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Dec. 8, 2024 - Epoch Times
22:27
Should Society Grant Citizens the Right to be Killed? Wesley J. Smith
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In Canada, in 2023, more than 15,000 people were euthanized.
It's become one of the top causes of death in that country.
Once you say that killing is an acceptable and indeed a splendid answer to human suffering, how do you limit the quote suffering that would qualify for killing?
Actually, you can't.
It's a continual process of expansion.
Wesley Smith is a lawyer, author, and chair of the Discovery Institute's Center on Human Exceptionalism.
He has been following the rise of euthanasia, also known as medically-assisted suicide and medical assistance in dying, made for over three decades.
You've seen articles in the Canadian press saying, look at the many millions of dollars we've saved for the healthcare system because of euthanasia.
Another example of objectifying people who want to be dead.
This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Jan Jankielek.
Wesley J. Smith, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.
Thank you.
There's been a lot of talk about MAID, or medical assistance in dying, as I understand.
That's what it means.
This is something that very quickly over past years has become, I guess you could even say commonplace in Canada.
It's a significant cause of death in Canada today.
How did this happen?
What is the reality of that, even?
Well, first, MAID is a euphemism for euthanasia.
In Canada, it's lethal injection euthanasia.
In other words, it's homicide.
It's not murder because it's legal, but it is homicide.
One human being killing another human being.
In the United States, it's so far assisted suicide where a doctor will prescribe poison, an overdose of opiates, to a patient to kill themselves with.
So MADE is something to try to deflect from the harsh darkness of that reality.
It isn't dying because they don't use the term.
They just say it's MADE in capital letters.
So what you're talking about is mercy killing or assisted suicide or euthanasia.
This began, the push for this began in earnest in the modern times in the late 80s.
Back in 1989, 1990, there was only one jurisdiction in the world that had legalized assisted suicide, and that was Switzerland.
Switzerland had done it in the 40s, and it wasn't so much part of a right to die issue because there wasn't such a movement back in the 40s.
In 1992, Oregon voters passed an assisted suicide law, 51 to 49 percent.
And since then, jurisdictions throughout the world have legalized either euthanasia or assisted suicide.
It's now legal in, I believe, 10 states in the United States.
Canada, which you mentioned, Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Colombia, often legal throughout most of Australia, and various places, Spain, and so forth.
So this has actually spread like a cancer.
And I use that term precisely because it is about death promotion.
It is about suicide promotion.
In fact, it seems to me that when a country or a state legalizes assisted suicide or euthanasia, it can no longer call itself anti-suicide because it specifically approves some suicides.
And it's a very dangerous movement that is normalizing this kind of approach to dying as opposed to natural death.
Well, so I want to look at it maybe through the eyes of actually some of the people I've read about in your book, people who have some sort of severe disability later in life.
They're in incredible pain, and they believe that this would be a compassionate way out, a painless way out.
Instead of promoting this sort of suffering, and that kind of makes some sense.
Only on the surface, because that's how it's sold.
Euthanasia-assisted suicide is sold as a means of eliminating suffering when nothing else can accomplish that.
A, that's mostly a misnomer.
Suffering can be alleviated.
And B, if you take a look, whether it's in the Netherlands, Canada, Oregon, and other jurisdictions, the reason people actually ask for euthanasia or assisted suicide isn't pain.
It's existential issues such as fears of being a burden, fears of losing the ability to engage in enjoyable activities, fears of not having dignity.
And these are important issues, but we can intervene and help people through those difficulties rather than kill them.
And the thing that strikes me is it's cruel, it's abandonment, even though that's not the intent.
So somebody is going to jump off a bridge.
And we run up and say, no, no, don't jump off a bridge.
And the person says, oh, but I have cancer.
Oh, well, let us hold your coat.
You're telling the person with cancer that their life isn't worth living.
And even if that person doesn't believe it's worth living, when you affirm that for them, or when you actually start applauding them for that, you end up with a different culture than I think we would want to have.
