This year marks 23 years since Oregon legalized physician-assisted suicide, and as in previous years, the reasons that patients sought to end their own lives were primarily loss of autonomy and a decreasing ability to participate in activities that made life enjoyable. Additionally, over half expressed a concern that they were “becoming a burden” to their family and caregivers. In other words, fear and discouragement have been major factors motivating people to end their own lives, and rather than being offered help and hope, they were offered lethal drugs.
And yet, as people continue to turn to assisted suicide out of fear, the assisted suicide lobby consistently calls for the erosion of any safeguards that are in place. This is because the logic of assisted suicide allows no limits. Even when proponents claim that safeguards will be in place, those safeguards without fail begin to erode within decades or less. Dr. Joshua Brisoce, a hospice and palliative care physician and professor at Duke University, recently pointed out where the logic of assisted suicide leads, writing,
If suffering warrants assisted suicide, why should seemingly arbitrary limits like terminal illness or even autonomous choice limit it? For surely non-terminally ill, incapacitated patients can suffer — and for longer than a cancer patient with 6 months to live!
If the answer to suffering is death, then we quickly run out of scenarios where embracing life makes sense. Furthermore, if assisted suicide is about autonomy, as the assisted suicide lobby claims, then allowing the medical community to establish any sort of limits also doesn’t make sense. Briscoe continues,
… If assisted suicide is meant to honor the autonomy of the one who chooses it, then forcing them to submit to the medical establishment’s arbitrary limits of terminal illness or suffering is a slight against that autonomy.
If people have a “right” to choose when they die, then the medical community must have an “obligation” to allow or enable them to do so. It is logically inconsistent to say that one must be able to gain a doctor’s assistance committing suicide in some instances but not others. The logic of assisted suicide leads to assisted suicide on demand for any reason.
Suffering exists, but the answer to suffering is not to end the life of the sufferer, either by their own hand or someone else’s. We must be willing and ready to walk alongside people in the midst of pain and suffering and help them to see that their lives have value. Assisted suicide preys on the fears of vulnerable people, flies in the face of human dignity, and sends a loud and clear message that there is no hope in the midst of suffering.
In his recent book, Hope Always, Dr. Matthew Sleeth writes that in the coming year, 10 million Americans will consider taking their own lives. Sleeth warns that we are currently on a path toward normalizing suicide that someday in the not too distant future it will be viewed less as a tragedy that wreaks devastation on the people left behind and more as a “life choice.” This view of “autonomy” falsely pretends that our choices happen in isolation from the people around us, rather than recognizing that humans by our very nature communal and that one person’s choices can cause serious, lasting harm toward those around them.
Sleeth also points out that belief in God and involvement in a local church significantly lower the chances that someone who is facing depression will commit suicide and “the current epidemic of suicide and depression will only get worse if the role of God, faith, and belief is not moved to the forefront of our discussion and treatment plans.” As suicide rates rise and assisted suicide is becoming accepted, we are seeing how post-Christian culture offers no antidote to a culture of death.
This does not mean that Christianity is simply a means to an end. The Christian faith is not merely a useful tool to give people a sense of meaning and improve society by lowering rates of suicide and despair. The fact that the Son of God took on human flesh, lived, died, and rose, reconciling sinners to himself and defeating death forever, and that he is restoring all things and is coming back to reign forever is the reason that life has meaning and hope not because it is merely a nice or comforting idea but because it is true. A culture that rejects this is left with hopeless ideologies that necessarily lead toward death and despair.
Assisted suicide is part of a culture of death and its logic does not allow limits. A culture that begins by accepting assisted suicide as an answer to suffering will eventually accept assisted suicide and euthanasia on demand for any reason. We must expose the lies behind this distorted view of autonomy and hopeless response to suffering. Scripture tells us to rescue those being taken away to death and hold back people who are stumbling toward slaughter. (Proverbs 24:11) This means that in a culture that increasingly embraces death, we must help people see the value of life and point then to the One who came that we may have life and have it abundantly.
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