Perchance to Sleep

Ben Mattlin, in the New York Times, on an 'assisted suicide' proposal in Massachusetts:

"I learned how easy it is to be perceived as someone whose quality of life is untenable, even or perhaps especially by doctors. Indeed, I hear it from them all the time — “How have you survived so long? Wow, you must put up with a lot!” — even during routine office visits, when all I’ve asked for is an antibiotic for a sinus infection. Strangers don’t treat me this way, but doctors feel entitled to render judgments and voice their opinions. To them, I suppose, I must represent a failure of their profession, which is shortsighted. I am more than my diagnosis and my prognosis.

"This is but one of many invisible forces of coercion. Others include that certain look of exhaustion in a loved one’s eyes, or the way nurses and friends sigh in your presence while you’re zoned out in a hospital bed. All these can cast a dangerous cloud of depression upon even the most cheery of optimists, a situation clinicians might misread since, to them, it seems perfectly rational.

"And in a sense, it is rational, given the dearth of alternatives. If nobody wants you at the party, why should you stay? Advocates of Death With Dignity laws who say that patients themselves should decide whether to live or die are fantasizing. Who chooses suicide in a vacuum? We are inexorably affected by our immediate environment. The deck is stacked."

. . . .

"To be sure, there are noble intentions behind the “assisted death” proposals, but I can’t help wondering why we’re in such a hurry to ensure the right to die before we’ve done all we can to ensure that those of us with severe, untreatable, life-threatening conditions are given the same open-hearted welcome, the same open-minded respect and the same open-ended opportunities due everyone else."

I'm on record as being generally supportive of one's right to choose when to jump off this mortal coil. Not that I myself am yet in the sort of situation where I might want to take it. But Mattlin puts his finger directly on the reasons for the reservations I have about it too. I would want to choose for my own reasons.

Of course, that's selfish, in a way. But I do not want to find the society around me forcing me into that choice, as, in the UK, government policies increasingly may. To make your own choice as to whether or not you live or die should depend on the society around you—whether it's friends, relatives, or the broader society of local or national government—having done all it can for you.

So that your own decision is one that is in fact entirely your own.

But that is not the way I see things going. Mattlin is absolutely right in wondering why societies often seem to be keener on ridding themselves of 'useless mouths' in as brutal and coercive a fashion as the commanders of besieged towns in the 15th and 16th centuries did, instead of giving them the wherewithal to live.