So, I'm thinking about Germany, which I think, as I understand it, has the most permissive law, which is, essentially, if you wish to die, commit suicide, the medical system is to help you.
Do I understand that right?
That's not quite right.
What Germany's highest court legalized was created a fundamental right to suicide.
It didn't create a right for doctors to kill you.
But it did say that you can commit suicide for any purpose as a fundamental right.
It doesn't have to be related to health.
That you have an ancillary right to assistance if that's what you want.
And that anybody who wants to assist, if asked, has a fundamental constitutional right to do so.
In essence, what the German high court, the constitutional court, legalized was death on demand.
And Jan, that's where this whole movement leads, even though that may not be the intent.
Because once you say that killing is an acceptable and indeed a splendid answer to human suffering, how do you limit the, quote, suffering That would qualify for killing.
Actually, you can't.
And so if you take a look at jurisdictions where this has been legalized outside of Germany, which is mostly health-related or disability-related, what you find is that it's a continual process of expansion.
So let's look at Canada as just a good example, which I think is good for people in the United States because Canada is our closest cultural cousin.
So in Canada, the reason euthanasia became legalized was a Supreme Court ruling that said that it was unconstitutional to outlaw it.
The Parliament, the National Parliament, then passed a legalization that said death had to be reasonably foreseeable.
Now, that's a wide enough definition that you could drive a hearse through it.
And this is in the mid-2010s we're talking about?
No, this would be about 2015, 2016, 2017. I believe the Supreme Court ruling was in 15, might have been 14, but I think it was 15. And so the Parliament passed a law that said people can ask to be euthanized and doctors can lethally inject them, commit homicide, but legally, if death was reasonably foreseeable, which is a hugely open definition.
Well, the euthanasia activists don't want it to be limited to people where death is reasonably foreseeable.
Lawsuits were filed again.
And today in Canada, you can have euthanasia if you're terminally ill, if you're chronically ill, if you have a disability, if you're an elderly person who says their suffering based on, let's say, debilitation is such that you don't want to live.
They were supposed to legalize it for the mentally ill, It's been put off until 2027, not because it's wrong, which it is, but because they need to prepare the psychiatric community to be able to do that.
And I would point out that in the Netherlands, mentally ill people are euthanized, as in Belgium.
And then what happens is an instrumentalization of people, an objectification of people, because once you're killable, Then there's ways we can actually make good use of you.
So in Belgium, in the Netherlands, and in Canada, you now see euthanasia conjoined with organ harvesting.
And in Ontario, Canada, if somebody goes to a doctor and says, I want to be killed, The doctor says, okay, I'll kill you.
Then the doctor contacts the organ procurement organization that will contact the patient and say, well, since you're going to die, can we have your liver?
And I would point out that in this whole process, this patient is almost never given suicide prevention.
So what we've done is we have said, yes, you're killable.
Oh, yes, we would like to make good use of your body parts.
And there's been no real attempt made to try to keep that person, get them through the darkness that makes them want to die so that they can remain in life.
Wesley, just one sec.
We're going to take a quick break, and we'll be right back.
And we're back with Wesley J. Smith, chairman of the Discovery Institute's Center on Human Exceptionalism.
You mentioned something earlier, this term right to die.
Shouldn't we have that fundamental right as human beings?
We have the power, but a right to die implies that the government will make it happen for you.
And that's what I don't believe we have, and no government should be in the business of authorizing private killing.
Euthanasia is not the same thing as refusing unwanted medical treatment.
That is a right.
So if you get cancer and the doctor says, well, the only way we can keep you going is with the extreme chemotherapy that might cause you to be really sick, you can say, no, I don't want the chemotherapy.
If you are in an intensive care unit where you're hooked up to respirators and kidney dialysis, you can actually say, no, I don't want that, even though it's likely to cause your death.
You can write an advance directive saying in terms of if I'm ever incapacitated and can't make my own medical decisions, here's what I do want and here's what I don't want.
Often, the right to refuse medical treatment is conflated with euthanasia.
They're not the same thing at all.
