Assisted Suicide is Inequality, Just Like All Legal Violence

This article was originally published on the Consistent Life Blog, and is republished with permission by the author.

As I write this, Governor John Carney has the fate of generations of citizens at his mercy should he sign HB 140 making Delaware the 12th U.S. state where assisted suicide is legal. I wrote a letter urging him to veto HB 140 which I documented from my scientific research as a scholar and author of peer-reviewed studies on assisted suicide on the significant dangers that come with killing rather than caring.

I cited a recent journal article detailing cases where people were not terminally ill but subverted safeguards to obtain lethal medications by refusing food and fluids until they would die of dehydration if not given a deadly prescription. I explained how these abuses inspire reforms –but not to protect citizens. Rather, they create more victims when used as a rationale for reforms that expand access to euthanasia for more desperate people. Rather than close loopholes meant to keep people safe, safeguards are simply eliminated.

Any provision in the law that might mistakenly assuage the governor’s concerns about abuse is a mere illusion. There is no safe way to kill someone. Those citizens the governor might be okay with killing according to HB 140 as written won’t be the only casualties. I warned him that he wouldn’t be disregarding only those lives he thinks aren’t worth protecting, but that it would likely cost the lives of people he believes still matter.

I urged the governor not to legalize killing for some by warning him about the risks to others, just in case that might inspire him not to kill anyone. I certainly don’t hold an ableist viewpoint on whose lives are worth saving from suicide, but public opinion polls show the majority of Americans now do. They support assisted suicide for those with catastrophic physical illness, but suicide prevention for the healthy.

Informing them of misdiagnosed patients like Jeanette Hall who sought assisted suicide nearly 25 years ago and is still alive today can get through to people about the perils of helping people end their lives prematurely when hit with a devastating diagnosis. Jeannette needed to be asked why her life was still worth living despite having cancer. This inspired her to fight just long enough to see her son graduate from [the] police academy. Instead, she beat cancer completely. The truth remains that Jeanette Hall would still deserve to live even if she only had a few months left instead of decades. But her story reminds us that doctors can be wrong. It inspires many to wonder who would still be with us if assisted suicide wasn’t a legal option.

Pleas made to avoid taking a human life that someone doesn’t value by appealing to their desire to protect lives they do care about are beyond disturbing. But sadly, they’re sometimes necessary. Any form of legal killing requires placing some humans below the rest, deeming them less human and valuable than others.

It’s not just assisted suicide that implies the old and ill are less human and valuable than the young and well. Abortion suggests the unborn are less human and valuable than the born. Capital punishment declares death row inmates are less human and valuable than the unconvicted.

Some people are restrained from hurting others by self-interest and avoiding punishment.  Someone must hold some humans’ existence in lesser regard to justify killing them, and those willing to kill another or themselves clearly think some criteria make human life worthless. Knowing this means we sometimes have to appeal to concerns for the humans whose humanity they still acknowledge in hopes of saving humans they would kill.

We wouldn’t have legal killing if all lives were considered equal. A sidewalk counselor urging a mother of twins to spare her unwanted unborn daughter with Down syndrome because the abortion could cause her to lose her non-disabled son (the baby she still wants) might save the little girl.

To convince an enraged gunman to put the rifle down because if he shot his cheating wife, the bullet could hit their son in the next room – that might be the best hope of saving the hostage. If it did, I doubt the freed wife would take offense to that argument, nor think her rescuer honestly believes her child’s life is more valuable than her own, even if her captor does. I think she would just be relieved and grateful to be alive.

Likewise, those who preach about how the sanctity of innocent human life demands murderers face the ultimate punishment could be moved by concerns about accidentally executing the innocent, because innocent lives are precious to them. Any doubts about the inmate’s guilt can compel a stay of execution where arguments against the immorality of capital punishment probably wouldn’t work at all. Desperate times call for desperate measures, and sometimes the only way to protect a powerless human from death is to highlight the equal worth of those the powerful still think worthy of protection.

While I attempted to make an objective case in favor of a veto, not from my subjective and personal convictions as a consistent life ethic adherent, but as a scholar, detailing that this bill could cost the lives of people beyond those it intentionally destroys assaults my conscience. Because I certainly don’t think the terminally ill in Delaware are any less human and deserving of human rights than anyone else, I departed from my fact-based argument and rebuked this form of human inequality.

I wrote:

“Governor, the bottom line is that you should not be at peace with signing any law that declares entire groups of human beings as disposable. My goal here is to inform you that what supposed safeguards may comfort you in the current draft of HB 140 are more than just arbitrary criteria for determining what lives don’t matter: these limits for who may access poison are clearly fungible and changeable for the worst. History proves it. On principle, you should reject any unjust law that relegates any population to a lesser status as second-class citizens who get suicide assistance vs. everyone else who gets suicide prevention when they cry out for help. You may be okay with how HB 140 decides what Delaware residents in desperate circumstances get pushed off the ledge on request to fall to their death (rather than talked down from the ledge as we usually do), but I assure you that the qualifications on which lives don’t matter will likely expand to other populations if you make the mistake of signing HB 140 and opening this Pandora’s Box.”

In sum, regardless of what violence a consistent life advocate is trying to prevent, testifying to the equal worth of every human being is vital so we don’t undermine our message even if the intention is to save lives. If arguing against abortion exceptions includes the point that some other babies could also die or that mothers might make false reports of sexual assault, it is still necessary to reiterate that human beings are entitled to exist regardless of how they were conceived.

Abortion is wrong not because a mother refuses to take responsibility for her child who she freely created: it is wrong because her child is a human being entitled to their life and limbs. I made my case to spare all lives at risk from HB 140 by informing Governor Carney of how it endangered more than just the terminally ill, but I ended my letter to him by reminding him that terminally ill humans deserve protection too.

In a world rife with bigotry and oppression where the powerful routinely destroy the powerless, we must combat the most lethal forms of inequality without abandoning our witness to this fundamental truth that all humans deserve the basic human right to exist free from violence.