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--Robert D. $utton Here's a hypothetical situation. Imagine you�re a 52-year-old suffering from Lou Gehrig�s disease (a fatal illness that leaves victims unable to speak, swallow or move). You have no chance of recovery, and nothing to look forward to but a vegetative, agonizing, drawn-out death--simply put, life is no longer worth living. So you decide to end it all. However, as you are either physically unable or mentally unprepared to do it yourself, you must hire a doctor to do it for you. Unfortunately, no doctors will agree to meet your request. Few would want to do it anyway, but, more importantly, those who would (doctor or non-doctor) are legally prohibited from doing so by laws against euthanasia (mercy-killing). You are told that there was once a doctor who was willing to risk prison and death to perform assisted suicide on patients--but he was convicted of second-degree murder. It didn�t matter that the doctor had the patient�s explicit, rational consent (or that the patient�s family members were not allowed to testify to verify that consent). "Consent is not a viable defense in taking the life of another," declared the inquisitors. The doctor was branded a "medical hit man in the night with his bag of poison" by his prosecutors, who touted his conviction as "proof that our first commitment as a nation is to the protection of human life." As you lose your powers of speech and movement, you cannot help but feel bitterness toward the nation that, in the name of "the protection of human life," has condemned you to a subhuman existence. If only they didn�t insist on out-of-context absolutes, they would realize that the only "protection" government can and should provide is against the initiation of physical force. Government does not exist to "protect" individuals from receiving products (in this case, death) they have rationally and voluntarily consented to receive. The law does not exist to protect you from yourself! And if your tormentors cared to examine the true meaning of "human life," they would discover that it is more than the breathing, digestion and excretion of a hairless mammal with opposable thumbs. They would see that the essence of human life is the rational pursuit of values and happiness, and that a life devoid of these is meaningless (particularly to the man who has to live it!). Forcing a man to "live," when he has lost the ability to LIVE, is like forcing a man without legs to "walk." But what does THAT matter to them? "The law," they say, "does not [ask], 'Does the victim have a quality of life that's worth protecting?' The law protects everyone." You are not comforted by the government�s insistence that it is making you suffer in order to "protect" you. You begin to wonder if the "law" was written by sadists.1 Nor can you live with the argument that people must be stopped from helping you die because they would "break the law." The Founding Fathers "broke the law." So did the people who hid blacks and Jews in times of oppression. One cannot make the claim that something is right simply because it is a law--might does NOT make right. You are especially repulsed by those who forbid your assisted suicide because you "might still, really, deep down, want to live." Who the hell are they to decide what you want--let alone pass a law on the basis of their presumptions? But the worst injustice is that your consent--and therefore, your life--means nothing: the disposal of your life rests not with you, but with legislators and prosecutors. Your final words are: "WHOSE LIFE IS IT, ANYWAY?" ("Our lives are not ours alone," reply the legislators and prosecutors, reciting the lessons they learned so well in college.) So whose life is it, anyway? Is it God�s? Society�s? The state�s? Or is it YOURS? If your life is yours--yours to live--then it is yours TO END. The right to die is an aspect of the right to live (an aspect that would probably be exercised far less if the right to live were more consistently respected, as the high suicide rate of totalitarian countries suggests). And, as with any right, you have the right to seek the voluntary assistance of others in exercising your right to die, and others have the right to provide it. That is why Jack Kevorkian is, above all else, a defender of the right to life. His recent murder trial was, by his own admission, a "test case" for euthanasia. His conviction was not a failure on his part; rather, it was his country that failed him. His consistency and courage in defending what this country was founded on (but has since forgotten) makes him a hero and an inspiration--even for those of us who won�t be needing his services. Notes
1 Actually, the laws were written by religionists and statists--who, ironically, have always claimed to act out of "compassion." (Of course, their "compassion" consists of giving away your wealth--which you might have spent on a life-saving operation, or a healthier lifestyle.) So you must admit, in all fairness, that there is a difference between your tormentors and genuine sadists: sadists don't patronize their victims.
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