And I would point out that in the United States, there was actually a Supreme Court case called Vacco v.
Quill back in 97, in which euthanasia activists, assisted suicide activists said, well, since a patient can refuse intensive care that will likely cause their deaths, that's no different than assisted suicide.
And nine to zero, the Supreme Court said, no, that's not true.
Because one is a natural death, the other isn't.
And when you refuse unwanted medical treatment, the outcome is uncertain.
You might be expected to die, but you don't necessarily die.
And there's certainly plenty of examples.
Oh, absolutely.
And there are people who...
Art Buchwald, the humorist, was in a hospice because of kidney disease in the United States to enter hospice.
The rules are, I think they should be changed, but the rules are you have to have, reasonably believed, six months or less to live.
Well, he was brought into hospice with kidney failure, and after a long time, he actually didn't die, and he left the hospice to write his last book.
So you never know.
It's never certain.
There have been people who have been given lethal prescriptions, for example, in Oregon, which has a six-months-to-live requirement, who three years later died a natural death.
We don't die by the numbers.
Unless you're really close to death, you can't actually predict it with assurance.
And again, we cannot have a system in which some people, oh, we want you in life, and other people, well, of course you should die, because that leads to a two-tiered system of moral value, and I would say destroys human equality.
This is this whole ideology of bioethics that you describe.
It's sort of central to your book, Culture of Death, which I've been reading with rapt fascination.
Well, actually, you mentioned the hospice, and you have an amazing little story.
I'm just going to get you to recount it, because I love this moment in the book.
How did the concept of hospice come about in the first place?
It was very interesting.
The modern hospice movement was created by a tremendous medical humanitarian named Cecily Saunders from England.
She's now Dame Cecily.
She has since passed away.
She was a medical nurse in World War II. And after World War II, she was caring for a Polish patient who had actually escaped the Holocaust And was Jewish, but was dying in the hospital in the UK. And she went to visit him every day and she was asking him, what's the experience you're experiencing?
And she said, I came up with a concept called total pain, that often people who are terminally ill...
We'll have physical issues, you know, symptoms of course, but also existential issues, fear, often isolation.
Too often we let people, you know, oh, I don't know what I'd say, and we let people be alone and isolated.
And so she came up with this idea of becoming a doctor.
She was a nurse.
She became a medical doctor back at the time when that wasn't done that often.
To promote this new idea of setting up hospices so that people could actually die with inclusion.
And in, I believe it was the 60s, she created St. Christopher's Hospice in London.
I visited St. Christopher's.
I had the great honor of interviewing Dame Cecily, who gave me a half hour of her time.
And one of the things Dame Cecily insisted on in creating modern hospice was that it would include suicide prevention.
Because I asked her, I said, well, you know, there's this assisted suicide.
She said, that destroys the equal dignity of my patients.
She became quite animated about that.
And the whole hospice philosophy was hospice is not about dying, it's about living.
It's about helping people get the most out of life in the time they have remaining and the natural death.
She was once asked, how do you want to die?
By the New York Times.
And amazingly, she said, well, I would like to die of cancer.
And you go, what?
And she said, the reason is because I know that my symptoms could be alleviated.
I'd have the time to make, you know, say goodbye to my friends and so forth.
And that's actually what happened.
Dame Cecily passed away in her own hospice in peace and in dignity.
And this whole idea that assisted suicide is death with dignity is really insulting because that means my father, who died with the care of hospice in 1984, didn't die with dignity.
It means that my mother, who died in my home with my wife and I caring for her in hospice with the hospice help of Alzheimer's disease, didn't die in dignity.
And we have to reject that out of hand.
I'm not clear.
Why would that Because we're being told that death with dignity is assisted suicide.
I mean, it's not the only death with dignity, is it?
Of course not.
In fact, I would say it's the opposite.
But the implication is that dying with dignity means you've been given the pills or you've had a lethal injection.
I see.
So you've done it on your own terms.
Right, exactly.
So that people dying naturally, somehow that's not death with dignity?
