Something has disturbed me recently. I found out that there is a bill on the ballet in Massachusetts to legalize physician-assisted suicide for those who are terminally ill.
On the surface, such a law often sounds like a good idea. Supporters use words like "dignity" and talk about suffering. If someone knows he is going to die, why prolong the suffering?
My beliefs suggest that there are some very important reasons why suicide is never an option.
Not that we can ever do anything to set us back permanently. Suicide is not going to land us in hell for eternity. But leaving early does deprive us of the chance to work through the sanskara that we were put in this life to deal with. and the act of suicide is going to add some very serious sanskara to future lifetimes.
It may sound cruel to say we have to stick it out no matter the circumstances. And I'm a very firm believer in the "separation of church and state," as they say here. I don't want to legislate my morality. I don't vote based on religious preferences alone (although my religion certainly informs everything in my life).
Some of you may now that I'm connected to doing work in disability rights. Another thing that I have against a bill like this is the double standard. When a healthy and/or able-bodied person says they want to kill themselves, we rush to get them counseling, medication, and help. When someone with a severe disability or illness wants to kill themselves, we say "Yeah, that makes sense. Your life must be shit."
No one has the right to take his own life.
And I think that's what's at the heart of this passionate debate back and forth over the right to die issue.
We want to believe that we have some control over our life and our death. We like to tell ourselves that if things got too bad we could always kill ourselves, that at any time we could take control.
But we are not in control of death.
The universe takes us when it is our time and we will never see that coming. Even those who are terminally ill cannot predict (or have doctors) predict the moment they will pass. Prognoses are educated estimates. We don't know when our time to go is.
Proof of that, to me, is the seemingly random way that some people do insanely dangerous things and live while others die tucked away at home reading a book. People even frequently survive suicide attempts. When a doctor gives you poison, though, there's no turning back.
This is not the same as a do-no-resuscitate request. This is an active killing of a human being.
And whether that life is your own or someone else's, it's still murder in my book. Our lives are not given over to us to control. Not entirely.
Now since I try not to force my moral and religious beliefs on others, I can almost come to this issue the way I do to abortion. I think it's wrong and I wouldn't do it, but I don't begrudge anyone else making the moral decision for herself. I don't judge those who do choose it and I don't prevent them from choosing it. I am not in their skin. I don't know what the situation looks like to them.
I am not terminally ill. I don't know what such people are facing.
This law gets more personal for me. It concerns me that, for example, the official witness who confirms that the person really does want to die can be the person who inherits from the death. It concerns me that we put doctors, whose oath is to life, in the position of purposefully killing (and what that might do to their sanskara!). And it concerns me that we value some life more than others.
I no longer live in Massachusetts, so this is not something I will have to vote on as of yet. My friends tell me there are some states where such bills have passed and nothing terrible has come of it. I am not so sure. After all, we can't see sanskara.
These are my thoughts at this moment. I'm uncertain how they may evolve. At this time, though, I am passionately opposed to legalizing suicide.
{And for further reading, I would suggest the "life with dignity" people,
Not Dead Yet}
