I am so pleased by this reminder. I would like to look forward to a tidy death, and to have a large party around and during that moment. The need for this may yet cause me to move back to Oregon after 45+ years away. Right now I have no need. But, should the time appear, I'll be enroute home Oregon. (I'm an RN; I've seen too many lingering deaths that are hard on the person and even harder on the family.)

I think I read somewhere that when given the option, more people chose not to use it than actually used it. I think that's the value of it -- give people an option, not an ultimatum. Nothing in the law seems to be an ultimatum. It's a matter of personal choice, one which I, for one, would like to have.

Linda Ryan

It's sad that we are being asked to take any form of suicide seriously as a morally licit choice.

I understand the impulse behind this--who among us wouldn't want to exercise control over their final moments?--but I find it hard to square the seeking a "tidy death" with the concept of "the Christian hope."

Warren Woodfin

Why is it sad? Are we as people of faith not called to grapple with difficult questions? Should we not look at an issue critically, even when we are afraid to?

I don't think we should debate assisted suicide any more than we should debate torture.

I don't know why? They're quite unrelated issues.

I hear this argument a lot in the Church. People say, we can't talk about gay marriage any more than we can talk about bestiality. The reality is that we can talk about bestiality, but we'd probably arrive at a drastically different conclusion than we would when talking about gay marriage, because they are drastically different issues.

We shouldn't try and compare apples and oranges in such a way. And, we shouldn't just let the air out of a discussion by saying it's off-limits. If we don't engage with the difficult questions, we'll never grow spiritually and our understanding of God and morality will never grow.

It's interesting that the argument has changed to using "quality of life" and "dignity" (as opposed to "intractable pain") as the rationale for suicide. If you pay attention to what people actually mean by "dignity," it often turns out that what they want to avoid at all costs is dependence on others. I think that the Church should be very wary of advancing the concept that loss of physical autonomy is something degrading or undignified. Among other things, it cheapens society's regard for the lives of people with disabilities and the elderly. A recent essay by a person with paralysis who believes physicians (and the wider society) encourage people with disabilities to choose death over life is available here: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/hast.38/full

Both are violent assaults on the image of God that betray an underlying ant-Christian worldview. We don't get ti unmake what God has made either by torturing a person or by choosing the manner and hour of our death.

Wonder what all here who are against it will say when the time comes? Wouldn't be better to talk about it and learn the reasons people feel it is necessary? What can those who are not suffering currently do to support those who are instead of say "bad" or "silence"?

I'm wildly ambivalent re physician-assisted suicide. My mom had ALS, and often mentioned ending her own life. Ultimately, she did not try to go that route (in California), and succumbed naturally to this (horrible!) disease. I was relieved she didn't try to end her own life, mainly for the sake of my father, who was so opposed.

However, I'm very uncomfortable, BillC, by your hyperbolic certitude on this topic. It's a difficult subject, which benefits from Christian humility. Maybe it IS always wrong, but we ought not to proclaim we KNOW the Mind of Christ on it.

JC Fisher

There can't be a good reason for an irrational and violent act. That we are considering it at all is a real sign of breakdown in the human community. The state right prohibits suicide, wirh a firm foundation in natural law.

"by choosing the manner and hour of our death."

Your certitude on the matter is disturbing Bill C.

There are folks who commit suicide all of the time, often as an act that is labeled heroism and yet the person who died knew full well that they were committing suicide, ending their own life. By your definition, it appears that no one has the right to end their own life. That would also include those who decide that they want to end treatment or not have heroic measures taken to ensure that they live.

So we should instead enact laws that require everyone to receive all treatment and measures necessary to ensure that they ave no say in when their life should end. And also pass laws that prohibit taking any heroic steps to save others at our own peril.

Or where does one draw the line?

Bro David

where did i say we couldnt stop treatment?

We are talking about assisted suicide, not a dnr order

Certitude is the only position one ought to have when contemplating human complicity in murder. Skepticism is an evasion of the responsibility for moral judgment

Before we get into the question of assisted suicide as such, it might help to get some facts. The article in The New York Times says that it is the more educated and affluent who are likely to choose assisted suicide. These are people who value personal autonomy. This fact resonates with my own experience as the Co-President of the Long Island/New York City Funeral Consumers Alliance that the more educated and the younger have been moving toward funerals which honor individual autonomy. People have been moving toward home funerals, in states which allow them, and away from traditional funeral rites. It was not that long ago that the more educated and groups such as the Unitarians began choosing cremation, which had been considered unChristian by many Christians.

