Nicole's+Letter

media type="file" key="nicholet-wesleysmith-euthanasia.mp3"

Please note, it isn't finished yet, but something is better than nothing. Dear Wesley J Smith,

First of all I would like to thank you for your time. I find it to be refreshing that one as busy as yourself would take time out of your day to read essays written by 12th graders. It means a lot to me, and I am sure to the rest of the students and Mr. Geib. It is definitely more interesting to be writing to you, someone who is so unalterably opposite to pretty much everything I believe in. I respect people who can be so sure of themselves, because I can’t say I have ever been. My name is Nicole Teitel. I am seventeen and a bit naive, so I imagine this essay won’t have too much effect on you and your rather sturdy opinions, but as assigned, I will write to you and I will enjoy it. I go to Foothill Technology High School, as you probably would have guess if you are hearing my voice or reading my letter. I, like all of the other students who are responding to you, am in Mr. Geib’s sixth period Bioethics class. I like the morally gray and the debate that comes with it, so I subject myself to a class where I have a two in three chance of crying because of viewing some horific image and there are so many student enrolled in it I have no set chair. They are conditions I am willing to suffer because I find the subject fascinating and the conversation to be enjoyable, but I guess that says a lot about Mr. Geib and the class he has set up for us, more than it says anything about me. As you can tell there are many different viewpoints in the class, from the very religious to the generally atheistic. I am extremely agonistic, so I fall somewhere in between, though I generally agree with the atheists. I believe in autonomy over ones own body, because the basic human right is to live and die freely. If it isn’t effecting your body only others who want it, why should you have a say in the matter? I think that a large proscription of morphine is a good way to control the pain of the dying, of those with no other hope then to fade away peacefully until their heart stops. I know that you are dead set against euthanasia, no pun indented, but as I am a naïve teenage, I think I am right.

When I was in the third grade, my parents had my dog euthanized. They took me to school like nothing was going to happen to her. I went on thinking it was just another day. I would pet Doris when I got into the house at about 6:30 and she would lay on my feet to keep them warm. She was a very pretty Afghan Hound, her hair was a rusty brown and her ears were long and floppy, with hair maybe six inches long covering them. I unfortunately didn’t get to have my feet heater again, I unfortunately never got the chance to say goodbye. My parents knew that the end was near, her liver was failing quickly, and no matter if I got to say my last words, I wouldn’t understand what was going to happen to Doris. She was gone when I saw my parents next. They picked me up right after school, which was a rarity; I usually stayed at the on campus daycare until they left work. They broke the news in the car. It was a rather tense five blocks. My mother was visibly upset; her eyes were bloodshot and puffy. My dad was Mr. Calm and Collected, like always. He broke the news in his sympathetic voice, he uses it for the most depressing news. I remember that car ride very clearly. I didn’t cry, though I was a rather upset. I always had a firm understanding of death, and I knew that it was her time and that her body couldn’t continue any longer. My parents made me watch “All Dogs go to Heaven” a couple of times, hoping that would make things better. I was still a bit depressed. I thought her death was natural then. Maybe my mom forgot something and had to go home and found her lying on the ground unresponsive or my dad came home for lunch quickly and found her died. I thought that not even my parents had their shots of giving her one last loving pet. I am a little jealous of them now. I would have liked a chance to say goodbye. Water under the bridge I guess, but I do miss her long hair and looking at the Pedigree adds always make me nostalgic, they have an identical dog on their commercials that we would always call Doris. She was old and weak, but I still would have liked to say goodbye, getting all of my love for her off my chest, and gain a bit of closure as her owner.

