Weekly Standard | "We never say no." by Wesley J. Smith
Meanwhile, in the real world, the founder of the Swiss suicide facilitating organization Dignitas is just about done with pretense. The Sunday Times Magazine (London) reported that Dignitas' founder, Ludwig Minelli, plans to create sort of a Starbucks for suicide: a chain of death centers "to end the lives of people with illnesses and mental conditions such as chronic depression."Minelli believes that all suicidal people should be given information about the best way to kill themselves, and, according to the Times story, "if they choose to die, they should be helped to do it properly." Dignitas admits to having assisted the suicides of many people who were not terminally ill. As Minelli succinctly put it, "We never say no."
The story about Minelli illuminates a deep ideological belief within the euthanasia movement: that we own our bodies, and thus, determining the time, manner, and method of our own deaths, for whatever reason, is a basic human right.
That statement of belief caught my eye. Stripped of the fancy language, the proposition is: We have a right to die.
One of the points that is frequently overlooked by advocates of assisted suicide is this: I can't stop a determined and able-bodied person from committing suicide. Leaving aside the immorality of suicide for a moment, let's look at the practical reality. If John Doe wants to kill himself, he will probably be able to do so. There are an astounding variety of lethal implements around the average home, starting with the kitchen knives. If he doesn't want to kill himself at home, John can go somewhere high above the ground and jump. Or he can drive his car into a stationary object at 75 mph. Or whatever....
If there's one thing that the history of terrorism teaches us, it's that people who are willing to sacrifice their lives are very hard to stop.
Now, if John is profoundly disabled, he might not be able to kill himself. These are the cases that the assisted-suicide advocates use to support their arguments, but their own words tell us that they seek to secure the "right to die" for everyone. The "hard cases" of terminally-ill people are simply how they get a foot into the door, not any kind of real limit. Since the assisted-suicide advocates want to grant their murderous mercies to all people, their arguments should apply equally to all people. Furthermore, being unable to exercise a particular right because of a disability does not actually prove that you don't have the right. It simply proves that your disability prevents you from making full use of your rights. A quadriplegic has the right to bear arms, even if he would have no way of actually using a gun.
In other words, we already have a right to die, if only because it's effectively impossible to prevent us from killing ourselves. People have been killing themselves since the beginning of history. What we do not have is a right to expect someone else to help us die. Should the aforementioned quadriplegic have a right to expect someone else to carry his gun and use it for him?
Let's find out more about this supposed right to die. Another groundbreaking pioneer in the field of helping people to kill themselves is Dr. Phillip Nitschke, who says:
My personal position is that if we believe that there is a right to life, then we must accept that people have a right to dispose of that life whenever they want ... So all people qualify, not just those with the training, knowledge, or resources to find out how to "give away" their life. And someone needs to provide this knowledge, training, or resource necessary to anyone who wants it, including the depressed, the elderly bereaved, [and] the troubled teen.
Aha! Our right to die is a corollary of our right to life! So why is it that the same people who are advocating our right to assisted suicide are also the people who deny that human beings have an inherent right to life? In other words, why are the euthanasia fans also pro-choice and pro-embryo-destruction? A cynical person might suspect that this is really more about death than about life....
However, I definitely believe that all human beings have a right to life. Does it necessarily follow that I must also believe in a right to assisted suicide? No, it does not. I believe strongly in freedom of speech, which also requires the freedom to not speak. But silence is just another form of communication, sometimes even more powerful than actual speech. I also believe in freedom of religion, which means that I believe someone is free to have no religion at all. But again, atheism is really another form of religious belief. A committed atheist has enough "faith in nothing" to rival many followers of traditional religions.
Freedom of speech and freedom of religion are not the core rights-at-issue in either case. Freedom of speech is ultimately based in our right to communicate ideas and express ourselves. Otherwise, freedom of speech could not also apply to the written word. In a similar manner, freedom of religion is really about our right to make our own decisions about what we believe. But the right to life cannot be based on anything else, because it is foundational to all of our other rights. If you are dead, then you cannot express yourself, communicate your ideas, or worship the Flying Spaghetti Monster. The right to life is the firm ground upon which all other rights are standing.
The right to life does not also require the right to die. More importantly, the right to life does not require the right to be killed. Claiming otherwise is the kind of silliness that we should only expect to see in highly-trained philosophers. It seems to require a highly-trained mind to argue that black is white, up is down ... and death is really life.
(cross-posted to Naaman the Ex-Leper)
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