Assisted Suicide

Here in good ole' North America, committing or attemting to commit suicide is no longer a criminal offense. However, helping a person commit suicide is a criminal act... unless you're a physician in Oregon. There's been a lot of debate recently about Physician Assisted Suicide, or Death with Dignity if that's what you want to call it. Of course, like most things, I have an opinion on the matter.

Let me start by saying that assisted suicide is a very slippery issue and both sides have some very valid points. We all know that I'm pro-life when it comes to unborn babies, mainly because abortion is murder. Ronald Reagan once said, "Abortion is advocated only by persons who have themselves been born." Of course the question is, once a person has been born, where should the next line be drawn with regards to their own personal will to live/die?

In case you wonder where I'm coming from, and why I have such strong opinions on issues such as these, here's a little background.

I'd say that I've seen my share of the world and real world issues in the short amount of time I've been on this earth. By the time I was 11 years old, I had lived in seven countries on four continents. I spoke two languages fluently, and I had lived through a civil war in Africa where my family lost everything and we had to be evacuated from our house in a tank in the middle of the night. Before we were evacuated, among other things, a hand grenade was thrown just outside my bedroom window – it was defective and didn't go off, otherwise I wouldn't be alive to tell you about it. Just hours after our evacuation, rebels jumped the walls of our compound with machetes, looking for the white people so they could cut off our heads, literally. I then continued to live in Africa (in yet another country) until I was 17.

All this to say, I'm not stupid. I didn't grow up in podunk Eugene, where all the liberals are obsessed with diversity yet, oddly enough, they live in a town mostly populated by middle class white people. I've seen more war, famine, disease, poverty, not to mention diversity, than they'll ever see in their lifetime. That is, all of them combined.

Now, back to the issue at hand...

Throughout most of the history of mankind, people had no choice but to allow disease to take its course. You got cancer, you died of it. End of story, no pun intended. You probably didn't even know you had cancer, you just knew that you were dying. However, modern medicine has come a long way in the last few decades. Not only can we diagnose sicknesses and diseases, we can also cure some of them. Cancer patients can go through chemotherapy and have a chance of overcoming the disease. However, some treatments only delay the inevitable, like with AIDS.

Some people, however, don't want to go through chemotherapy or whatever treatment options they have. Others have such slim chances of survival that treatment is a mere shot in the dark. Still others don't even have any viable treatment options. In the more severe cases, I can understand the lack of eagerness to undergo invasive surgeries or agonizing treatments such as chemo. Not to mention the financial burden of prolonged and potentially ineffective treatment.

To these people, I say, God bless you and your decision. Every person has the right to refuse treatment, just like every person has the right to sign a DNR (Do Not Resuscitate). However, when you decide to cut short the natural course of life, that's where I draw the line. You can refuse to let your doctor treat you but you can't ask your doctor to please kill you. Not in my book.

My general conclusion is this. I've seen firsthand people dying on the streets in third world countries. Never once did I think to myself, "Why am I carrying around a Bible, or anything else for that matter, when I could be toting a breifcase full of lethal injections?"