A lot of people who support the idea of the legalization of assisted suicide claim they do so on libertarian grounds. It’s no surprise – libertarians have the same shortage of critical thinkers in their ranks that seems to be the norm across the political spectrum.
Thomas Szasz is one of those exceptionally clear and critical thinkers – whether you agree with him or not. And it’s well worth reading what this man has to say on any number of subjects.
Today, though, I want to highlight a couple of short pieces that help expose some of the hypocrisy in much of the assisted suicide marketing.
For example, in a 2001 Op-Ed titled “Assisted Suicide is Bootleg Suicide” he makes the following points:
On Tuesday, a federal judge in Oregon extended a court order that stops Ashcroft from dismantling the law until the state can prepare arguments defending it. Liberals, who revere medical paternalism, condemn Ashcroft’s move. Yet classic liberals and libertarians who respect the rule of law should applaud it. “Decisions about when and how to die are best left to patients … not legislators,” wrote Jerome Groopman of Harvard.
I agree and wish it were so. The truth is that psychiatrists routinely prescribe involuntary “treatment” for patients whom they consider dangerous to themselves. Physician-assisted suicide laws permit doctors to write prescriptions for lethal drugs under certain circumstances. Supporters of such laws misrepresent them as permitting patients to decide when they want to die.
Assisted suicide and euthanasia proponents have been largely successful in uncoupling the realities of public policy toward suicide from their own advocacy. It’s almost unheard of find an assisted suicide propent asked how they feel about the reality that many people are hospitalized and medicated against their will for “being a danger to themselves.”
In a 2002 Op-Ed titled “Kevorkian Warps the Values He Touts,” Szasz took a critical look at Jack Kevorkian and didn’t like what he saw:
Misleadingly, Kevorkian’s subjects were called “patients.” However, Kevorkian had no license to practice medicine, and the people he “helped” did not come to him to be diagnosed or treated. They came to be killed and often traveled long distances to secure his services. If they could do that, they could have killed themselves by other means. They came to Kevorkian, then, either to obtain lethal drugs to which they had no access but Kevorkian did, albeit illegally; or they came to die by Kevorkian’s hands rather than their own, anxious to depict medical killing as “therapy.” Kevorkian was eager to oblige portraying himself as a heroic fighter for a right to suicide. In his book, “Prescription: Medicide,” Kevorkian stated that “helping suffering or doomed persons to kill themselves . . . is merely . . . a distasteful professional obligation. . . . What I find most satisfying is the prospect of making possible the performance of invaluable experiments or other beneficial acts.”
To the press and the public, Kevorkian represented his activities as a medical obligation, imposed on him by his conscience and medical degree. To make himself appear a medical savior, he falsely diagnosed his “patients” as dying. Eventually, his conceit got the better of him, and he was sent to prison, where be belongs.
We’ll be posting more on Kevorkian over the next couple of weeks, but check out more of what Szasz has to say in the meantime. –Stephen Drake