I learned that today, and it was very interesting and unnerving. I think I don't ever want to live in Oregon.
I'm getting pretty interested in this whole euthanasia/physician assisted suicide (pas) debate. More than I thought I would be. I do have a lot of preconceived notions about death, I guess. For instance, palliative care v. pas? Can palliative care really take care of most of the pain and make someone comfortable as they're dying? How large a load of guilt would the physician carry who had, say, prescribed a month's supply of barbiturates knowing that the patient intended to end his/her life with them?
What is the moral distinction between killing and letting die? Not just in the context of today's medical profession, either (where I think the distinction is pretty clear). To take a totally classic example, let's talk about the good samaritan... with a few modifications. There are three people lying by the side of the road. A priest comes along, 'has mercy' on one of the men and kills him, because he's so severely injured he could never recover. A levite comes along, 'has mercy' on one of the men, and kills him for the same reason. A samaritan comes along, and seeing the crazy extent of the remaining man's injuries, 'has mercy' on him and leaves him there to die, because there's no way he could be rehabilitated. Is the samaritan being a better person than the priest or the levite?
Or Batman. Admittedly, he's facing a pure evil villain bent on the destruction of society as he knows it, but is he really a much better person because he only engineers a situation for the villain to die in and then refuses to help him out of it, rather than just directly stabbing the guy's eyes out? You got to admit, interesting questions.
Also, I'm taken aback by the violence of most people's feelings about death and the right way to meet it. Or else they refuse to think about the way they'd like to meet death at all.
As Christians, I think that it's never permissible to take our own lives, or to ask a physician to assist us in that. Even when the pain of death cannot be alleviated by palliative care, is there not something to be gained from suffering? We say that suffering has purposes in life. Why would it not have a purpose at death? I woke up this morning thinking about death (which is admittedly depressing) and I thought, could suffering before death not be a kind of weaning process? Not just for the patient, but for the patient's family. Emphasizing, so to speak, the difference between this life and the eternal one, letting us face it better, in the end. But then, what if the suffering goes on for years, rather than a few months or a few weeks or days? Would the magnitude of that suffering wipe out any purpose it might have?
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I'm with you on this one. The bit about suffering being a period of weaning, especially. How many times has someone said something like, 'Yes, I'm sad that so-and-so is dead, but it's better for them now. They're in a better place, and their suffering is done.' And they're at least accepting of it, if not actually okay with it.
Of course, this does raise the question of 'vegetables.' If someone is in a coma, is a virtual vegetable, has no chance of recovery, and is more than likely not aware of anything - is it okay to 'pull the plug'?
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