Go back to Words & Wit pageSAN FRANCISCO -- Insurance and HMO executives must be rubbing their hands with glee over the November elections. I refer to the passage of Measure 16, the so-called Death with Dignity Act passed by Oregon voters on Tuesday. The measure allows doctors to prescribe lethal drugs to the terminally ill. While its authors did not include language that would legalize active euthanasia, be assured that its intent is to lead toward that end.
"It's just the first domino to fall," Geoffrey Fieger, attorney for death doc Jack Kevorkian, crowed to The New York Times. Suicide guru Derek Humphry told The Oregonian he anticipates a rapid challenge to the initiative by a patient who is not physically capable of taking lethal pills. A favorable court decision, influenced by the fact that pills are not the most foolproof method of suicide, could expand the new law to allow lethal injection by physicians.
While similar initiatives -- in Washington in 1991 and California in 1992 -- have failed, the passage of an assisted-suicide measure was bound to happen. The national debate over universal health care has made Americans acutely aware that they ultimately pay for other people's medical needs, through high insurance premiums and taxes. The prospect of paying higher taxes and premiums for people who, well, face it, are going to die anyway -- that prospect doesn't appeal to some people. Why not save some dough and just let the old folks die early?
Measure 16 features a proposed form that the afflicted could sign in order to request "medication to end my life in a humane and dignified manner." Orwell's doublespeak lives. Humane? Nazi Germany perfected bloodless killings and you know where that led. Making suicide acceptable and antiseptic inevitably will lead to more suicides -- for the greater good of society, of course.
"In February, we started explicitly rationing health care services," Bob Castagna of the Oregon Catholic Conference told the American Medical News. "And in November, we vote on the prospect of physician-assisted suicide. The institutional conflict of interest that is potentially being set up is immense."
Drafters may argue that Measure 16 contains language that would outlaw coercion to suicide. Sounds fine, but what are police departments supposed to do -- book someone for telling Uncle Nick that it is undignified for him to cling to life? (It must be undignified to want to live, since suicide is the proponents' idea of dignity.)
Proponents have argued that Measure 16 gives patients a new option. This assertion is ludicrous; people have always the had the option to kill themselves. No government can take that option away. Measure 16 doesn't give people anything but a push toward the final exit.
The fear of having to commit suicide yourself is a bourgeois phenomenon. The poor are afraid they won't get enough health care, only the affluent are afraid of being kept alive. (Incidentally, the decision to refuse extraordinary life-prolonging treatment already is legal and has nothing to do with 16.) What both rich and poor, especially the poor, should fear, however, is that when the concept of assisted-suicide catches on, there may be social sanctions in its favor. You know: Be a patriot and go early so that more tax dollars can go toward schools.
To many readers, my warnings no doubt seem hysterical. The slippery slope argument always does. But the real hysteria lies among those who believe it is such an intolerable burden to commit suicide themselves that they are willing to accept the societal risks inherent with legalizing and popularizing suicide.
Here in California, health care providers have made it quite clear that no matter what the courts say, they will not implement Proposition 187, the initiative that would deny social services to undocumented immigrants. This dissent is the natural result of a law they find morally reprehensible. Oregon doctors and medical associations should do likewise. They should fight this measure, refuse to participate in drafting procedures for antiseptic suicides and adopt whatever means it can to fight this atrocity in the making.
But, you watch. They won't. It's so much easier to go along.
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