A Secular Take on Euthanasia

I’ve always found it very disturbing that we routinely utilize euthanasia to limit the suffering of our pets but do not accord the same level of respect and mercy for our own kind.

I was happy with the death with dignity act in Oregon until I had a friend that wanted to use it but couldn’t because you have to be able to swallow pills and his cancer prevented that. On the whole though it’s a good law and people don’t use it as much as feared by the religious wackos out here. Washington state adopted something similar last year. 

I don’t believe he was acting out of pure compassion for his disabled daughter when he killed her via carbon monoxide poisoning

What’s wrong with mostly compassion (even if you could possibly know how “pure” his motive was)? He loved his daughter and she was in constant pain with even worse pain on the horizon. If she were my daughter, I’d have wanted to spare her that too. It’s shameful that the man spent any time in prison.

How are we having this discussion without mentioning Eric McDonald? 

Last August, we had to euthanize our cat.  She was diagnosed with abdominal cancer then her kidneys shut down.  It was the humane thing to do, no matter how hard it was.  Two weeks later, I was called home.  My father was in hospice, at the end stage of an aggressive adenocarcinoma.  The last weeks of his life were hell.  I still am angry that I could help my cat but do absolutely nothing to help my father. 

Those that want assisted suicide to be illegal because our lives belong to god, should also refuse life saving medical treatments.  Until they do they are hypocrites.

And, why should we be aloud to die with dignity and what is dignity? You simply can’t say such things from a pure atheistic worldview. If you’re not going to measure it against an external standard it can’t be defined can it? An atheistic stance or a secular one as presented above is simply not practical when developing a legal system or when ethics are discussed.

Was it her decision?

I’m old enough that I’m starting to think about whether I would seek medical treatment for a terminal illness.  They’re very good at prolonging death until bankruptcy.  They’re not so good at prolonging life.  If you can’t get off the medical train once it starts, why get on?

Oh for pete’s sake! Just because there’s no such thing as objective morality doesn’t mean that there aren’t right and wrong answers to ethical questions, given that any discussion of ethics implies that fundamental concern for human wellbeing. Given the premise of wanting to create a society that negotiates the needs of the many against the wellbeing of the individual, the atheist perspective absolutely has plenty to bring to the table (and, by the way, “secular” is not the same thing as “atheist”). 

You’ve hit the nail on the head.  The medical industry is in cahoots with the religious right because those end-of-life treatments with “the machine that goes bing” are fantastically profitable.

I have always been a supporter of euthanasia. One of my former college instructors asked my class about our thoughts on suicide. Is it “selfish”? I answered that it wasn’t and that it was more selfish to want to keep someone who doesn’t want to live alive. If someone wants to kill themselves, that’s their choice. Sure it will cause their loved ones pain and everything but they (the loved ones) don’t take into account the amount of pain their loved one is in just by simply being alive. It may sound cold hearted but sometimes all the therapy and anti-depressants in the world can’t make someone want to live.

This is one of the few issued that makes be grateful to follow the baby boomers into retirement.  Regardless of their religious beliefs today, I think laws will change when hundreds of thousands of boomers realize what it means to suffer without a choice until you die.

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I work in a cancer hospital, and it breaks my heart to see such suffering. I agree, if a person does not want to spend thier last months suffering, why make them, and charge them for it?? I think it is cruel, myself. We put our animals ‘down’ when they are too sick to recover, why not give humans an option? Are we humans not more important than our pets?

I think it all boils down to supernatural reasoning. According to our society’s most popular religion, human beings have “souls” that belong to God. However, animals are soulless creatures and man was given dominion over them. So animals don’t have “souls” that belong to God, and it’s okay to kill them whenever we want. It’s why euthanizing a suffering pet isn’t the same as euthanizing a suffering person.

Regardless of your personal views on euthanasia, whether it is passive or active, the one thing that most religions have in common is the view that your life is not really yours; it belongs to “God.” It is not yours to live as you choose and it is not yours to take, regardless of how much pain and suffering you may be experiencing as you approach inevitable death.

This is such a disturbing view. It’s also why I can’t admire religious people who oppose the death penalty. They don’t actually think that killing people is wrong. They just think that only their god should have the right to kill people. So they might be against the death penalty, but it’s only because it involves humans killing other humans. If it was their deity doing it, suddenly everything would be okay. Because human beings belong to their god, their god can kill people whenever it wants, and they will never say that their god’s actions are immoral.

None of this is hypothetical any more. Places like Switzerland have had euthanasia for years, so we can look to their model and see how it works.

