A bad idea, revisited

Focus on the Family Action reports that Booth Gardner, former governor of Washington Sate, is advocating for a ballot initiative legalizing physician-assisted suicide in that State. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer confirms. Thus far, only Oregon has legalized the assistance of suicide in the United States; Washington would be second. Fortunately, Washington's current governor opposes the measure.

It was Washington's ban on assisted suicide that gave rise to the Supreme Court's watershed Glucksberg decision in 1997. The Court there affirmed the authority of states to prohibit the practice.

As many studies have shown (see, for example, the scholarship of Judge Neil Gorsuch), what is called for public-relations purposes "assisted suicide" is often, in truth, euthanasia. In Oregon and the Netherlands, anecdotal and statistical evidence suggusts that offspring and health care providers routinely pressure elderly parents and patients to shuffle off before their time. Remember, we're not talking about Terry Schiavo here. Most of these people are capable of living without extraordinary assistance. Most of them simply need a little help. The situation is so dire in western Europe that many elderly persons are now drafting living wills expressing their desire to be allowed to live.

Fundamentally, however, our disagreement with supporters of assisted suicide is over the value of human life. They think human life merely has instrumental value and that, once life ceases to be enjoyable, no reason commends preserving or defending it. We think human life has instrumental and intrinsic value; my life is valuable both because it enables me to enjoy friendship, skiing, and symphonies and because it is valuable qua human life. Human beings are reasons for action, in and of themselves. If once we lose sight of that truth, we have lost all.