Autonomy has come up up in the case of Gloria Taylor in British Columbia, of which the Supreme Court ruled that a prohibition on assisted funeral is unconstitutional. Not allowing a handicapped person to choose to end his or her life is a denial of liberty and constitutes discrimination against a particular group. Not allowing people to choose assisted suicide may make it more likely they will choose suicide out of fear of getting into a situation where they have no control.

The value I see in this is the dignity of the human person. It doesn't matter that the tradition has been opposed to assisted suicide because that is like trying to use the tradition to justify itself. The Gloria Taylor case is about a group of people who have been denied liberty and autonomy.

The Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, a religious conservsative, will appeal the decision from British Columbia.

But Gloria Taylor has been given an exemption to the prohibition while the ruling is appealed by the federal government in Ottawa.

What happens in Canada may influence courts in this country, no matter who wins in Ottawa.

Gary Paul Gilbert

Wikipedia Gloria Taylor
Gloria Taylor is a Canadian woman who is an advocate of assisted suicide and is currently suffering from ALS (Lou Gehrig's disease). Taylor is a member of a group who brought a court case before the Supreme Court of British Columbia to have the current federal law prohibiting assisted suicide be declared unconstitutional because it unfairly deprives people with degenerative illnesses of their liberty, and because it discriminates against those with a physical disability who might need assistance to exercise their right to take their own life. The group argues that the prohibition of assisted suicide violates Section 15 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms because it discriminates against people with degenerative diseases who have no physical means to take their own lives. They also argued the ban violates their Section 7 right to life because, if they do want to end their suffering, they would have to do so earlier than they might otherwise want, before they lose the capacity to act. Justice Lynn Smith put off her decision for one year, to allow the federal government to change the law to exempt physicians from criminal prosecution. The Harper government stated that it would appeal the decision.[1]

I wonder how Bill Carroll's demand (that others suffer to support his certainty that suicide is always wrong) differs from those who insist that acting on same-sex desire is always wrong, so that life-long celibacy is the only option for those so afflicted. There is a view that suffering is a part of this life, and embracing it is ennobling. Well, those who want to embrace suffering may do so, but insisting that others do so seems arrogant.

The great editor at Indiana University Press who hired me away from the Episcopal Book Club shot herself shortly after being eased into retirement at age 70. (At a memorial gathering, an editor friend observed, "There was nothing wishy-washy about Miriam.") I still have some of her furniture and china. Consensus was that she'd cared for her mother during her mother's long decline, and feared enduring something similar. As Gary says above, having assisted suicide as an option might reduce the pressure to do it while one still can.

I see that Bill Carroll has left Athens, Ohio, and gone to Shawnee, Oklahoma -- home of Oklahoma Baptist University. I attended OBU for five semesters, and graduated from the University of Oklahoma only because I transferred there to take a sequence of courses in professional writing, and it was simpler not to go back. I get the OBU alumni magazine for news of old classmates, found mostly in the obits. I feel well out of Oklahoma nowadays. I hope the place isn't overindulging Bill Carroll's taste for suffering.

Bill Dilworth is right to cite "A recent essay by a person with paralysis who believes physicians (and the wider society) encourage people with disabilities to choose death over life." My former wife and I knew a woman in London paralyzed from the neck down. She got around in a specially equipped automobile and chair and enjoyed life. Her greatest danger, she said, came when she entered hospital for maintenance -- she had to guard against nurses and physicians who assumed she'd be better off dead. Odd how easily we assume that we know what's best for others, or project our wishes onto their situation. It really is vital that we listen to one another.

There's nothing arrogant about upholding moral and legal standards. The arrogance comrs with a near Satanic sense of the range of possible choices and undetcutting prohibitions meant to protect the mentally ill, disabled persons,;and othet vulnerable people. The law in saner jurisdictions does not recognizr this as a choice. It is a crime and for good reason.

There is everything arrogant about upholding moral and legal standards if you refuse to recognize that they are misapplied. "Thinking Anglicans" just closed a discussion thread that reached 93 comments as people tried to reason with three posters absolutely convinced that same-sex marriage was morally wrong, citing legal standards that were changing even as they wrote. "I have the Truth" is not an argument; a discussion needs evidence and reason.

