The U.K.’s vote in favor of medically assisted suicide may force another society to confront the reality, and significance, of frailty.
The U.K.’s vote in favor of medically assisted suicide may force another society to confront the reality, and significance, of frailty.
L ast week, the U.K. Parliament voted to legalize medically assisted suicide, if a doctor agreed that death was likely within six months, and a court agreed. Proponents of the bill, which has not yet received final approval, said that the aim was to shorten death, not life.
If it passes to become the law of the land, the United Kingdom will quickly find out what Belgium, Denmark, and Canada have discovered. People who are actually in their death throes rarely ask doctors for death. They ask for pain medicine. They ask to see their loved ones.
That’s why those nations, having legalized suicide and sold it to the public as a valorous end-of-life assertion of dignity, end up radically expanding the definition of those eligible for medically assisted suicide. This is to include the people who request it: the isolated, the lonely, the desperate, the depressed, and those people who are terminally ill, but who are excessively fearful of a painful death that is nowhere near them. A study of people who qualified for Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID) in Canada showed that barely half of those requesting suicide cited a symptom of their terminal illness in the top two reasons for their request. Instead, psychological factors predominated, answers like “loss of autonomy” and “loss of control.” Others cited the fear of being a “burden” on loved ones, whether financial or emotionally. Confronted with actual pain, most patients find in themselves the virtue of long-suffering, or call out for modern pain medicines. It’s fear and loneliness that inspires people to call out for death.
The very legality of medically assisted suicide will tend to condition both doctors and patients to demoralize each other with assessments about the “burden” that chronic illness or depression brings to others. In fast-paced cultures that overvalue “productivity” — like those that obtain in most Western countries — the elderly and the sick are already afflicted with a sense that their lives are an unjust burden on loved ones. And it is true that our frailty at the end of life is a kind of humiliation that prepares us for death, and that this frailty imposes costs on our adult children.
In the fight against legal suicide, Christians have to confront the fact that the perceived “senselessness of suffering” at the end of life is the product of a materialist worldview. To champion the dignity of life — even life marked by dependence, suffering, and senility — we have to recover the Christian vision that sees that the humiliations of old age and infirmity are not meaningless.
Of course, some cases are extremely hard. I have witnessed levels of senility that can sap all the sweetness out of the personality of an aged relative and replace it with a childish crabbiness borne of fear and afflicted unknowing. I have seen the aged resist gentle caretakers as if they were being put under torture rather than a sponge bath. I’ve had my own elderly relatives refer to me by the name of a long dead brother or father. No, I hope that I do not die, having lost the ability to reliably recognize my family members, or respond to them familiarly.
But our need for others’ care in old age should no more make us feel guilty than our need for others when we were young children. Instead, this dependence is a strong reminder that our lives are not our own, but sit atop the treasury of love and care in our families, and the decency of our society. Our physical dependence late in life is a reminder of our spiritual need for grace and mercy in the judgment to come. And it is an inducement to virtue in the people around us. The acceptance of these humiliations is part of the road to a good death.