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Why Is Assisted Suicide Popular?
Any half-wit can kill themselves. There are a myriad of ways that are pretty much instantaneous. Some are messier than others, it is true, but one does not need to be a genius to end one’s own life.
So why is there such demand (see Canada) for a medical professional to do the killing? Is there something about the blessings of the state that somehow make suicide a much more attractive life choice? Or is it the attraction of having someone else – even a stranger – helping? Do we prefer the engagement and touch of another human even at the moment of death?
I think proponents of euthanasia believe that assisted suicide is a strong preference within society – one of the reasons they promote it.
But I don’t understand why. Can anyone shed some light?
Published in General
I was going to write a post on euthanasia after seeing this article in The Federalist. But I’ll follow your post instead!
I think that having the state give its sanction to suicide provides the fig leaf of normalcy and respectability that people crave when contemplating morally suspect actions.
When I was receiving talks on suicide prevention in the Air Force close to twenty years ago, the statistics cited were that men and women attempted suicide at about the same rate. However, men were more successful because they usually chose a method more likely to succeed, firearm or hanging versus pills. A few years ago women were starting to catch-up by completing more attempts. I don’t know what the current statistics are.
Why is unassisted suicide so popular?
Suicide Statistics
I think it comes back to “My body, my business,” much like abortion. People want it all to be clean and not have the chance of surviving, so they call in an expert.
My question is why any physician would be involved. Except, I really understand that, too. End suffering. Still, it opens far too many doors to abuse.
Of course, some of us have very different precepts. This is G-d’s world. This body is G-d’s temple. Why would I tear down the temple?
The spirit of “do-it-yourself” is truly dead.
Many religions, including my own, teach that suicide is seriously sinful. If someone has some remnants of that teaching left inside them, they may rationalize that assisted suicide lessens their own guilt. When facing G_d they (unconsciously) hope to plead, “Well, I made my decision after consulting with appropriate medical authority”. I’m not saying this is true of everyone who favors assisted suicide, but it might be true of some.
Something that I need to say in addition, not directly related to this post. Catholicism teaches that, in an objective sense suicide is always a seriously immoral act, like murder. But in case someone reading this has friends or relatives who have committed suicide, please understand that even committing objectively serious sins does not automatically mean that person is going to Hell. There are often factors that mitigate personal responsibility. For example, mental illness may prevent a person from realizing the gravity of their offense. Other factors may also lessen responsibility. The Church teaches that we can never know the true state of someone else’s soul, which is one reason we are warned not to pass judgement on the sins of others. We can’t possibly know all the factors that contribute to their actions. G_d is the only one who can pass judgement. Just make sure that you don’t commit suicide yourself.
I am in no way supportive of state-sanctioned suicide, but in its original intent, it is used by hospital patients who are too sick or incapacitated to get up and jump off a bridge.
It s normal to look to government as a substitute G-d.
Over-population. Every effort is made to normalize taking people out.
Fight for every minute of life, God’s greatest gift. Fight.
According to the WHO the 3 most common methods (globally)of suicide are poison, hanging, and firearms.
The CDC says the most popular method in the US is firearms.
Poison (20%) is most commonly used in the form of pesticides, commonly available for agricultural use.
Poison and hanging seem to me to be painful and unpleasant ways to go, so I can see why having medical assistance is preferable.
The state’s interest in sanctioning suicide is easy to see – money! It’s cheaper to kill people than to treat them.
I’d say the increasingly favorable view of suicide and assisted suicide is part of the general breakdown of family culture and the way medical technology allows people to live longer without necessarily living healthier. Most of the folks I come across who speak positively of assisted suicide are also the people who neither have nor want children and/or have watched an older family member decay with a chronic disease like dementia.
These people don’t want to die tomorrow; they’re not depressed. But they are looking at the future and thinking that they don’t want to live if life means being confined in a nursing home with no one on the outside who cares for them, or trapped in a failing body, or worst of all, having lost everything in their mind that makes them who they are while the miracles of modern medicine mean their body lasts for a decade.
If medical suicide is just a way of gently passing on, why is capital punishment by drugs a barbaric procedure?
Twice in my lifetime I have been involved in cases in which hospitals wanted me to “pull the plug,” so to speak. I gave in to the pressure both times, but needless to say, I’ve thought a lot about this issue for years.
Some of the pressure is coming from within the medical profession who wish to “put people out of their misery.” I understand that sentiment. And some of the pressure they are feeling comes from the money end of things and the endless parade of politicians who decry the amount of money people spend on “end-of-life care.” And from the recipients of that care who feel guilty about it. And the permission is coming from off the side from the local veterinarians who put our pets “to sleep,” the organ and tissue donor programs, and the fear people have of losing control over their healthcare–we see that in the high numbers of people with do-not-resuscitate orders. And a lot of people are scared of cancer care, which I understand.
The death-with-dignity movement has completely screwed up healthcare now. When this started, the “heroic measures” meant heart-and-lung machines and painful major surgeries. The Terri Schiavo case opened my eyes to how this movement had morphed over the years–today, food and water and antibiotics are being withheld to hasten death. This is not only immoral. It’s sadistic.
