Right to Die Movement is Really About Euthanasia, Not Compassion

By: Wesley J. Smith Lifenews.com May 1, 2006 THERE IS A PRETENSE in contemporary assisted suicide advocacy that goes something like this: "Aid in dying" (as it is euphemistically called) is merely to be a safety valve, a last resort only available to imminently dying patients for whom nothing else can be done to alleviate suffering. Meanwhile, in the real world, the founder of the Swiss suicide facilitating organization Dignitas is just about done with pretense. The Sunday Times Magazine (London) reported that Dignitas' founder, Ludwig Minelli, plans to create sort of a Starbucks for suicide: a chain of death centers "to end the lives of people with illnesses and mental conditions such as chronic depression." Minelli believes that all suicidal people should be given information about the best way to kill themselves, and, according to the Times story, "if they choose to die, they should be helped to do it properly." Dignitas admits to having assisted the suicides of many people who were not terminally ill. As Minelli succinctly put it, "We never say no." The story about Minelli illuminates a deep ideological belief within the euthanasia movement: that we own our bodies, and thus, determining the time, manner, and method of our own deaths, for whatever reason, is a basic human right.

That is certainly how one of the other superstars of the international euthanasia movement, the Australian physician Phillip Nitschke, sees it. Nitschke travels the world presenting how-to-commit-suicide clinics. Several years ago he was paid thousands of dollars by the Hemlock Society (now merged into the assisted suicide advocacy group Compassion and Choices) to create a suicide concoction made from common household ingredients (a formula he calls the "Peaceful Pill"). Like Minelli, Nitschke is straightforward about his goals. In a 2001 interview, National Review Online asked him who should qualify for the Peaceful Pill. He responded: My personal position is that if we believe that there is a right to life, then we must accept that people have a right to dispose of that life whenever they want . . . So all people qualify, not just those with the training, knowledge, or resources to find out how to "give away" their life. And someone needs to provide this knowledge, training, or resource necessary to anyone who wants it, including the depressed, the elderly bereaved, [and] the troubled teen. Nitschke and Minelli's position has a large constituency among euthanasia believers. Indeed, over the years, the movement has left many telltale signs that assisted suicide is not intended ultimately to be restricted to the imminently dying.

Take the "Zurich Declaration," issued at the 1998 bi-annual convention of the World Federation of Right to Die Societies. (The WFRD is an umbrella group made up of 37 national euthanasia advocacy organizations, including Compassion and Choices and Hemlock founder Derek Humphry's Euthanasia Research and Guidance Organization, or ERGO.) It states:

We believe that we have a major responsibility for ensuring that it becomes legally possible for all competent adults, suffering severe and enduring distress, to receive medical help to die, if this is their persistent, voluntary and rational request. We note that such medical assistance is already permitted in The Netherlands, Switzerland and Oregon, USA. It should also be noted that one need not be dying or even sick to experience "severe and enduring distress."

SUPPORT FOR A BROAD AND LIBERAL ACCESS to suicide extends far beyond activists in the euthanasia movement. It has been embraced by some people in the mental health professions, where a concept known as "rational suicide" is being promoted in professional journals, books, and at symposia.

Typical of this genre is a 1998 article by James W. Werth published in the journal Crisis, with the ironic title, "Using Rational Suicide as an Intervention to Prevent Irrational Suicide." Werth urges that mental health professionals should not always save the lives of suicidal patients, but instead, should non-judgmentally facilitate the suicidal person's decision making process. If the professional agrees that the desire to die is rational, then the suicide should be permitted, or perhaps even assisted.

To qualify for a rational suicide, the patient would have to demonstrate to the mental health professional that he has a "hopeless condition," which Werth defines as, "terminal illnesses, severe physical and/or psychological pain, physically or mentally debilitating and/or deteriorating conditions, or qualify of life no longer acceptable to the individual." This is circular thinking. By definition, if one is suicidal, he has a quality of life that he believes is no longer acceptable.

Not surprisingly, assisted rational suicide is already permitted in the Netherlands where the Dutch Supreme Court approved a psychiatrist's facilitating the death of a distraught woman who wanted to die because her children were dead.

Similar suicide-friendly attitudes are often expressed among mainstream bioethicists--and not just by Princeton's Peter Singer. For example, the University of Utah's Margaret Pabst Battin suggests that "suicide can be rationally chosen," to "avoid pain and suffering in terminal illnesses," as a "self-sacrifice for altruistic reasons," or in cases of "suicides of honor and principle." Along these same lines, Julian Savulescu, an up-and-comer in the international bioethics community, argues that respect for human freedom demands that society permit the suicides of competent persons--even when they are expressing an "unjustified desire to die."