No country lets you just walk in and take a few pills. There’s a process, and it involves counselling. Rather than create a mess for people with depression, I’d say it would actually help.

To give you an example, my sister was suffering. We knew she wasn’t doing well, but none of us knew how bad it was until we got that phone call that she’d taken her life. What if assisted suicide had been an option? Would she have pursued it, which would have put her in the hands of professional counsellors who might have helped her? Would it have told us just how bad things were so we had the chance to wake up and give her the support she was so badly in need of?

I’m too young for euthanasia to really have a visceral meaning for me, but I support it for all the lives it might save; people like my sister who might have had a better avenue to get help rather than taking matters into their own hands alone and in desperation. 

Suicide would be a shortcut to heaven. Can’t have that. If only because those people would no longer be under the church’s control

Transcend suffering? How does one do that? I urge you to read through Eric McDonald’s blog (
http://choiceindying.com/about/) and even to contact him if you still have trouble understanding what it means to have a terminal illness.

They rotate who gets in print, but all the “experts” who submit for the given week are given a place online.

at present a very dear friend is lying in bed in a hospice close to death.

He’s drugged against severe pain, and confused, hallucinating, and lacking the dignity of his years.

His distress is obvious, and those of his friends heartrending after each visit – which may be the last.

I am appalled that a civilised secular society could not OFFER an escape if he wanted it

Suicide, the only crime that you only get punished for if you fail.

Besides the matter of the faulty notion that any life, no matter how horrific and painful, is to be judged as more worthwhile than death, I see a matter of pure principle here.

My life belongs to me. It does not belong to any nonexistent god, and it most certainly does not belong to the state. It is the one thing even the most destitute can claim, ownership of a life. It’s my life, and I find it outrageous that I cannot decide to end if it is too unbearable.

Of course there are complications. There is the matter of people who are not in their right minds, and how you diagnose that and provisionally deny them the choice of death. There is the matter of end-of-life decisions taken by family members. There is the matter of to what extent doctors should assist a person in making death painless. All of this requires discussion and regulation. But before you do any of that you must affirm that the full ownership of your life is yours alone, and that this includes the right to terminate it when circumstances force the matter.

i
saw a beautiful documentary about a man with ALS who wanted to be
euthanized before he lost the ability to communicate. he said he was
terrified of laying there in a body that felt aches or pains …that
itched or needed to be moved…..but was
unable to tell anyone and have to just lie there and deal with it. so
they went to Sweden. the doctors were so loving and understanding of
his fears…and his desire to end his life. arrangements were
made…and when he got close to the time that his communication started
to fail..his wife contacted the doctors. he held her hand and they
began the process in a quaint little room. he said goodbye…and he
died. his wife cried a little…but i cried like a baby! she was asked
later why she didn’t cry much…and she said that she has been watching
him die slowly for years, so instead of one big cry…she has had years
of small ones. i cried because of how respectfully and lovingly the
whole thing was done. i felt happy that he had his wishes and his
family was at peace.

I have yet to see an external standard which is a) standard (consistent) and b) doesn’t contain provisions that would make anyone puke, unless they’re willing to say “God is allowed to do evil shit because he’s God”.

The Suicide Tourist (also available on Netflix)

SJH, yours is clearly a religiously-inspired philosophy of suicide.

First of all, life is cherished and adored because it is worth living. When it is not, when you, say, have been paralyzed by MS, are wracked with pain for many hours of the day, when you have no bowel control and must be constantly cared for by others, life – according to those who have been in these situations – becomes markedly less adorable. For someone who wishes to die, for someone who is suffering, assisting them in their wish is something done out of compassion. Anything else would be cruelty. It would be controlling another and subverting their right to make their own decisions.

I notice that you do speak of controlling others, and here I would advise you be incredibly careful. You speak of allowing people to commit suicide, as if their lives were yours to control. There is nothing compassionate or just in denying someone the right to die because you aren’t okay with it.

Furthermore, there is nothing beautiful and enlightening about being made to suffer. It is here that your religious bias most shows. Believers in an all-powerful, loving God are simply required to make a virtue of suffering, because otherwise they have no way of explaining its existence. But because it makes your philosophy look neater does not make it true. Life has painful moments. For some, life has become pain, and is no longer worth continuing. There is no beauty in that. Nor is there “redemption.” Redemption for what?? Again, this is religiously-inspired nonsense, and guilt tripping. That we gain something from unending pain (which is called “hell,” by the way) is one of the sickest claims a person can make.

This was the only option my mother was given in her last days after a very long, very painful battle with cancer: to be made “comfortable” by an ever-increasing dose of morphine. She suffered anyway, despite her clear-minded, pre-emptive wish to die quickly and quietly. Thanks, New Jersey.

