Time Magazine: Nancy Gibbs Voices Concerns Over Assisted Suicide

(note: for a variety of reasons, the comments have backed up in the moderation queue. I plan on posting backlogged comments tomorrow, with replies.)

The new issue of Time Magazine has an interesting essay by Nancy Gibbs, who is a pretty mainstream journalist. What makes this interesting is that she has taken a look at recent developments on the assisted suicide front, and she’s uneasy with what she sees and what more may be coming.

Here is an excerpt from “Going Too Far with Assisted Suicide?“:

We allow for the removal of feeding tubes, the withdrawal of respirators, the replacement of aggressive treatment with palliative care; these can all be wise and merciful choices. But each step forward gets a little more slippery. Is there some point, visible in the cloudy moral distance, where the right to die becomes a duty to die? We don’t need to set Grandma adrift on her ice floe; the pressures would be subtle, wrapped in the language of reason and romance — the bereaved widower who sees no reason to try to start over, the quadriplegic rugby player whose memories paralyze his hopes, the chronically ill mother who wants to set her children free. Already in Oregon, one-third of those who chose assisted suicide last year cited the burden on their families and caregivers as a reason. A study in the Netherlands found that one in four doctors said they had killed patients without an explicit request–including one doctor who believed that a dying Dutch nun was prevented from requesting euthanasia because of her religion, so he felt the just and merciful thing to do was to decide for her.

There are problems with her analysis. For one thing, she is simply wrong when she implies the Netherlands eligibility for euthanasia is to be “suffering intolerable pain.” In fact, the key term in the Netherlands has always been the fuzzy and expansive term “suffering,” which has enabled expansion of eligibility for euthanasia over the years.

She might have been even more concerned about recent developments if her own magazine hadn’t completely mangled and misreported the basic facts surrounding the Final Exit Network.