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‘Foolproofing Suicide with Euthanasia Test Kits.” The matter-of-fact headline should chill us, especially since it didn’t appear in some fringe publication or advocacy magazine.
It appeared in Time.
“When someone with a terminal illness decides to end his or her life by overdosing on barbiturates, they may hope the drugs will lull them into a peaceful and permanent sleep,” wrote the Time reporter. But if the drugs have expired, or if the dosage is incorrect, “the would-be suicide victim may actually survive,” although possibly with additional complications or in a coma.
Thank heavens (yes, that is sarcasm), an Australian euthanasia advocate, Dr. Philip Nitschke, has come up with a way to avoid that danger. He plans “to sell barbiturate-testing kits to confirm that deadly drug cocktails are, in fact, deadly.” The kits will debut in Britain in May for $50.
The “seriously ill” don’t want to mess around when they’re trying to kill themselves, says Dr. Nitschke. “They want to know they have the right concentration of drugs so that if they take them in the suggested way, it will provide them with a peaceful death.”
I spoke with Nitschke back in 2001. At the time, he was already being referred to as Australia’s “Dr. Death,” a label he was proud of: “People only start calling you names if and when you become effective.”
When I asked him whom he aimed to help kill themselves, he explained that if one has a right to live, one should also have the right to die, and have the means to do it. “Someone needs to provide this knowledge, training or recourse necessary to anyone who wants it, including the depressed, the elderly bereaved, the troubled teen. If we are to remain consistent and we believe that the individual has the right to dispose of their life, we should not erect artificial barriers in the way of sub-groups who don’t meet our criteria.”
Thanks to the tireless work of Wesley J. Smith, a consumer advocate turned defender of human life, that interview did cause some trouble for Nitschke in his native Australia as he crusaded to make euthanasia legal. Now Time magazine — a major publication with a national, if not global, reach — gives respectful coverage to a doctor who has advocated the right of troubled teenagers to kill themselves.
This should set off all sorts of alarm bells, especially since assisted suicide is not academic theory but a reality. Following in the footsteps of their Oregon neighbors, Washington State voters passed a Death with Dignity ballot initiative last November; the law went into effect in March. Physician-assisted suicide with a lethal dose of medication is now legal in Washington for adults who are expected to die within six months.
But what exactly does that mean? In 2002, Time’s expert of choice, Nitschke, counseled an Australian woman named Nancy Crick on her suicide. To gain public acceptance for her choice, Crick, who had had surgery for bowel cancer, was presented as a cancer patient. After she killed herself, an autopsy revealed that she was, in fact, cancer-free.
Another high-profile euthanasia advocate is Ludwig Minelli, a Swiss human-rights lawyer and the founder of the clinic Dignitas in Zurich. Earlier this month, Minelli stated clearly that there should simply be no limits on assisted suicide. “It is without conditions,” he said. “A human right is without any conditions except capacity.”
If we don’t question the media’s almost casual acceptance of assisted suicide, we’re going to find before long that we have moved way beyond debating extraordinary care and the legality of assisted suicide in terminal cases. They sure have moved beyond that point at Dignitas. Mentally ill patients have been assisted in their suicides there. “Suicide is a very good possibility to escape a situation which you can’t alter,” Minelli told the BBC.
What’s next, an organization with centers in every city dedicated to helping end human life?
If this sounds overly dramatized, then we should recall where we were about a half century ago on the issue of abortion. (Nitschke, as it happens, has talked about running a “death ship,” which would get around Australian law by operating in international waters. He got the idea from a Dutch abortion ship already operating off European shores.)
Minelli is currently working to prepare a Canadian woman to kill herself when her husband dies. George has heart disease, and Betty wants to avoid the heartache of losing him.
Betty will suffer a deep and painful loss when her husband dies (naturally or otherwise). But her life should not be over. There is something sick — verging on terminally so — about a society that instead of working to affirm the value of life makes it easier to end it at any and then all stages.
— Kathryn Jean Lopez is the editor of National Review Online.
© 2009, Kathryn Jean Lopez. Distributed by Newspaper Enterprise Assn.