If you really wanted to know more about the kinds of regulations that should be/are  put on PAS (physician assisted suicide), you should look at the laws Oregon has in place. They are the only state in America that allows PAS. The rules involved are extremly rigid and often times the patient actually dies before they are approved. You may want to see how these regulations apply to your own beliefs in the matter.

Yeah, I don’t get the selfish angle at all. Far from it, I’d say the selfish ones are the people trying to keep their loved ones alive far beyond the point that they want to be alive, forcing them to suffer just so that they can delay feeling grief. 

I think you misunderstood me Seladora…or possibly my sentence was too long and nonsensical. I completely agree with you and was saying that I don’t take comfort in the fact that I could kill myself and not go to jail (seems rather obvious that I wouldn’t), BUT that nobody can aid in my death at my own request. I was somewhat pointing out the irony of the laws, not stating my displeasure that suicide was legal. I agree that suicide should be legal. Sorry if that was not clear.

Exactly!  It’s infuriating how they can easily push aside that “my life belongs to GOD and only GOD decides when I leave!” when they get  sick or when they are doing the suffering.

Maybe God wanted you to have an enlarged heart from some untreated illness, maybe God wanted you to die because he needed you in heaven, but no, not you!  You couldn’t allow God to do as he wills with your life, to do with it as he wills and end it if he chooses, you just went ahead and thwarted his Divine Plan and his Mysterious Ways with your vile Satanically-inspired SCIENCE!!!!!

There are few things more vile than the idea that “my religious beliefs dictate that your life belongs to God and so I should be able to force you to suffer to satisfy my religious convictions”.  Freedom of religion does not work that way.

It is difficult for me to allow suicide

Nobody asked for your permission, so what makes you think it’s your right to give or withhold it?

If we can be said to own anything at all in this world, it is our bodies and our minds. What we do with those (consent issues not withstanding) is our own business. We’re not your possessions, your kids, or your pets for you to control. We’re individual human beings that have the ability and right to make our own choices for our own circumstances.

If our choices aren’t necessarily the choices you would make, too bad. It’s not your place to force others to live their lives just likes its not your place to tell them how to live.

I figured that out as a child that the main objection against suicide seemed to stem from the fact that dead peasants provide no  bon-bons for the aristocracy and clergy–can’t let them check out early or the privileged would have to earn their keep, and that would defeat the purpose of the whole scam.

+1 for “the machine that goes bing”.

Katie, she wasn’t capable of making any sorts of decisions…she’d basically been a vegetable since the minute of her birth due to oxygen deprivation during birth. She had the mental capacity of a five month old baby. Her biggest enjoyment in life was being held and rocked, something that could NOT be done after a time because of the rods inserted in her body to combat the scoliosis.

Her cerebral palsy completely involved her entire body. She was in constant pain, but they wouldn’t prescribe anything stronger than Tylenol because of all the anti-convulsants she was on. By the 1990s her scoliosis was so pronounced it was impacting her internal organs (hence the rods).  In 1993, at the age of 13, she was so unable to take nourishment and keep it down that she weighed only 38 lbs at one point (while living in a care facility briefly).

And while Robert did not discuss his actions with Laura, it’s not as though she’d never said their child would be better off dead.  She did, the day they found out that their child would have to have another operation that might make her life marginally less painful, but would cause extreme pain after the fact (basically severing her hip and removing the entire joint).

So, what exactly was selfish about him ending his daughter’s suffering before yet another painful operation that would not significantly improve her overall quality of life and would cause excessive pain? The only thing that would have been more altruistic, IMO, would have been doing it earlier and with a MD’s help.

I’d suggest you read “Robert Latimer: A Story of Justice & Mercy” by Gary Bauslaugh (one of the only journalists that Latimer would talk to in detail).

I know it’s not the same, therefore I used the words ‘or’ and ‘as presented above’.

You can see positive results coming from certain behaviour yes, but you can’t call it right and wrong and expect others to agree with it if it is all subjective and relative.

If we agree on our goals, yes, we can talk about right and wrong. Because some actions will help achieve our goals and some actions will not. I really don’t know why some people are so intent on making this seem complicated…

So right. His poor daughter was suffering horribly and she was scheduled to suffer even more. Try to picture having major hip surgery with plain Tylenol as the only post-surgical pain relief.
I have no doubt that Robert Latimer did the right thing. The criminal aspect was that there was no legal way for him to do it.

He could have escaped a long prison term if he’s been willing to say he’d done wrong. He wouldn’t.

