Can assisted dying be for the common good?

By Harold Jantz and ChristianWeek | May 30, 2016

The assisted dying legislation now before Parliament should have us ask the question: what is our idea of the common good? Under almost any circumstance our impulse would normally be that helping people end their lives is not in our common interest. Why should it be now?

The Supreme Court and many Canadians have embraced the argument that asking for assistance to die is a human right. But a human right and the common good are not necessarily the same thing.

Making assisted dying a human right in effect puts a question to every life. Law not merely regulates, it also teaches. It will do so in this case too. This is what Robert-Falcon Ouellette, who voted against the legislation, appears to have recognized. The Trudeau government has every reason to move cautiously.

Part of the difficulty is that the law doesn't respond to a request for the common good but for what is assumed to be a personal good. As the column about Dr. Kevorkian pointed out (Op-ed May 18), it is the autonomous individual to whom it responds.

This is why human rights issues like assisted dying, abortion, and same sex rights have invariably been won through the courts. They had to use litigation and the courts to yield to personal demands. While this may in cases be helpful, one can't make the assumption it is always so. The individual may be helped but the rest of us may also lose something.

We have good reason to ask why giving same sex unions the value of natural marriages—even when they deny children the opportunity to grow up with parents of opposite sexes—is good social policy? Or why it's good social policy when heterosexual parents overwhelmingly carry the burden of socializing children to adulthood?

This is analogous to what assisted dying legislation does. Of course, nobody wants to be seen as giving approval to the young people in Attiwapiskat in their efforts to commit suicide. Yet, inevitably we have to ask, why? Why is it a good thing to help some end their lives and not others who might also feel they live under intolerable conditions?

Our sense of the common good tells us their wishes are anything but good, but legislation approving assisted dying show how uncertain our answers start to become.

We've already decreed that would-be mothers have the right to end the life of infants growing in their wombs. We know, given the opportunity, that these unborn children would have become people like any one of us. In our city, the counselling agency Crisis Pregnancy encourages and supports pregnant women to keep their babies as they're debating whether to abort.

I vividly recall the agency's beginning some thirty years ago. There are now around three thousand persons who might very well not be among us if that agency didn't exist. I've heard the grateful voices of mothers who kept these babies.

I also know about those who've had abortions and were helped to deal with the pain that followed. Surely this is an example of a agency that has done much for the common good, yet how very hard it is for its voice to be heard. Intolerance in the name of progress.

We are being urged to embrace a range of what are considered “progressive” changes. Charles Colson helped create a ministry to prisoners called Prison Fellowship after serving time for his misdeeds during the Nixon administration. It brought him into hundreds of American prisons, he once explained.

There, he said, he observed that the “obsession with autonomy has created utter chaos. It has led to a sexual epidemic, to brutal violence and to the rampant fatherlessness that is at the root of so many of our social pathologies.”

Once assisted dying legislation becomes law it is hard to believe that pressure won't grow to expand the range of those who should be assisted to die. It will almost certainly be extended to the young, the mentally ill, the depressed, the disabled, the aged, and the mentally incompetent.

The reason, as Catholic observer Daniel Avila has written, is that “hemlock members” cannot have their status altered “without injuring others.” An assisted suicide law does not distinguish between Dying with Dignity members and Right to Lifers and devout Christians.

Writing in The New Yorker, Rachel Avivi says it does not take long before, as happened in Belgium and elsewhere, doctors “have been authorized to kill not just in cases of depression, but also autism, anorexia, borderline personality disorder, chronic-fatigue syndrome, partial paralysis, blindness coupled with deafness and manic depression.”

Even in the present case, the Trudeau government is already saying this is only the first step. A decade ago in the Netherlands, for every five people euthanized one was already being euthanized without giving explicit consent, writes Jose Pereira of the University of Ottawa in a study.

In my congregation in this city we have recently followed the journey to death of a young mother. It was slow and painful, yet we never once heard a suggestion that doctors should hasten it. Another Winnipeg mother has just published a book of her life with MS. The title she gave it speaks volumes: Endearing Pain.

This is how the author, Colleen Peters, faces pain,

“When I face a loss I don't face it alone. Jesus' strength allows me to be vulnerable as I grieve the losses and suffering that my illness brings. His strong presence lets me patiently hope that there is wisdom to be gained through losing, and that there might be purpose in my pain.”

This is the spirit that points to the common good.