"Some freedoms are worth the cost of innocent life," Savulescu wrote in a chapter for the book Assisted Suicide. "The freedom to finish one's life when and how one chooses is, it seems to me, about as important as any freedom."

The right to receive assisted suicide for virtually any reason is especially popular among self-declared "free thinkers" and humanists. Thus, Tom Flynn, the editor of Free Inquiry, the house organ for the Council for Secular Humanism, wrote in the Spring 2003 issue, that the belief in human liberty must include an unfettered right to die. "While suicide has never been exactly popular, a new assault on our right to suicide is brewing. It's something secular humanists ought to resist." Why? Because Flynn (and other humanists) believe fervently that a right to suicide is a crucial element of human liberty:

What's really in play here is the old dogma that individuals don't own their own lives. Physician-assisted suicide is but part of the issue. If we trust our fellow humans to choose their occupations, their significant others, their political persuasions, and their stances on religion, we should also defend their right to dispose of their most valuable possessions--their lives--even if disposing of life is precisely the choice they make.

There are even ongoing discussions in bioethics suggesting that some people might have an ethical obligation to commit suicide. Thus, a 1997 cover story in the prestigious bioethics journal the Hastings Center Report, philosopher John Hardwig argued that there is not only a right, but also a "duty to die":

A duty to die is more likely when continuing to live will impose significant burdens--emotional burdens, extensive caregiving, destruction of life plans, and yes, financial hardship--on your family and loved ones. This is the fundamental insight underlying a duty to die. A duty to die becomes greater as you grow older. As we age, we will be giving up less by giving up our lives . . . To have reached the age of say, seventy-five or eighty years without being ready to die is itself a moral failing, the sign of a life out of touch with life's basic realities. Bioethicist Battin has also supported the concept of an eventual duty to die for those living in rich countries, not just to spare burdening our loved ones but to promote world egalitarianism. Thus, she wrote in a book chapter called "Global Life Expectancies and the Duty to Die" that the time may come when we will have the moral obligation to "conserve health care resources by forgoing treatment or directly ending [our] life" toward promoting "health prospects and life expectancies" that are more equal around the globe.

DESPITE THIS THICKENING ATMOSPHERE of suicide permissiveness, most assisted suicide advocates in this country continue to insist that "all" they want is for the terminally ill to have access to hastened death.

For some, clearly, this is a mere political tactic. The ultimate goal is a much broader death license. Others may actually mean for the initial terminal illness limitation to be permanent, believing that "restricted" assisted suicide, once accepted widely, would not spread to ever widening swaths of acceptable killing (as it has in the Netherlands).

Which camp one decides best represents the overall euthanasia movement doesn't really matter. Once assisted suicide is accepted in law and culture, the premises of radical autonomy and allowing killing to alleviate human suffering would conjoin, unleashing the irresistible power of logic that would push us inexorably toward the humanist nirvana of death on demand. Wesley J. Smith is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute and a special consultant to the Center for Bioethics and Culture. His most recent book is the Consumer's Guide to a Brave New World.

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Famous quotations about sports

Champions aren't made in the gyms. Champions are made from something they have deep inside them -- a desire, a dream, a vision. Muhammad Ali American Boxer and three times World Heavyweight Champion. Doctors and scientists said that breaking the four-minute mile was impossible, that one would die in the attempt. Thus, when I got up from the track after collapsing at the finish line, I figured I was dead. Roger Bannister After becoming first person to break four-minute mile, 1952. My thoughts before a big race are usually pretty simple. I tell myself: Get out of the blocks, run your race, stay relaxed. If you run your race, you'll win....Channel your energy. Focus. Carl Lewis American athlete and winner 9 Olympic gold medals. Whoever said, 'It's not whether you win or lose that counts,' probably lost. Martina Navratilova American tennis player. Football is like life -- it requires perseverance, self-denial, hard work, sacrifice, dedication and respect for authority. Vince Lombardi American football coach. I always turn to the sports pages first, which records people's accomplishments. The front page has nothing but man's failures. Earl Warren Chief Justice of the United States. Fail to prepare, prepare to fail. Roy Keane Irish soccer player and English football club manager. It's just a job. Grass grows, birds fly, waves pound the sand. I beat people up. Muhammad Ali American boxer. Every kid around the world who plays soccer wants to be Pele. I have a great responsibility to show them not just how to be like a soccer player, but how to be like a man. Pele Brazilian soccer player, considered possibly world's greatest. Golf is a good walk spoiled. Mark Twain Golf is a game whose aim is to hit a very small ball into an even smaller hole, with weapons singularly ill-designed for the purpose. Winston Churchill If you watch a game, it's fun. If you play it, it's recreation. If you work at it, it's golf. Bob Hope The English are not very spiritual people, so they invented cricket to give them some idea of eternity. George Bernard Shaw I never play cricket. It requires one to assume such indecent postures. Oscar Wilde Irish writer. I am a winner. I just didn't win today. Greg Norman Australian golf champion. People don't win because they're physically stronger. It's because they're stronger between the ears. Alex Shaffer American alpine skier. I never ran 1000 miles. I could never have done that. I ran one mile 1000 times. Stu Mittleman American ultra-distance runner. Football is a mistake. It combines two of the worst things about American life. It is violence punctuated by committee meetings. George Will American journalist and author. Leaders aren't born, they are made. And they are made just like anything else, through hard work. And that's the price we'll have to pay to achieve that goal, or any goal. Vincent Lombardi American NFL football coach. I'm tired of hearing about money, money, money, money, money. I just want to play the game, drink Pepsi, wear Reebok. Shaquille O'Neal American basketball player. The way a team plays as a whole determines its success. You may have the greatest bunch of individual stars in the world, but if they don't play together, the club won't be worth a dime. Babe Ruth American baseball great.