Cats and dogs are put down everyday; Doris was no exception, a large enough ejection of morphine and their hearts stop. It is a peaceful way to go. Humans die everyday though, sometimes in more pain than all of their passed experiences combined, pain that not even a safe amount of morphine can curve. I, like all of my classmates, need to talk about four view points that are found in our Bioethics reader that Mr. Geib made for us. I hope you are not bored by the same things stated in other essays, regurgitated into my own words, because here it goes. In “Listening and Helping to Die: The Dutch Way” there is a first hand account of Pieter Admiraal, a doctor at the general hospital in Delft, Netherlands. He is apart of their Terminal Care Team, which practices active voluntary euthanasia. “It remains a sad medical fact that in some 5 per cent of cases pain cannot be controlled even with the most advanced techniques, and in some cases it can be controlled only through the continuous intravenous infusion of opioids and other drugs that will render the patient unconscious.” Is being unconscious until your heart stops the way you would like to spend your last days, because it isn’t how I would like to spend mine. Never do I think that it is okay to compare the quality of life between the disabled and the able and never do I think that it is okay to judge someone for his or her actions especially when it comes to suicide. All I can say that if I were given the choice of ending my suffering then and there I would do it, because ultimately it doesn’t matter what others think, it just matters what we as people want in our final days, “…it is the patient’s view which must ultimately be the determinative one”. Suicide is a very uncomfortable topic and I wish that help could have been given to the people who have committed it, but it is to late now. Should’ve, would’ve could’ve, technology has done all it can for them. If they don’t want to be here, that is their choice. I think it is a sad enough day when a human doesn’t feel like they should be apart of the world anymore. The Catholic Church is the king of morality. They are firm on their beliefs and rarely change them. In their statement “Declaration on Euthanasia”, the Catholic Church make their beliefs well known, like always they put a value on human life that isn’t their own. “The norms contained in the present Declaration are inspired by a profound desire to serve people in accordance with the plan of the Creator. Life is a gift of God, and on the other hand death is unavoidable; it is necessary therefore that we, without in any way hastening the hour of death, should be able to accept it with full responsibility and dignity.” God has his path for each life form, and it may well be to lie in a bed like a vegetable until your biological life has ended. It was God’s plan to allow humans to become functional talking heads, leaving machines to do what the body can’t. Humans should watch as simple tasks like buttoning their pants become impossible, because it is God’s plan for them. “Everyone has a duty to care for his or her own health or to seek such care from others”, it is God’s plan. Where is the dignity in that? He loves each and every unloved baby, every depressed man, and every human who is just out of reach of his light. Although this may be the general belief of the Catholic Church they justify it with their theory of a morbid society. If Euthanasia is made legal by the government it will create a culture of death, it will lead to “…condition that facilitate the acceptance of death”. Earlier this year in Bioethics we talked about the suicides of made up, fictional people. The class concluded that if someone committed suicide it would make it more justifiable for someone else to do the same; upset monkey see, upset monkey do. Euthanasia, although, is much cleaner than suicide, which could take away the empathy for those who make the choice for the path of death. What was once the romantic mess of Shakespeare’s tragedies will become cold, precise, and regulated, much more ethical than patients biting their tongues off or throwing themselves down flights of stairs. What about the disabled, what about those who under special circumstances their parents would give up on? In a culture of death, would babies with developmental impairments like Down syndrome continue to survive? In one of our other sources “Right to Life of the Handicapped” by Alison Davis, we hear the account of a woman born with spinal bifida, the most common birth defect in the world. Her parents could have easily started over, and allowed a new bundle of joy to replace the ill formed one. “I do not doubt that they were ‘acting in good faith’ when they advised my parents to abandon me, but that does not mean that their advice was correct”. Davis fears the legalization of, in her eyes murder, of people like herself who suffer extreme disabilities, because if she was born into the culture of death that the Catholic Church fears so much, she wouldn’t have been alive to write her article, she wouldn’t be alive to do anything. Babies in the womb, who have not taken their first breath, may die because it is justifiable to kill it if it has some difficult impairment. Parents should be able to reserve that choice for their young, though I know very few who will choice it unless there is no other hope.

The biggest protestors of Clint Eastwood’s, “Million Dollar Baby”, were those were in wheelchairs themselves. They love life more than most, and clearly do not think that any of their injured peers should feel the need to die just because there life has changed dramatically forever. “The Note” written by Chris Hill explores the life Hill has lead as a fully mobile person to justifies why he wants to commit suicide after an accident left him only the use of his arms and head. “I lost my dignity and self-respect. I would forever be a burden on those around me and I didn’t want that no matter how willingly and unthinkingly family and friends assumer that burden”. When I think of the differing definitions of dignity given by the Catholic Church and Chris Hill I think of two international spies, one with a cyanide pill, the other with nothing. The spy with the cyanide pill will take the pill upon the moment of capture to keep safe the secrets he knows, he will die with his dignity and loyalty to his party kept intact. The other will have to suffer through what ever the enemy has to throw at him, until all of his dignity is lost and he breaks and tells the enemy what he knows, one can only yell “freeeeeeedoooommm” for so long. I know that this metaphor may only make sence in my movie filled mind, but I find that it is the only thing that fits.