Libertarian case misses euthanasia complexity

Jess Joel, life is complex and complicated and that applies to death as well as to sex, procreation, birth, marriage, commitment and all the other questions with which we struggle. But a blanket ban on all forms of euthanasia is just as simplistic as the libertarian's individualistic position. And whose needs are being met when you posit 'our opportunity to show love and care' as part justification for your position ?

When a person dies other people are intimately involved. Their spouse, their descendants and friends. These two statements make presumptions: that they are married and have a spouse still living, that they have children, that their close friends are living. Still, it's a time of not knowing, perhaps trusting, but not knowing. So people want to control what little control they have. I believe good quality palliative care is a fundamental right of every person. Our health system should be about supporting this person through this most emotional time.

Thanks for this article Joel. Among many good points you state: "These changes will affect how the elderly or dying elderly see themselves, particularly those who feel pressured or lack support at the end of their lives." This is very serious and I believe can particularly apply to women. In a society such as ours where women are not even guaranteed the same salary for the same work as men, it is a concern. If the value of your work during life does not attract the same financial reward as men, why would anyone think that your worth at the end of life is suddenly on a par with them? That which is considered of lesser importance is, by implication, more dispensable. If euthanasia is legalised there would be a subtle shift in consciousness over time. It would involve a new calculation about the rationalisation of health and other resources. It would lead to the expectation that one should consider the burden one is to family, society, tax-payer. And this shift would have greater effect on women than on men, given their demonstrated lesser status.

Thank you Dr Hodge for providing another view on euthanasia. You raise some really important questions here - euthanasia is highly complex, as is life. We must look after the vulnerable in our society - it would be devastating to see the elderly or people with a disability pressured into accepting euthanasia because society comes to see them as a burden, rather than opportunities for us to provide care and dignity to them. What is a life worth living? Will legalising euthanasia fundamentally change our views on this? As a health professional working for many years in a hospital I saw this. When my grandmother was in hospital very sick (but not dying/terminal) I noticed she was aspirating so I mentioned it to the intern doctor and asked for a speech pathology assessment. The intern said “they’ll just put her on thickened fluids and that’s no quality of life. Just let her deteriorate.” My grandmother was for thickened fluids, but the intern doctor refused to make the referral because *he* didn’t agree it was quality of life. If society’s attitudes change towards quality of life and life itself then where does it stop?

Great article, Dr. Hodge. The idea that some people should be able to compel the rest of us to legitimise or facilitate their death' is not only naive. It is abhorrent. As a mature nurse, I worked in a tertiary hospital when abortion was legalised. I watched in horror as doctors prescribed abortifacient drugs and walked away, leaving nurses to administer them. Some of my colleagues not only refused to have anything to do with the women who had chosen abortion, but also treated those women without courtesy, let alone charity. The situation could easily arise with euthanasia that others, perhaps lower in the health hierarchy, would be expected and pressured to administer the lethal medication against their wills.

These concerns about euthanasia are very appropriate. Life does involve suffering, sometimes this is taken on voluntarily eg by athletes in training, sometimes involuntarily eg by the parent of a drug-addicted child, or by a person whose partner has an affair. There is fortitude in this kind of suffering. The suffering of those with degenerative or terminal illnesses is often thought to be useless, but this can never be assumed, especially from the standpoint of Christian Theology. Attempts to insist others should agree that one’s illness-caused suffering is unbearable and can only be alleviated by death has a sense of coercion about it that is the antithesis of the exercise of the free choice it purports to advocate. A second assumption is that how one ends one’s life has nothing to do with the kind of existence one might experience subsequently. It is all very well to say: ‘I don’t care about your religious views, the only compassionate way to treat me is to do what I ask and kill me (gently)!’, but if the person making these demands were truly autonomous, they would not need to ask others for this help, nor ‘guilt-trip’ them to do so!

Hi Joel, My decision and wishes are based on my own circumstances of life that make my wishes and decisions on assisted dying .... Mine are a Father who had Mesothelioma (no cure) a terrible death (I was one of his carers) ....As a nurse of 52 years now retired and aged 82 this October I want my choice of how I die if I am in a state of not knowing of a life of meaning. My my last years to be MINE and mine only not dictated by some other person...or law.....that others have decided it right.I base my decisions on my life experience Lois Daley 25/7/2018

Nice work, Joel. Keep speaking up against the waverers in our presumably Catholic midst!

Yes, thank you Joel for your intelligent, thoughtful and faith-filled article. Unlike Michael Furtado, I do not believe that being a waverer makes one 'presumably Catholic'!

There is no secular principle against euthanasia, merely some prudential arguments to do with protecting the subject or administrators of euthanasia against coercion, none of which refute a posited principle that a free person of sound mind may take any action he or she pleases which does not violate another’s rights. If someone with no family or friends decides that no one will be bereaved by his desire to see what lies on the other side, who can complain for their own sakes against him? Tort applies only to those who may reasonably be expected to suffer loss by an act. The secular Right claiming that ‘safe space’ is not needed by a person of ordinary toughness, they cannot now insist, moral or physical coercion aside, that a general right to commit suicide invades the right of a member of society to feel safe. The secular Left claims that laws can be tweaked to make the general principle go easier on the deplorables who insist on feeling unsafe. There is no secular principle because why should God bend over backwards to make it easy for humans not to believe in him?

Great post, Elizabeth; but, as a liturgist par excellence, you must know that good liturgy is founded upon good theology and that because so much of our (Catholic ) theology, such as in the instance of the sacramentology of marriage, is underdeveloped or locked into the dim dark days of a past that bears very little contextual relevance to the present, many Catholics are turned off it. As with matrimony, and the plethora of Catholics who marry outside of its rules, so also with the Sacrament of the Sick and what it offers to us as we age and, inevitably, die. The Church has been too slow in acknowledging that it does not teach about the extenuation of life at all costs, but instead has always prudently taught against the extenuation of suffering through its adherence to the principle of double effect. Unfortunately, the many fundamentalist Jansenists in our Catholic midst do not either understand or condone this, and are so locked into a warped mindset that privileges pain and atonement that many Catholics are properly but mistakenly revolted by this. My plaint, in favour of Joel's argument, was against the many Catholics favouring euthanasia over such a fundamentalist distortion.