Last year, my 64-year old husband was diagnosed with glioblastoma, an aggressive and terminal brain cancer. He completed six weeks of chemoradiation, followed by six months of chemotherapy. He works every day to try to improve himself, mentally and physically, yet he accepts that he will die much sooner than he had ever expected.
Glioblastoma patients have an extremely poor quality of life as this debilitating disease progresses. It causes neurological, psychological, and cognitive disabilities, resulting in extreme fatigue, falls, and the inability to manage daily tasks.
My husband knows he doesn't have much time.
His preferred way to say goodbye to me, our three daughters, and other loved ones is in a way that he can control -- an option he knows he can choose if he is eligible for it: a personal option to die when, where, and how he wants.
I wish this could be available for every adult who is competent to make this decision when faced with a terminal disease. This is our hope for my husband.
Jeff Jacoby presents a lot of reasons why well-intended attempts at assisted suicide legislation have gone awry since the measures were passed and why legislation will probably also go wrong if it is adopted in Massachusetts. Here's another reason: "Assisted suicide" is an oxymoron. You are not killing yourself if someone is helping you. Somewhere along the line from the original decision to the fatal action itself, there will be other human beings involved. They will have minds of their own, motives of their own, and values of their own.
No one can argue that a person with intractable and untreatable pain should have to endure it until a natural death. And it would be hard to blame people in these circumstances for committing suicide.
But once assistance is sought in that process, the will of another person or of other people is introduced. That can raise the possibility of a range of notions, from the belief that the sick person is a burden or is using up financial resources to the subtlest agreement that some lives (even in the absence of intractable pain) are not worth living. The very passage of an assisted suicide bill would be just such a subtle societal agreement.
I have no doubt that most advocates of assisted suicide are kindhearted and mean well. They may be distressed by stories or personal experience of people who have endured unnecessary pain and despair. But the solution is to address the unnecessary suffering by relieving it, not by employing the quick and relatively inexpensive fix of ending a life.
Jacoby is warning us that the kind hearts wanting to pass this legislation could be enabling some hard hearts who will be implementing it.