The real challenge facing society is to make quality end-of-life care available to all.ĭoctors should help their patients to die a dignified death of natural causes, not assist in killing. Anything less falls short of what human dignity requires. For those for whom death is imminent, hospice care and fellowship can accompany them in their last days. For those in physical pain, pain management and other palliative medicine can manage their symptoms effectively. Instead of helping them to kill themselves, we should offer them appropriate medical care and human presence.
People seeking PAS typically suffer from depression or other mental illnesses, as well as simply from loneliness. Instead of embracing PAS, we should respond to suffering with true compassion and solidarity. No natural right to PAS exists, and arguments for such a right are incoherent: A legal system that allows assisted suicide abandons the natural right to life of all its citizens. Classifying a subgroup of people as legally eligible to be killed violates our nation’s commitment to equality before the law-showing profound disrespect for and callousness to those who will be judged to have lives no longer “worth living,” not least the frail elderly, the demented, and the disabled. It does so by taking all reasonable steps to prevent the innocent, of any age or condition, from being devalued and killed. For our legal system to be coherent and just, the law must respect this dignity in everyone. Every human being has intrinsic dignity and immeasurable worth. Physician-assisted suicide undermines social solidarity and true compassion.įourth, PAS’s most profound injustice is that it violates human dignity and denies equality before the law. The temptation to view elderly or disabled family members as burdens will increase, as will the temptation for those family members to internalize this attitude and view themselves as burdens. Third, PAS would harm our entire culture, especially our family and intergenerational obligations. Physician-assisted suicide offers a cheap, quick fix in a world of increasingly scarce health care resources. Moreover, the option of PAS would provide perverse incentives for insurance providers and the public and private financing of health care. By the same token, PAS threatens to fundamentally distort the doctor–patient relationship because it reduces patients’ trust of doctors and doctors’ undivided commitment to the life and health of their patients. It corrupts the profession of medicine by permitting the tools of healing to be used as techniques for killing.
Second, PAS changes the culture in which medicine is practiced. People who deserve society’s assistance are instead offered accelerated death. Where it has been allowed, safeguards purporting to minimize this risk have proved to be inadequate and have often been watered down or eliminated over time. Betray human dignity and equality before the law.įirst, PAS endangers the weak and marginalized in society.Compromise the family and intergenerational commitments, and.Corrupt the practice of medicine and the doctor–patient relationship,.Legalizing physician-assisted suicide, however, would be a grave mistake because it would: In 2015, at least 18 state legislatures and the District of Columbia are considering whether to allow physician-assisted suicide (PAS). This is the reality that such euphemisms as “death with dignity” and “aid in dying” seek to conceal. Doctors may help their patients to die a dignified death from natural causes, but they should not kill their patients or help them to kill themselves. Human life need not be extended by every medical means possible, but a person should never be intentionally killed. No one, especially a doctor, should be permitted to kill intentionally, or assist in killing intentionally, an innocent neighbor. I will neither give a deadly drug to anybody who asked for it, nor will I make a suggestion to this effect.” This is an essential precept for a flourishing civil society. The Hippocratic Oath proclaims: “I will keep from harm and injustice.
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