Shane's+Letter

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To Mr. Wesley J. Smith, Before I present my formal response to you regarding euthanasia, I would like to thank you for indulging our Bioethics class with this opportunity to seriously discuss the issues at hand. Thank You.

This past Tuesday a friend of mine passed away. He was loyal, friendly, a little lazy, and enjoyed company of any kind. He was also a dog. My family and I had been anticipating his death for several months, so when he stopped eating we made the decision to extend to him a favor that is rarely even considered for humans. Outside of a certain sophomoric discussion of flexibility, this is the only aspect of being a dog that I have ever heard any human envy. I would fit into this category. Why subject a man to pain that his best friend will, if he is in proper care, not ever have to endure? There is no evidence of an objective difference between a man and a dog in terms of "value", and even if there was, why would man's inherent superiority be an excuse to burden them with unnecessary pain in the interest of some pitiful ideal of the unrelenting preservation of life?

The debate surround euthanasia has become something of a zeitgeist involving a plethora of perspectives and opinions, which often don’t discuss euthanasia of the canines, but that of humans. The divinity of life, tragic suffering, and the supremacy of subjectivity are extensively explored and sometimes ignored by the participants in this debate. The most amply funded opponents to euthanasia, The Catholic Church, articulated their concerns about euthanasia in an official papal decree in 1980. Cardinal Franjo Sepper makes the case that euthanasia should always be an objectionable proposition because life is a “gift of God’s love”. Sepper claims that murder and suicide, which he equates with euthanasia, are always wrong except in the case of martyrdom, in which a person would be fulfilling “God’s glory”. Sepper recognizes the motives of a suffering person to end their life, but objects to them on the grounds that to suffering is a “sharing of Christ’s Passion”, and is therefore enviable.

I find the official Catholic position patently absurd, not only because of the myth on which it is based, but because of this obscure worship of pain and the general castigation of pleasure. The cardinal would have us apologizing for our humanity under any painful circumstance, whether it is a mild stomach ache or whilst enduring the side effects of chemo therapy. Even as a former Catholic, it is difficult for me to understand the promotion of masochism on such a large scale, no one should have to abandon reason and empathy for a dogma established by a bunch of goat herders that could hardly fathom the circumstances upon which our ethical dilemmas, like euthanasia, depend.

Cardinal Franjo Sepper fails to provide any evidence that would justify his position. In fact, the official decree reads more like an attempt to guilt the religiously inclined into accepting something they may have otherwise approached ethically and scientifically. I know I should not be surprised by religious appeals in a doctrine issued by the Vatican, but I cannot take seriously something so offensive to the intellect, and even if you accept assertions by these dogmatists in the absence of evidence, any rational person should not let it influence their respect of personal rights. We should not tolerate the irrational and allow them to subvert an otherwise reasoned debate. Now I suppose I should move on now that my Irish catholic ancestors are rapidly turning over in their graves.

Relying on dogmatic panaceas is the epitome of intellectual disingenuousness; euthanasia is not morally reprehensible in all cases. Morality can only be measured by the impact an action has on general wellbeing, this is how the modern world has arisen. Murder, slavery, and rape are morally wrong, not because they are divinely decreed, (in fact two of those are actually divinely condoned) but because they are completely unsustainable actions. Preserving life at all costs may have seemed to fit into this rubric for sustainability in the bronze age, but since the advent of modern medicine we have gained the ability extend the lives of people who, if they had been born before the latter half of the 20th century, would have perished. We are now able to draw out the lives of the terminally ill and sustain the seriously handicapped, and as a result must address the requests of those who would refuse such treatment or request a medically induced death. If a patient under the previously described conditions were to ask for euthanasia, it would not come into conflict with the moral standards that have given rise to modern society, and should therefore be allowed.

Pieter Admiraal, an anesthetist and palliative care specialist at the Reinier de Graaf Hospital in Holland, administers active voluntary euthanasia. He regards euthanasia as morally right and considers the failure to provide it to a willing patient as failure by the doctor. As he wrote in //Listening and Helping to Die: The Dutch Way//, “To respect the patient’s autonomy presupposes that the patient’s own evaluation of her medical situation ought to be the determinative one.” The presupposition that he addresses is one that I have no trouble promoting; autonomy when it does not interfere or infringe upon the rights of others is always favorable because it is the only means by which we can ensure, on a basic level, the wellbeing of a population.

While the justification for voluntary euthanasia is quite apparent, there are a great many circumstances under which consent is not a factor. Steve Lopez followed the story of a Californian man who attempted to kill himself and his wife of 64 years who had for some time been struggling with Alzheimer’s. The man, Jimmy Wheeler, turned the gas burners on in his house and waited to die along his wife’s side only to be discovered by a neighbor who quickly called 911. In the LA Times article, Lopez described Wheeler’s actions as an “act of love”. While it is hard for me to promote the actions of Wheeler, it is equally difficult for me to denigrate them. Wheeler and his wife Becky formed a very unique relationship in that it lasted to the very end; it is hardly my place, as someone who hasn’t know any person that long, to begin to evaluate the nature and value of that relationship. I only bring up this situation because, I believe it in some ways relates to the issue of child euthanasia.

Allison Davis described her life as a sufferer of myelomeningocele spina bifida in the article //Right to Life of Handicapped//. She describes herself as a “lucky” to not have been born today, as she fears she may have been euthanized because of here ailment. While I agree in hindsight, if she would have been euthanized she would not have been able to be married, travel, and educate herself. However, Davis’s argument is saturated with confirmation bias; the fact that she has led a successful life despite a disability does not indicate that infant euthanasia ijn all cases is morally reprehensible. She also misrepresents the modern methods by which infant euthanasia is approached, she suggests families are at odds with the doctors or are almost coerced into euthanasia. In fact the Groningen protocol used in Holland, is almost completely subject to the whims of the parents, and is the result of diligent counseling and involvement by social workers.

While I may not agree whole heartedly with Allison Davis’s article, I would not throw my support with much glee towards child euthanasia. I could never even begin to imagine what I would do in a situation like the 22 people who utilized the Groningen protocol, and I don’t find trying to imagine it as a very productive or appealing act. I do know however that I would not want to posit an absolute with infant euthanasia and assert its efficacy in every possible situation, espescially if that absolute was determined by anectdotal experiences.

Euthanasia is a maddeningly complex issue, humility in the face of its many intricacies is something I find lacking in many people today. We cannot allow ourselves to fall prey to our petty hopes for a happy ending in the lives of the seriously disabled. We may want to encourage someone to rise to the level of Stephen Hawking or Jean-Dominique Bauby, but to demand it is inconsiderate and unrealistic. Nor can we let our respective religious views take precedence over others’, let them inform the debate, or make sweeping generalizations and equivocations in their name. And so, while few things in ethics are certain, we can recognize that fulfilling the most human liberties while denying no others is indeed never a morally reprehensible pursuit, and in fact may be a noble one.