It’s a mess, frankly. At this point, many people are thinking to themselves, “In terms of sin and sinning, what’s the difference whether I pull the plug or the hospital does it? Or some doctor helps me find the pills that will help me end all of this easily?” The morality here is very blurry to people.
I used to think that we should not involve the medical profession in this at all. I understood the wish patients had to depart on their terms and in their own time. But put up a red phone booth outside the hospital for those patients. Let them call a deathcare facility rather than a healthcare facility. Having the doctors do this inside hospitals is going to lead to nothing but confusion within the medical field. Wow, was I right about how this story would end.
Clarity of purpose and mission is essential to success. The advancements in medicine that followed World War II came about from a tremendous drive to prevent or alleviate human suffering. Those achievements are as big a deal as the moon landing.
We’re going to go backward now because we can’t agree on a purpose.
Just as postscript to comment 16: This has been going on for thirty years. That’s a lot of people who, like me, have been involved in the plug pulling. I’m an objective person who tries not to engage in rationalization. But most people who have been involved in these incidents rationalize them, and they are pushing this because they are comfortable with it. And the more people who do it too, the more it feels as though what they did wasn’t wrong.
I think you are saying that people conflate pulling the plug with assisted suicide. They are definitely not the same.
No, they are not the same. But they are on the same trajectory. And in many cases, withholding care is the same as assisted suicide.
I think it’s important to add that (I believe) your use of the term “withholding care” has to do with care that keeps the patient alive. Hospice care excludes offering care that will extend the person’s life beyond their normal progression.
And that’s where situations like Terry Schiavo get so nasty. If one end of the spectrum is that her life isn’t worth living so kill her painlessly, and the other end is all life is worth living so keep providing her what she needs, the “compromise” of pulling the plug and letting her starve to death was the most evil option. If taking her off the machines was murder, then they should have just ODed her on morphine and made death quick and painless. Euphemisms like “pulling the plug” and “letting nature take its course” are just ways to dodge the responsibility of choosing to hasten death.
In the past people would talk about assisted suicide only for terminal patients (“Hey, they are going to die anyway”) but now some places offer it for non-terminal patients. How many people seriously injured in accident might consider ending it all? And how many people who have considered it went on to have meaningful lives?
I think iWe was trying to get at the demand for doctors’ assistance in hastening death for patients at death’s door.
To answer that, I think one has to look at the decision to forgo hospital treatment in favor of dying in a hospice facility. To many people, there’s no appreciable difference where I go as long as I go now before thus and such happens. Hospice care is a godsend for people who want to opt out of further hospital treatments or for people for whom no treatment exists. But it is part of the equation driving patients to seek physician-assisted suicide.
It’s all about avoiding unnecessary pain and suffering. And money being spent. It’s all in the same mental compartment. For a lot of people.
I thought it was pretty obvious, and it surprised me that I didn’t see it in any previous comments. These are governments, basically, who insist that people should have government doing everything FOR them. Why wouldn’t that include suicide?
They do get nasty. I’m not clear on whether you had a position on the Schiavo case.
There was so much going on in that case I don’t feel qualified to have an opinion on what the right move was. But I do think if someone is not capable of expressing their wishes, and the legal guardian responsible for making decisions for them decides they shouldn’t be kept alive, and removing the machines won’t cause death within, say, an hour, then the guardian should be forced to take active steps to kill them faster and more painlessly.
Taking away machines to let someone starve to death is cowardice, a way of soothing a conscience. “Oh, I didn’t kill grandma; I just let nature take its course.” No. If you’re going to take steps to ensure someone dies, you owe it to them to own that decision. You killed them. If someone isn’t capable of acknowledging that fact, then they have no business making end of life decisions.
Any government that offers to help end someone’s life is not to be trusted.
If our lives are lived on loan from the Creator, then they are not ours to reject. Our “bodies” are not something we chose. Our parents hoped and often prayed for the gift of our lives and were grateful for it. They accepted the responsibility to get us to adulthood. The only time our choice of death over life could be justified would be in defense of someone in need; from our children all the way up to our countrymen in times of war. Our lives are at the root of the family tree of our descendants and there are theoretically countless future descendants whose very existence and whatever good they will do for others, depends on our living. We cannot know the effect of every small, seemingly insignificant act that we do. But our Creator does and uses us for His purposes – usually to help others.
Even something so seemingly trivial as this conversation could help one of us here say just the right words to prevent a suicide. All is possible. Though I am inclined to believe this audience far removed from such thoughts generally. Despite whatever challenges we face, that path wouldn’t be a likely choice…
Right?
I don’t know the answer to the question. I can speculate.
When you assert that assisted suicide is “popular,” I take this to mean that the idea that assisted suicide should be legal has popular support. Why would this be?
Well, Christians generally oppose it. There do seem to be a lot of people who simply take the opposite position to Christianity.
People who attempt suicide often have doubts all along the way and sometimes flinch when they try.
Having someone help
sdoubtless makes it easier.Peer-pressure apparently has its uses.