Brittany+On+Kevorkian+and+Euthanasia

I like to think that I’m a person who is thoroughly enjoying life. I do my best to live adventurously, and dread the day that it’s no longer an option. Of course, I put on my bravest face as I read //Tuesdays with Morrie//, telling myself that I would someday be that accepting of death. I told myself that I’d embrace every moment of my life with a stoic understanding that every moment of it served a purpose, including whatever horrible disease nature threw at me during the last years.

Yet, it’s not as easy to say that when reading that your body will drown itself, or the person you love will slowly turn into a stranger, or worst of all, you’ll be nothing more than a shell of yourself living off of machines in a hospital bed. There’s little that my supposed “brave face” can do to make me want to live through that.

I’ve been surrounded by strong independent elderly people my entire life. Their lives were the basis of my initial belief that euthanasia was some kind of horrible way of saying their lives were useless. I had seen the livelihood that they still had, watched my grandmother beat cancer, and decided that I didn’t support euthanasia. I assumed that euthanasia was the opposite of my pride in them. It meant giving up when they had taught me to fight. I now know that there are situations where fighting cannot be an option.

There are times when fighting will get you nowhere. There are times when every hopeful belief that life will get better is handed back to you in the form of test results that “don’t look good”, in morphine, and turning into a person who exists, but doesn’t really live. There are moments where the best a person can hope for is starvation. There is suffering that I, along with millions of other people, had ignored.

I don’t think that euthanasia is considered such an evil subject out of disrespect for peoples lives, nor is it due to religious affiliation. It’s an overwhelming misunderstanding. People hear that there is a building solely dedicated to helping people kill themselves and are horrified. They hear that a person in the early stages of his life decided to end it, and his suffering or unhappiness doesn’t register with them. You hear a doctor in the news angrily preaching his ideas, fresh out of prison for killing people in the back of the van, and it’s difficult to conceive euthanasia as a good thing. People fear it, because the majority of what we hear about it makes it seem like a reasonable thing to fear. I believe that doctors are simply responding in the way any normal human would. Kevorkian’s views are too extreme, his actions too reckless, and efforts to push his cause forward have done nothing but pull it back. I don’t see the so-called “cowardly” doctors way of helping patients die in private as cowardly at all. In a way it’s significantly more respectful that the carnival that Kevorkian turned it into. They’re helping their patients in the way that they wish to be helped, and I happen to believe it’s enough.

It is in this attitude against Kevorkian that helps me understand the opinions of those who negate euthanasia. Their claim that a doctor who is as trigger happy as Kevorkian devalues their lives is most definitely a possibility that deserves attention. The message that’s being sent out by offering euthanasia as an option to people with handicaps, if only subtly, suggests that there isn’t a possibility for them to have a happy life. People who pushed through the suffering to live fulfilling lives will become less accepted as society begins to believe that it’s acceptable for them to die for their handicap. It’s not necessarily going mean an instant fall into Nazi Germany, but the aftermath will include a wide set of problems. Even more than this, we’ll be cutting short the lives of people who could have offered so much more. From there we will face tremendous difficulty learning where is an appropriate place to stop. If we allow some people the right to kill or be killed, how can we back away from that stance and deny it to others.

However, as I stated before, there are times when there can be no light at the end of the metaphorical tunnel. The negations argument is very optimistic in stating that everyone should keep living, without acknowledging the pain that many of these people are in. By claiming the slippery slope argument to protect the lives of handicapped people, they’re denying what could be a blessing to people suffering from terminal illnesses. They even go against themselves, forcing people like Dan James, or Chris Hill, to accept a life that they hate living. Perhaps there were alternatives that would have led them to enjoying their new way of life, but it is just as likely they would have spent their entire life simply pleading to be allowed to die. The cruelty of forcing a person to live through that does not show compassion, it shows a stubborn disregard for the ability of people to make decisions.

I believe that our current solutions are not helping people in the way they need to be helped, however I fear the reaction of a people who are not ready to accept euthanasia.

There’s little more that can be done until the topic of euthanasia becomes less taboo to discuss. I don’t know what I will choose when I find myself old and losing the things I once loved. But, while I could never bring myself to be so self-centered to dictate that the suffering of others be prolonged, I also have no respect for a man who would take peoples suffering and private wish to die and turn it into a media uproar for his own selfish interests. Euthanasia is something that can help our medical system, but first we must change the way we present such a sensitive issue.