Jerry Coyne, Ph.D., an American biologist recently published a post on his blog titled “Thought for the day: On mental illness and assisted suicide,” discussing the topic just after the suicides of Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdain. In the post, he includes a video of Adam Maier-Clayton, a former frequent contributor to FEN’s Facebook page, where his death in April 2017 was announced with both sadness and understanding.
Understanding disagreements between DWD advocates and disability rights advocates may be a way to find some common ground between the two groups. This is Part 1 of a multi-part series exploring the issues.
All of the Death With Dignity (DWD) laws now in the US are modeled after the Oregon law that went into effect in 1997. The other jurisdictions that have adopted such a law include Washington, Vermont, Washington, D.C., Colorado, California, and Hawaii. A judicial decision in Montana allows DWD to be practiced with cooperating doctors.
Missing from all of these laws is the right of people who have specific kinds of incurable, debilitating, painful, or extremely distressing medical conditions, but are not necessarily within six months of dying, to use these laws.
The American Association of Suicidology recognizes that the practice of physician aid in dying, also called physician assisted suicide, Death with Dignity, and medical aid in dying, is distinct from the behavior that has been traditionally and ordinarily described as “suicide,” the tragic event our organization works so hard to prevent. Although there may be overlap between the two categories, legal physician assisted deaths should not be considered to be cases of suicide and are therefore a matter outside the central focus of the AAS.
No, it is not an obituary for a specific individual. It is an obituary that recognizes and celebrates taking control of one’s end-of-life suffering.
On April 16, 2018, the Final Exit Network (FEN) filed a lawsuit in federal district court against the State of Minnesota. The suit asks the court to declare that Minnesota’s law prohibiting speaking to a person about how to hasten her own death is a violation of the free speech clause of the First Amendment of the US Constitution. The suit seeks, also, to void FEN’s conviction under the statute, and to bar the State of Minnesota from again initiating a prosecution of FEN, and its personnel, under the statute based solely on the utterance of “speech” that “enables” a suicide.
In my last post, I discussed some general propositions about Voluntarily Stopping Eating and Drinking (VSED). In this post, I look at some VSED issues in greater detail.
Most objectors to the right to die stand on religious grounds, claiming that God gave life and only God can take life away. Also, any deliberate ending of life is breaking the sixth commandment and therefore a mortal sin. Life is sacred and must be preserved at all costs, only God can decide when and how our lives will end, and Christians are supposed to suffer because it allows them to empathize with Jesus’ suffering.
This interpretation of the sixth commandment is, in fact, wrong.
“Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.”
— John Stuart Mill
The United States Constitution and the common law (along with some state constitutions) give us the right to make directives that control the health services we receive if we become mentally incapacitated. The instructions provided by most states in the statutory forms that have been approved since the late 1980s do not limit us. We can write non-statutory directives I call “supplemental directives” when they are attached to and referenced in the statutory directives. We can also write our own health care directives without using statutory forms (an issue to be discussed in a subsequent post).
With this post, I begin a multi-part series that suggests how one might use advance directives to hasten one’s death to avoid inevitable, intractable suffering or an unacceptable loss of dignity, when the option of direct self-deliverance is unavailable or unwanted.