We are more and more treating people as autonomous individuals -- even the bride, formerly a piece of property, is now an equal party to the marriage. Yes, assisted suicide is open to misuse -- the laws in question attempt to guard against abuse. Mr. Carroll seems to feel no need to inform himself about the laws in question -- he knows where he stands. We are individuals and we are members of communities. We are responsible for ourselves, and we have responsibilities to others. There is tension in these relationships. Calling differing positions "Satanic" doesn't advance the argument.

What is Satanic is the view of autonomy in question.

And the justification of murder that flows from the premise is a reductio ad absurdum. One might justify any sort of crime by such a strong notion of autonomy. At best, one ought to take autonomy into account other things being equal. There are other, far more fundamental values at stake. The point of view you are espousing is in fact anti-morality, version of Satan's "I will not serve."

I didn't mention a DNR. Someone who needs to be resuscitated has already died and that's a different conversation. There are many forms of heroic treatment besides resuscitating someone, the refusal of which would be to choose death. Someone deciding against heroic efforts or to stop treatment, is often insuring their death, choosing the manner and oft times the hour, and it is certainly a form of suicide.

Someone dependent on an iron lung or other forms of respiratory assistance, who chooses to turn it off, would be committing suicide.

So, again my question, where do we draw the line about allowing someone to take the decision to end their own life? Just with the person who has a fatal dose of meds?

Bro David

To live, you gotta have two things, a body fit to live in, and a mind fit to live in. Sometimes, a body nearly unfit to live in forges a mind no longer fit to live in. It's that simple.

"wirh a firm foundation in natural law."

"natural law"???? :-0

A concept I reject. NOT "natural", and (thankfully!) not "law" in State or TEC. When the Popoids threaten me w/ their "natural law", I fear it as much as a Papal excommunication. Pure Power-Over Trip, of *human* construct.

Needless to say, BillC, my discomfort w/ your certitude has only intensified. Your condemnation of "autonomy" strikes me as similar to Papal condemnations of democracy (As Churchill said, the worst form of governance---except for all the others).

Why don't you climb down off your figurative Chair of Peter (no less figurative than the one in the Vatican!), and TALK WITH us, and not at us?

JC Fisher

Gloria Taylor, the plaintiff in the British Columbia case to strike the prohibition on physician assisted suicide, is a member of the United Church of Canada, the largest Protestant denomination in Canada, three fourths of whose members support assisted suicide.

http://tinyurl.com/bu33q8o

It is wrong to paint this issue as a battle between, on the one hand, faithful Christians and, and on the other hand, nonChristians.
Many people support this issue not despite their faith but because of it.

The issue is complex and opponents ought not be labeled as lacking moral convictions, unless one is willing to unchurch members of the United Church of Canada and, in this country, the United Church of Christ (which has developed a whole teaching series on the topic, presenting many sides and opinions though leaning toward liberalization.)
http://tinyurl.com/c6yfm7a

Yes, JC Fisher, when people get together to talk, things can get complicated. But the democratic way is the best.

Gary Paul Gilbert

This documentary by Sir Terry Prachett, who is suffering from Alzheimer's Disease, helped me to understand the assisted suicide movement. Perhaps it will help this discussion, for those who care to watch it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_NUa0SyyyMg&feature=related

It does not provide easy answers, it does not make proclamations or decrees, but rather it puts a human face on the difficult struggle faced by the author and those he profiles.

I was deeply moved, deeply troubled, and led to prayer and contemplation after watching the documentary.

I was using dnr as an example of withholding
artificial life support. Turning of a respirator is analogous. Active euthanasia is another matter.

I would never give up on the concept of natural law. Hard to see how one can believe in a Creator and affirm any kind of teleology without it. In my view autonomy is too thin to be a fundamental basis for morality. It's a short jump from Kant ro the twentieth century. We need tradition, authority, and law, or we descend into brutality and carnage. The idea of law as the product of a self legislating subject is the very kind os Satanic view I am arguing against. We need God and community to be moral human beings

Besides the pressure brought to bear on people with disabilities and the elderly to just climb out in the ice floe already, for Pete's sake, there's some evidence that in the Netherlands some physicians are assessing patients' quality of life and making what they consider to be the appropriate choice, even without the patients' consent. If I lived somewhere with legal assisted suicide/euthanasia, I'd be sore tempted to make sure my physician and hospital were both Catholic to avoid having someone make that decision for me.