Men forget everything; women remember everything. That's why men need instant replays in sports. They've already forgotten what happened. Rita Rudner

It's not the size of the dog in the fight, but the size of the fight in the dog! Archie Griffin American football player and two time Heisman Trophy winner. Perhaps the single most important element in mastering the techniques and tactics of racing is experience. But once you have the fundamentals, acquiring the experience is a matter of time. Greg LeMond American champion cyclist and three times winner of Tour de France. If the Bible has taught us nothing else, and it hasn't, it's that girls should stick to girls' sports, such as hot oil wrestling, foxy boxing, and such and such. Homer Simpson You need to play with supreme confidence, or else you'll lose again, and then losing becomes a habit. Joe Paterno American football coach. Cricket is basically baseball on valium. Robin Williams The difference between a successful person and others is not a lack of strength, not a lack of knowledge, but rather a lack of will. Vince Lombardi American football coach. You have to have the mentality of executing your game when you don't feel like there's a lot of hope. I think the best feeling is when somebody pushes you to the limit and you dig down a little bit extra. By the same token, you also need a little luck. Sometimes they come together. Andre Agassi American tennis champion. If you can believe it, the mind can achieve it. Ronnie Lott American professional NFL player. Golf and sex are the only things you can enjoy without being good at them! Jimmy Demaret American golfer. Ask not what your teammates can do for you. Ask what you can do for your teammates. Magic Johnson American NBA basketball star.

Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence: in other words, it is war minus the shooting... there are quite enough real causes of trouble already, and we need not add to them by encouraging young men to kick each other on the shins amid the roars of infuriated spectators. George Orwell The Sporting Spirit. Leadership is a matter of having people look at you and gain confidence, seeing how you react. If you're in control, they're in control. Tom Landry American football player and coach. Football doesn't build character, it reveals character! Marv Levy American NFL football coach. If you train hard, you'll not only be hard, you'll be hard to beat. Herschel Walker American NFL football player. To succeed...You need to find something to hold on to, something to motivate you, something to inspire you. Tony Dorsett American NFL football player. I guess there is nothing that will get your mind off everything like golf. I have never been depressed enough to take up the game, but they say you get so sore at yourself you forget to hate your enemies. Will Rogers American actor. The difference between the old ballplayer and the new ballplayer is the jersey. The old ballplayer cared about the name on the front. The new ballplayer cares about the name on the back. Steve Garvey America baseball player. One day of practice is like one day of clean living. It doesn't do you any good. Abe Lemons American basketball coach. Most games are lost, not won! Casey Stengel American baseball player and manager. A lifetime of training for just ten seconds! Jesse Owens American Olympic sprinting gold medalist.

An athlete cannot run with money in his pockets. He must run with hope in his heart and dreams in his head. Emil Zatopek Czechoslovakian runner and winner four Olympic gold medals. If winning isn't everything, why do they keep score? Vince Lombardi American NFL Coach. My mind is my biggest asset. I expect to win every tournament I play. Tiger Woods American golf champion. It is almost impossible to remember how tragic a place the world is when one is playing golf. Robert Lynd Irish Writer. So you wish to conquer in the Olympic games, my friend? And I too, by the Gods, and a fine thing it would be. But first mark the conditions and the consequences, and then set to work. You will have to put yourself under discipline; to eat by rule, to avoid cakes and sweetmeats; to take exercise at the appointed hour whether you like it or no, in cold and heat; to abstain from cold drinks and from wine at your will; in a word, to give yourself over to the trainer as to a physician. Then in the conflict itself you are likely enough to dislocate your wrist or twist your ankle, to swallow a great deal of dust, or to be severely thrashed, and, after all these things, to be defeated. Epictetus Greek Stoic philosopher. Baseball has the great advantage over cricket of being sooner ended. George Bernard Shaw Irish playwright.