I suggest that the above book settles the case for people who aren’t blinded by theism.

This wasn’t really what the article was about and I won’t have much other time to continue the discussion, but here goes….

Tracy Latimer was not able to write or communicate in conventional
ways. Although frequently portrayed as bed-ridden and in constant pain,
Tracy’s pain was intermittent and she rode the bus to school every day.
On the witness stand at Robert Latimer’s trial, Tracy’s mother Laura
was forced to admit having written (in the journal/log book that was kept) that Tracy was happy, comfortable and
doing well in the days before her father murdered her – she had
previously supported the defense claim that she was in constant,
unremitting pain. The misinformation about Tracy helped to create the
myth of Latimer as folk hero. In fact, he got a lot of breaks from the
justice system – a 10 year sentence for 2nd degree murder when he
admitted the killing was premeditated (which calls for 25 minimum before
parole eligibility). He was also not retried after his 1974 rape
conviction was overturned on appeal. The appeal was based on the fact
that the judge had not allowed the defense to ask the 15 year old victim
of Latimer and his (also 21 year old alleged accomplice) about her
sexual history. Little wonder the Crown was unable to proceed with a new
trial with the prospect of such a cross examination of a 15 year old
girl. The law has since changed and if it all happened
today, Latimer would likely have been unsuccessful in that appeal. 

Unfortunately,
many people accept Latimer’s defence arguments at face value and do not
read the court transcripts in context. Latimer is a child abuser of the
worst kind. People’s judgements about Latimer are clouded by their
pessimism  and ignorance about disability and their inability to imagine
that a kid like Tracy enjoyed life, which she clearly did – she liked
hockey, having her fingernails painted, teasing other kids and adults.
Yet people accepted the myth that she “had the mind of a 4 month old”.
That rationale also begs the question of what level of intelligence is
seen as worthy of life? The Nazis and modern bioethicists have been keen
to offer ideas and remedies on that issue.

Euthanasia goes on all the time. Quietly. Sometimes a doctor helps. Sometimes a family member.
The reason legalization is needed is so it CAN be monitored/regulated. Right now we have no idea if the people being helped are being helped of their own volition. It’s illegal to assist a suicide so no one involved can or will  talk about it. Legalization is the only way to bring this out of the dark.
 

That makes so much more sense! Thank you for clarifying haha.

I followed the Latimer case from the day it was reported to the present.

I contacted people I knew in Saskatchewan in the disability/community living field when I heard about it and found out that Tracy’s disability was very similar to many children I had worked with in the past, and was working with at the time – kids that had cerebral palsy and who went through the scoliosis and hip release surgeries that alleviate the conditions that were causing Tracy’s pain. Yet the news reports made it sound like she had some rare form of CP that left her in constant pain. Untrue – she was happy and comfortable a lot of the time. She had times of real pain, no doubt – I’ve been with and cared for kids that are going through that and its no picnic. But, it would have been alleviated by the scheduled surgery. Latimer’s lawyer asked the surgeon (Dr. Dzus) in court if the pain would be gone the day after the surgery – obviously a ridiculous question – and he and others used the answer to suggest that she would (always) be in pain after the surgery. I followed every trial and read every trial transcript and watched as Robert Latimer was re-cast as a folk hero through poor journalism and the selective reporting of expert testimony and trial testimony. I learned about his 1974 rape conviction and successful appeal on grounds that would not be accepted today (ironically, that trial was heard by one of the judges who 20-odd years later called him “the salt of the earth”. I learned about Tracy and about how she spent her time and the things she enjoyed. Latimer and his lawyers were successful in painting pictures of Tracy and her father that were both grossly inaccurate. Tracy was murdered and robbed of her life at 12 years of age. That 15 year old victim of rape was greatly harmed by both of the men who assaulted her – not to mention being further harmed by the justice system of the day. Latimer got off easy both times. Tracy had a right to life. Those who support Latimer insult her further in death. CanadianChick repeats the basic misinformation that was “sold” to the general public in the superficial reporting that happened in this case. She says Tracy was a “vegetable”. Such is the quality of our compassion and mercy.  

Agree that dignity is a relative concept. I’m annoyed by the phrase “death with dignity,” because it seems to insult people who live with conditions that others might find undignified: relative helplessness, chronic pain, inability to control movement, reliance on ventilators, etc. The disability movement often points out how euthanasia supporters sometimes play up fear of these kinds of medical conditions and interventions. (This kind of repulsion was my first exposure to the issue, if not yours.)