"Tradition, authority, and law" have often justified "brutality and carnage." Witness the long history of the Constantinian church and its dealings with heretics and hapless natives occupying lands and resources coveted by true believers. Witness how tradition, authority, and law supported the brutality and carnage of slavery and lynching in the U.S.

We need community to be human beings -- babies do not thrive in isolation. Love, morality, ethics, must be cultivated within our communities -- sometimes supported by God stories, often not. People can be moral without a concept of God, which is fortunate, since concepts of God are so variable.

Bill Carroll can keep his belief in final causes. The world as we know it simply IS, and we understand its history and functions so poorly that we are engaged in destroying its capacity to support life. The gift of fire is proving phyrric -- burning all the fossil fuel we can get our hands on is poisoning the atmosphere, with nary a cautioning word from divinity. (There should have been a limit on the command to multiply.)

Thanks to those discussing the articles Gary posted. Arguing theology is tempting, but there's no end to it.

I'm a little puzzled by the title the NYT gave to the article: "In Ill Doctor, a Surprise Reflection of Who Picks Assisted Suicide".

What's surprising about this particular person opting for assisted suicide? He voted for the measure, after all. Is it that he's physician? Since physicians are necessarily a part of physician-assisted suicide, I don't see the surprise. Am I missing something?

"(There should have been a limit on the command to multiply.)"

To be fair, Murdoch, there was one, sort of. Here's a quote from the website of Chabad of Queen's College:

"This is in accordance with the source in the Talmud (Yoma 85b) for why one is permitted to violate the Sabbath in order to save a life, as in the case of a woman in the travails of labor. The Talmud quotes Leviticus 18:5, which states with regards to the commandments, 'you will live by them.' The Talmud states that the verse comes to teach us that although one is meant to follow the commandments, this is not meant to be at the expense of life. 'You shall live by them, but not die by them,' is the Talmudic dictum, which is quoted in the Codes of Jewish Law."

Don't blame God for humans' insistence on soiling our own nest. Viewed with the Talmudic dictum in mind, "Be fruitful and multiply" wasn't a divine command to race towards extinction.

I could never do assisted suicide, nor could I assist another to do it, but it does not follow that I would not choose DNR if my condition was terminal and irreversible. In fact, I already have in my living will. I have also specified that I do not want a feeding tube if I am near death and stop eating. I would definitely choose hospice with comfort care only and whatever pain medication was necessary, though it might hasten my death, which is, as I see it, entirely different from taking one's own life.

June Butler

"which is, as I see it, entirely different from taking one's own life."

How is it different June? You would be taking steps to see that your life ended. It will just take longer and you wish others to be responsible to see that you are medicated so that you don't feel what otherwise would be an agonizing way to die as you starved. If the authorities of the State of Louisiana discovered that you had done the same to your husband in a bedroom of your home in secret, they would most likely arrest you and try you for murder because you took the steps to end his life. The only difference in murder and suicide is who you have caused to die.

Please forgive me of the bluntness of the comment, but I think that you are trying to fool yourself into believing that there is a difference. I don't fathom it.

Bro David

June,

No one is prescribing assisted suicide, or even recommending it. Some want it as an option in case of need. And since such people are likely to avail themselves of it in any event, it would be well if they didn't have to break a law in doing so.

If my old boss had been sure she'd be able to check out at will, she might not have blown her brains all over her bedroom wall, and traumatized her hapless roommate.

Gary saw his father through the end of his suffering from lung cancer. His dad probably would never have considered suicide, and, in any event, was in no condition to make decisions in his last months of life. But the people who stood by him have given serious thought to avoiding what he went through.

We all must lean on our communities, and look for their support; but in the end, only we know our situation, and are responsible for our decisions.

June, not only do you not see it as the same as taking one's life, but neither does the Catholic Church. It's called the principle of double effect, and is explained here: http://www.usccb.org/issues-and-action/human-life-and-dignity/assisted-suicide/killing-the-pain.cfm

Perhaps you should read the article again Bill D. The linked article is not speaking of the same thing that June described. It is strictly about providing pain medication. The Roman Church would not allow patients in their hospitals to withdraw sustenance that June described. Have you forgotten the whole Terri Schiavo debacle?

Bro David

David, you are mistaken. For an explanation of Catholic teaching regarding extraordinary means of sustaining life, read http://www.americancatholic.org/messenger/jan2006/feature1.asp

Thanks Bill for the link. Good to know that the circus surrounding Terri Shiavo has been misunderstood even by faithful Roman Catholics.

Bro David