Assisted Dying: Freedom or a Dangerous Slippery Slope?
Spectrum Street Epistemology
In this Spectrum Street Epistemology session, I’m joined by famed UK headmistress Katharine Birbalsingh and Ryan Badolato, a dedicated teacher at Vertex Partnership Academies in the Bronx. We tackle a divisive claim: Should assisted dying be legal? Reid Nicewonder stepped in to moderate this discussion, as the topic hit close to home—having watched both of my parents endure painful deaths from cancer, my views sharply diverged from Katharine’s and Ryan’s.
We explored tough questions: Should the state have authority over such intimate decisions? What about loved ones? Can you ask them to bear the weight of ending your life? Is it morally permissible for an individual to choose their own death, or does this conflict with the intrinsic value of life? Where is the line between relieving suffering and enabling harm in assisted dying scenarios? We debated whether legalizing assisted dying risks a dangerous slippery slope and who, if anyone, can be trusted to make such an irreversible choice.
It’s not assisted dying. It is killing. That is important because doctors aren’t supposed to kill people. They can, and must, assist people in having as good a death as possible but everyone knows that’s not what euthanasia, or doctor-mediated killing, is.
If you do legalize killing, you are putting it in the hands of one person — the doctor — to decide if this particular killing meets whatever the exemption from the law of murder the particular legislation enables. The experience in Canada is there really is a slippery slope.
Finally, the issue isn’t whether a person has the right to die. Of course they do: (Edit: attempted) suicide has not been a criminal offence anywhere in decades (Edit: and any competent adult, and even many minors, can refuse life-prolonging treatment, or any treatment, for any reason.) The issue is whether a doctor (or anyone else—who says it has to be a doctor?—) can escape criminal penalties if he kills you at your request. And what if the doctor is unwilling? Is he guilty of professional misconduct and can lose his licence if he believes killing is morally wrong and refuses to comply with your request? In Canada he is: he must do the deed or find someone who will. The patient can legally compel him.
It is a dangerous, slippery slope for the very elderly. My mother was diagnosed with congestive heart failure at age 98, but was not put on oxygen, was ambulatory and could afford 24/7 care. She probably needed only a fraction of that. My older sister, her health proxy and executor, decided she didn't want to manage the staffers my mother would need, and despite offers to do this from several other siblings, forced my mother to leave the house she'd lived in for 61 years. My mother lived in a small hospice room at Agrace Hospice in Fitchburg, Wisconsin for a year and a week. She was ambulatory until 10 days before they got her to start the morphine. She had only been on oxygen for 2 months. I and several other relatives witness the Agrace hospice staff suggest or cajole my mother to start taking morphine, as they offer no other pain medication, not Tylenol, not Advil. While NY state, where I live does not allow large 250 bed hospices like Agrace to exist, this is absolutely the slippery slope to corporate "death management." My mother was a religious woman and her wish to meet her maker naturally was taken from her. No to any assisted death when the patient is not in constant pain and asking to end his or her life.