Assisted suicide isn't courageous

Dartmouth ethics professor Ronald Green recently wrote an article for CNN in which he opined that it was courageous for Brittany Maynard, the 29 year-old woman suffering from terminal brain cancer, to end her life through physician-assisted suicide.  His argument was more broadly in service of legalizing assisted suicide and he contended that

[P]eople who are facing the end of life and those suffering from grievous and irreversible pain should be free to end their life.  This is a simple expression of respect for human freedom, autonomy and dignity, and it is also an expression of compassion to allow them to do it.

This is a very succinct way of putting a primary argument used by proponents of legalized assisted suicide, and that argument is often couched in terms of compassion, dignity, and even courage.

The assumption behind the assisted suicide argument is that at least some people find suffering to be undesirable and even valueless and therefore they should be have the legal means to alleviate that suffering.  In the case of terminal illness, like cancer, that suffering is—as Prof. Green puts it—“irreversible.”  The only way to alleviate the pain and suffering caused by terminal cancer is, of course, death.  If, the argument goes, some people therefore desire to avoid such suffering by a painless death at the hands of a physician before the onset of physical pain due to that cancer, then why shouldn’t they be allowed to?

Suffering is a stark reality in the human experience and therefore it cannot be nuanced or ignored.  It hits you hard in the face and demands a lot.  Ultimately, suffering is really worth something, it really means something, or it means nothing. If it means nothing, then you can either endure it or you can get rid of it, and in the case of irreversible suffering, like terminal brain cancer, getting rid of it means dying.

The assisted suicide argument is usually confined to instances of serious terminal illness.  So far, at least in the United States, it is those who are close to death and faced with deep and painful physical suffering who attract the strongest argument for legalized assisted suicide.  In other countries, “irreversible suffering” can take on a broader meaning.  Last year, twin brothers in Belgium who were born deaf used assisted suicide to die together after finding out that they would soon go blind.  The reason, says Britain’s Daily Mail, is that “they were unable to bear the thought of never seeing one another again.”  This year an elderly Belgian couple were euthanized together because they were concerned about being left alone and widowed in the likely event that one died before the other.  So they pre-empted it all by dying together by assisted suicide.

Let’s be clear: the potential suffering that the brothers and the elderly couple and the brothers from Belgium were facing would have been real, powerful, and difficult.  Likewise, the pain and suffering that death by terminal brain cancer would have caused to Brittany Maynard—and also to her loved ones watching her go through it—would also have been real. 

But why does suffering make some believe that life with suffering isn't worth living?   Why do we run so easily from pain?  Last year the New York Times reported that between 1999 and 2010 the suicide rate for middle-aged Americans rose dramatically, to a point where suicides claimed the lives of nearly the same number of middle-aged Americans as car accidents.  These suicides are probably more violent than the physician-assisted variety, but they are an identical response to pain and suffering.  When confronted with what feels like a burden that can not possibly be carried, a lot of people look for the nearest exit, and that sometimes is death.

Most of the time, though, people find the supposedly sweet escape in alcohol or drugs or shopping or women or whatever else does the job, and surely these are less serious and less dramatic escapes than suicide.  But the underlying reality remains, and it is likely one of the most significant issues facing contemporary western culture: we don’t believe in the cross any more, and therefore we don’t much want it, either.

At the heart of the Christian life is the appreciation of suffering as something to be redeemed instead of avoided.  Pain isn’t something you run from, it is something you grow from, and the only way to do that is through Calvary’s cross, all bloody and splintered and rough.  We follow a crucified Christ, and that necessarily means following him through the streets of Jerusalem with the cross on our aching backs and then up to Golgotha and finally atop the cross.

I was not yet a Christian when I visited Jerusalem years ago.  I remember standing at the foot of the Via Dolorosa in Jerusalem’s Old City, which, in Latin means “Way of Suffering.”  I thought nothing of it, of course, other than that it was one more quaintly ancient historical marker in a quaintly ancient and historical city.  But the reality was that I was standing not only at the foot of where Christ began his journey of pain to Calvary, but it was the beginning of my own journey through life, indeed, every human being’s journey through life.  Because we all suffer.  Whether from blindness or cancer or grief or one more of the many forms of suffering that a person can experience.

But that isn’t the end of the story, because we also follow a risen Christ.  This is where we move beyond our suffering and into the heavenly embrace of God Himself.  But we don’t get to this point without first taking that long, bitter trek up Calvary and onto the cross.  There is no shortcut.  Neither drugs nor pornography will get us to where we're trying to go.  Death won't necessarily do it, either.  Those are shortcuts that promise a path around and beyond the cross, and yet they lead only back to a steeper and bloodier cross.

Suffering is what it means to be a human being and, yes, it takes courage.  I can only pray for Brittany Maynard and everyone else who chooses death and turns away from the cross that leads to glory.  Surely that decision was agonizing and difficult to make, but it wasn’t courageous.  Indeed, it wasn't even really human.