I’d prefer some other term than “dignity”–aren’t we talking about “self-determination” or “preventing suffering”? But that ship has already left the port, and we now have plenty of wrenching testimony from people who are or were suffering, and their family members, so that the “oh, i’d never want to have an ostomy bag, it’s so undignified” and “i don’t want to be a burden” voices are mostly crowded out. If “dignity” is the word that gets the laws passed, keep it.

So our goals determine ‘wrong’ and ‘right’? And should our goals change then ‘wrong and ‘right’ also changes?

I don’t understand what you’re getting at. 

When we’re trying to determine social policy, the first step is to decide what the policy is supposed to accomplish. For example, if your goal is to reduce the rate at which people become addicted to drugs, you’re strategy is going to be different than if your goal is to prevent overdoses among addicts. 

Now, let’s say we’ve already decided that our goal is to prevent overdoses, and we have Politician A and Politician B. Politician A proposes that we just focus on arresting any drug users the cops can get their hands on. Politician B wants to build safe injection sites so that drug users have nurses present when they take drugs, while also giving social workers access to them. We try both strategies for a year and evaluate which strategy results in lower overdose rates.

In this example, Politician A is making his suggestion because he believes that God wants us to be tough on crime and not to tolerate sin. Politician B, on the other hand, has a liberal agenda and wants us to turn all our jails into atheist/environmentalist brainwashing centres and make all police uniforms pink with Hello Kitty logos. Secularism is about ignoring the reasons why these two politicians are proposing what they’re proposing, and focus instead on the results – how do the two strategies measure up when it comes to accomplishing the stated goal of reducing overdose rates?It does get more complicated when we have different goals. For example, one society’s goal might be focused around God’s wellbeing, while another might be focused on the wellbeing of its citizens. And in that case, it is fuzzier and we have more room for discussion, although we might well argue that the wellbeing of proven entities is, by default, the worthier goal. Or if we have a contest between a goal that caters to the wellbeing of the entire population versus only a segment (as we might see if we have a slavery-based economy, for example), the more people encompassed by the goal may be a better default. Beyond that, you really can’t argue, nor do I think it’s worth bothering. If we’re designing a hypothetical society and the designers do not get a choice of what role they will get to play in it, it simply makes no sense to design a society that favours only one group (or, rather, disfavours one). That would run completely counter to self-interest. The only thing that changes when we start talking about the real world instead of hypotheticals is that roles are already assigned so people can safely work with narrower self-interest. 

If you live in the US, and drive a vehicle on the roads, you do so following rules of the Uniform Vehicle Code, and any modifications to such made by your state and local jurisdiction.  This particular set of laws was ‘worked out’ without the help of any ‘giver’.  If you live somewhere else, something similar applies.

Your ‘nothing to work towards’ is your projection of nihilism on me/us.  Lack of belief in a ‘giver’ doesn’t mean what you really want it to mean.

Various faiths may believe euthanasia is “immoral” and equate it to
murder, but I believe it to be immoral to let human beings suffer in
agony when they’re begging to be put to rest, telling them that the
choice is not theirs to make. Life is precious, but when the time
comes, we should have the choice to die with dignity because, after
all, it’s our life. It is very adamant matter.

I’ve always treated the idea of euthanasia like I treat that other wonderfully divisive concept, that of abortion. I sort of passively believe that it ought to be legal, but I just can’t conceive of any circumstance under which I’d advise someone I truly cared about to actually do it.

What I find most amusing is when people try to say it’s strictly an issue that revolves around religion. It doesn’t. The suggestion that assisted suicide be regulated, and that there be a process involved, reveals a subtle but well-defined idea about death: that even when someone states they wish to die, by default we should try to change their mind with counselling or other tools. Even the secular tend towards the belief that in the general sense, life is worth preserving.

Terry Pratchett has Alzheimers? *sad*

My aunt may have early-onset… she’s having testing done now.

Replying to all other posts under this heading: I’m with you on the fact that we can agree on methods and rules etc and apply them as long as we can see that practically they work best and is sustainable for ongoing development towards other things we mutually agreed to build towards for instance. My initial problem was with the fact that someone made a moral judgement on something as wrong (or otherwise right) but I could not understand from his worldview what the source of authority is he drew it from? Every right or wrong has to be drawn from some source of authority. The laws that govern the roads could get drawn back to the body who lay them down and so forth, and if in the US for instance something is illegal then those who break the laws are only wrong with position to the US law system but not necessarily wrong because who says it is wrong in general to break national laws? A Christian for instance would draw on the Bible as his authoritative source who commands the followers of Jesus to obey such laws but what does an atheist, agnostic, and the like turn to? That was my issue.

what wmdkitty said… grew up with my mom being a vet, so I got used to it.