Meditation 11: Assisted Suicide

If assisted suicide were legal, it would be possible to make a date with death. People could choose to say goodbye to their families, their friends and their lives all at the same time.  If it were legal, an individual would no longer have to commit a lonely suicide, write a sad note and then take the pills, pull the trigger or jump off a chair into a noose. One could die with dignity, realizing that it is a right to choose to cease living and to have help in doing so.

Religion has been a key factor in preventing the legalization of suicide because it condemns ending one's life as a sin. People stoically have to bear the process of losing their powers one by one, slowly becoming racked by the pains of debilitating diseases, and wait for the end to come. Without the perspective of faith, this religious view makes little sense and should not involve itself with public policy. If one's religious beliefs prohibit suicide, that is fine, but the prohibition should no longer be mandatory for all. Whether or not there is an afterlife, what possible reason is there for extreme suffering when the desire to live has gone?

Of course, not just anyone should assist a person to die. The assistants should be licensed death planners and counselors. After the proper precautions are taken, people tired of pain and misery would be free to seek help to terminate their lives. These precautions include psychological counseling to ensure that the individual really does want to die and is not acting impulsively. They also include a watchdog body to make sure that old and handicapped people are not killed outright to save money for public hospitals and rest homes, not pressured into assisted suicide by the avaricious beneficiaries or stigmatized for refusing to do the "decent thing."

We are living in an age of enlightenment where assisted suicide should be legal and people free to plan for their deaths by assisted suicide or palliative care. We would be spared the torment of watching our loved ones die in excruciating pain or mindless with pain killers. As for ourselves, if, in one's own steady eyes, infirmity or disease takes away the reason to continue living, then it is rational to contemplate the choice of an arranged death over a slow and painful one. The world would be a better place if human beings had that choice.