Compassion means "to suffer with", not "to kill"

Euthanasia and assisted suicide have made headlines lately, with the Quebec College of Physicians' endorsement of the former and the death of a renown conductor by the latter. And with bill C-384, which would legalize assisted suicide, up for debate in Parliament this fall, the issue is not likely to go away. Forgive me if this post sounds strident, but I must admit to having little patience for anything that cheapens the value of human life.

And euthanasia and assisted suicide do just that. Whenever these things are debated, we hear a lot of words like dignity, choice and compassion, and even I will admit that they seem appropriate, on the surface. But look more closely, and it becomes strikingly apparent that not only do euthanisia and assisted suicide rarely involve any of these things, they negate them.

To decide that it is acceptable to hasten the death or assist in the suicide of someone is to declare that his or her life is no longer worth living. Only the person's death retains any dignity; his continued existence has been stripped of it. It starts with the terminally ill (a questionable phrase, since doctors can rarely tell how long a patient is going to live), who, we figure, are going to die soon anyway, probably painfully-never mind that palliative care is better than ever at treating pain. And it doesn't stay there. It extends steadily outward, to those in comas, those with severe physical and mental disabilities, those with chronic pain, those with less severe disabilities like Down Syndrome, even to the mentally ill and clinically depressed, until the lives of thousands of people, whose disabilities and illnessess any of us could develop at any time, are declared unworthy to be lived.

If it is about choice, it's a warped version of it. When choice becomes the ultimate expression of human worth and dignity, a lot of people end up losing those things. Since the severely disabled and the comatose can't make their own choices, the thinking goes, they are effectively non-persons, and not only that, but they interfere with the choices of healthy people by being a burden on them, so their worth actually becomes negative. This kind of thinking can lead to astonishing cruelty. In the U.K, a man with Down Syndrome who was in hospital after suffering a stroke starved to death because doctors neglected to insert a feeding tube. People with severe brain damage are routinely dehydrated; we only hear about it when a family member objects. In the Netherlands, infants with severe disabilities are sometimes killed. Even people who are considered by society to be able to make their own choices are vulnerable to having the choice essentially made for them. So often there is pressure in the form of fear of being a burden, neglect and abuse, sub-standard care, and untreated depression and anxiety. And then there is a society that reduces people to their utility, leading to the neglect of people whom it deems a drain on society. Last year in Oregon, where assisted suicide is covered by the state health care plan, a woman with lung cancer was denied chemotherapy, and a few years before that, a man was denied a double organ transplant. There is already talk of the need to ration health care, and it isn't exactly a secret as to who will be denied treatment.

There's no compassion in euthanasia and assisted suicide. Compassion means "to suffer with", and to suffer with someone they have to actually be alive. True compassion is hard. Euthanasia is easy. True compassion forms an intimate bond not only with the people we suffer with, but to everyone who has ever suffered, which is everyone who has ever lived. Euthanasia is lonely. Sometimes it is the absolutely autonomous soul, the one who refuses to lean on others, who dies from it. But more often than not who dies is the people those autonomous souls do not want leaning on them, those that they don't want to comfort, to provide for, to suffer with.