I reject that.
What did she mean when she said that providing this assisted suicide would violate my patient's equal dignity?
What does that mean exactly?
Well, because we talked about this with the example I gave of the man on the bridge who wants to jump.
And we say, no, no, no, life is worth living.
Well, I have cancer.
Oh, that's different.
Let us hold your coat.
She is saying that when you do not give suicide prevention to a suicidal, terminally ill person, which often can make them not want to commit suicide, studies have shown that, then what you're saying is that their life doesn't have the same value as, we'll say, the veteran with PTSD who wants to commit suicide.
No, no.
What we have to do is try to prevent suicide, not only in the patient with PTSD, which of course we do, but also the person with a serious illness.
Because people can get through that darkness and be very happy to live.
I have an example.
I was a hospice volunteer for a while.
And my last patient was a man named Bob Salamanca.
The reason I can name him is because he wrote an article in the San Francisco Chronicle about how much he resented the assisted suicide movement because it was telling him his life wasn't worth living.
Bob had Lou Gehrig's disease, ALS, which is a terrible, devastating diagnosis.
And Bob told me At that time, it was in the 90s.
Jack Kevorkian, who used to commit assisted suicide in Michigan, was active.
And Bob, when he got this devastating diagnosis, was so shook and so worried about being a burden to his families that he wanted to go to Kevorkian.
His family said, absolutely not.
We're not going to participate in that.
And Bob put it this way.
He said, after a while, the fog lifted.
Those were his terms.
And he was so glad to be alive.
So because Bob was given the time to adjust to this very difficult circumstance, and I'm not saying his life was just peaches and keen thereafter.
It was a struggle often.
But he was glad to be alive, and he lived until he died a natural, peaceful death from Lou Gehrig's disease.
But if he had been taken to Kevorkian, or if at that time in California, which is where this happened, assisted suicide had been legal, which it wasn't at the time and is now, I'm telling you, he would have taken those pills and he would have missed out what he said was some of the best time of his life.
So as we finish up, Something you've written and spoken a lot about is this idea of human exceptionalism, perhaps the opposite of what Peter Singer believes.
Correct.
Explain to me how that fits into this whole discussion.
Human exceptionalism is more than the sanctity of human life.
Part of it is intrinsic human dignity, which is essential if we're going to have human rights, universal human rights, because if you don't have rights based on human equality as an objective and intrinsic rights, So the first part of human exceptionalism is we are all equal and dignified in life.
And it's based on being human.
No subjective things such as quality of brain power or quality of life.
The second aspect, and the reason it's not just called human dignity but human exceptionalism, is we are the only known species in the universe with moral duties.
We know right from wrong.
So we have duties to each other.
We have duties to our posterity, people who we will never meet.
In fact, the founders of the United States talked often about their posterity.
That's us.
We have duties to treat animals humanely, as an example.
We have duties to treat the environment in a proper way.
So you've got the two aspects of human life, our rights, our value, and our duties and moral requirement.
Another way to talk about the duties aspect, it seems to me, is that it's about love.
About loving each other.
And sometimes love means you value somebody even more than they value themselves.
So in the context of assisted suicide and euthanasia, of course human exceptionalism goes way beyond this particular issue that we've been discussing.
We have to see the incredible worth of each and every patient, even when they're in extremis, and to suffer with them, which is what compassion means, and to mitigate their suffering and let them know they're still us.
There's no such thing as them.
There's only us.
And if we can do that, and if we can find ways to renew our mutual I think a lot of this nihilism that we were discussing at the end of the interview here will begin to fade.
It'll never go away completely because there's no such thing as a perfect society.
But if we yield to our worst angels of our nature, to kind of borrow from Lincoln, then the kind of trauma we're seeing throughout society now We'll only get worse.
And I don't know where the bottom is, if that's the way we go.
Well, Wesley J. Smith, it's such a pleasure to have had you on.
Well, thank you, Jan.
I appreciate the opportunity.
Thank you all for joining Wesley J. Smith and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders.
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