Vermont House Rejects Assisted Suicide - "Incredible Victory" Says Anti-Euthanasia Leader
House members voted 82-63 against the measure euphemistically entitled "Patient Choice and Control at End of Life," after a week of impassioned debate on the issue, the Associated Press reported. The legislation would have made it legal for a doctor to assist a patient with a terminal illness to commit suicide by prescribe lethal medication.
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Vermont Gov. Jim Douglas had opposed the assisted-suicide bill, saying while he supported the concept of death with dignity, he did not support doctor-assisted suicide.
"We need to make it dignified, we need to make it pain-free," Douglas said prior to the debates. "But to empower physicians--who take an oath to alleviate pain and do no harm--to hasten death is a step in the wrong direction."
This is, of course, wonderful news. I remember we discussed the issue of suicide in a philosophy class my freshman year of college. The strongest argument raised in defense of a "right" to suicide was that if a person, without external pressures of any sort, including depression, freely decided that their life was not worth living we should therefore have no right to stop them. The question I asked, and never received an answer to, was how could a person who decided their live wasn't worth living not be depressed?
The fact that someone has a terminal disease and will die soon anyway doesn't really change the fact that the premature ending of an innocenter person's life is still a form of murder, no matter what euphemisms we use to try to cover up that fact. The fact that they will die at some point in the imminent future doesn't make it acceptable to actively kill them now.
This same mistake is made in a Letter to the Editor in the Wilmington News Journal this morning. Brian Squire writes:
Excess embryos are created in nature all the time. Reproductive capacity is redundant in nearly all species for a reason.
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Even then, the ideal that all human embryos should be brought to term is unrealistic and against the laws of nature.
He misses the point between something happening on its own and causing it to happen. If a meteor hits a house and kills the family who lives there, there's no moral issue. It just happened, no one caused it to. But if I know a meteor's going to hit a house at a certain time and I make sure the family is home so that they will die, I'm a murderer, even though I am not the immediate cause of that death.
The fact that as many as three-quarters of pregnancies end in a spontaneous, natural abortion does not give validity or moral correctness to intentionally ending a pregnancy. Taking positive steps to end a life, even if done remotely from the immediate cause of death, as in the asteroid example above, still raises moral issues.
While I'm picking on Mr. Squire, I'll deal with the rest of his letter. He asks why pro-lifers opposed to Embryonic Stem Cell Research aren't protesting fertility clinics since they destroy many embryos in the process of implanting children into a womb. There are a few points to raise in response to that question:
One, as Bismarck reminds us, "Politics is the art of the possible." Fertility clinics aren't going anywhere. There's too much demand for them and not enough opposition to them. Given the limited supply of time and energy there are other battles to be fought rather than tilting at this particular windmill.
Second, I won't speak for Protestants on this issue, but the Catholic Church has long opposed in vitro fertilization and other scientific reproductive methods. Pope John Paul II wrote in Evangelium Vitae (The Gospel of Life):
This moral condemnation also regards procedures that exploit living human embryos and fetuses--sometimes specifically "produced" for this purpose by in vitro fertilization--either to be used as "biological material" or as providers of organs or tissue for transplants in the treatment of certain diseases. The killing of innocent human creatures, even if carried out to help others, constitutes an absolutely unacceptable act.
While that document doesn't specifically mention ESCR (it was written over ten years ago), you can see in that brief excerpt, an explicit condemnation of in vitro fertilizations and an implicit condemnation of ESCR.
At least from Catholic circles, there is no hypocrisy on these issues as Mr. Squire attempts to imply.
The important message to remember is that it is never morally acceptable to take active steps to allow someone to die. Similarly, it is morally wrong to be inactive when steps could be taken that would save a person's life. Either is murder, a reality we seem to want to deny in our culture today, but a reality nonetheless.
Yesterday was the