I was chatting to my friend (and Gript colleague) Laura Perrins on Monday about the assisted suicide report that passed, as expected, through the Dáil last night.
The report itself is of little immediate consequence. The question of assisted suicide will be much more of an agenda item in the next Dáil than it is in this one, with time having entirely expired on any potential legislation under the present Government. Nevertheless, Laura and I had a spirited conversation about it, because she feels – I think correctly on reflection – that it’s a debate dominated by dancing around the central question on both sides.
Suicide is, of course, legal in Ireland. In part because it would be a fool’s errand to attempt to arrest and prosecute a corpse, and in part because it might be considered unseemly to prosecute an unwell person who’s made an attempt and failed. The law already recognises the permissibility of ending one’s life, and the only thing that assisted suicide asks is that we be allowed to do it with a little bit more dignity than that afforded by the noose or other alternatives.
This strikes many people as simply moral. And decent. And indeed, compassionate. Which is why the pro-life side (for want of a better term) is largely losing this debate in country after country. Once it becomes about personal choice, it’s game over.
What’s more, choice is not all it is about. It is also about control. The right to exit this life on one’s own terms, at a date of one’s own choosing, in a manner of one’s own choosing. In an era where choice and self-determination are amongst our highest moral values, assisted suicide is the logical apotheosis of that.
And this is where the pro-assisted suicide side gets dishonest.
When they say you can have a limited or restrictive assisted suicide regime, the advocates for such a regime are simply lying, either to themselves – which is possible – or to the rest of us. Because you cannot simply enact the principle that doctors can kill you by invitation on a day of your choosing and expect that to remain a limited, restricted, “safeguarded” process. There is either a right to die, or there is not: Making such a right conditional upon a person feeling a certain level of pain or doctors thinking they might die anyway in a few months is absurd, as every country which goes down this road ultimately realises.
One example: On May 22nd this year, Zoraya ter Beek died at 1.25pm local time in the Dutch city of Oldenzaal, reportedly after being given, at her own request, a massive overdose of barbituates which rendered her unconscious and stopped her heart. She had celebrated her 29th birthday less than three weeks previously.
Ms ter Beek sought assisted suicide because, in her own words “‘I have a house. Two cheerful cats. And a partner who loves me dearly, and I love him. I’ve got everything. But that “all” is not enough to live for.”
She had suffered depression, and anxiety. Since her death there has been no word on how the boyfriend who loved her dearly has been coping with her decision. Her social media accounts, now silent, simply read “Zoraya: Status – departed”.
The state facilitated her death and declared it legal, because really the only criterion for assisted suicide in the Netherlands now appears to be that you no longer wish to be here, in the realm of the living. And that once you make a decision to “depart” then that decision is yours alone. It is the logical endpoint of the ideology of choice.
There is no arguing with it.
This poses big questions for those of us who oppose assisted suicide, because all the talk about palliative care and other options never quite gets around to asking or answering the biggest question of all: If you really want to die – for any reason – what right does anyone else have to stop you?
And why shouldn’t you be allowed to simply die with dignity, if that is your wish? Even if you are a perfectly healthy person.
On the right, for many decades if not centuries, the answers to that question have been instinctive and based on religious morality: That life is sacred, a gift from God, and that throwing it away is utterly sinful. It is also, I think a decision so anathema to those of us who love life or value it that we struggle to articulate a coherent argument for the thing that we instinctively value. It’s like asking people why they love the air they breathe: The answer is you can’t do without it. The dead person’s answer is “I can”.
But there is an answer: The answer is that our responsibilities are not only to ourselves, but to those around us. The ideology of “self” and “choice” is ultimately the ideology of “and fuck everyone else”.
It is not generally my policy, on these pages, to speak ill of the dead, but I will speak ill of Zoraya ter Beek:
She abandoned her cats. She abandoned her boyfriend who loved her. She abandoned her family and friends. And she did something worse than any of those things: She sent a message to vulnerable and suicidal people everywhere that she found a way out and is at peace now, and that they might do the same. We do not know the destruction she wrought, on her way out, in the lives of people and animals alike – both those she knew and those she influenced from afar.
We live in the era of the social media influencer and the internet meme and the impressionable teen. I’m sorry, but you have a duty to live, and a duty to set an example, because bearing your pain and suffering is a better example to set for the rest of society than “departing”. It is also braver.
We are all, ultimately, made weaker by the devaluation of human life. We all have a collective, societal interest in making individual lives the most valued things in our collective social morality. That is why for centuries murder has been our most serious crime, up there with high treason.
None of us are here by choice, but by a mixture of accident and obligation. A society that says life is an incidental thing that we may just throw away devalues all lives, not just the one giving us the peace sign while inhaling nitrogen gas in a death pod.
But while the right shies away from these questions and engages in these debates in milquetoast terms, it is doomed to lose. The question is not “palliative care versus assisted dying, which is more dignified?”. The question is not “is there a slippery slope or do we have safeguards?”.
The question, rather, is do you have a right to take your own life and say “it’s just my choice to do this”?
The answer, for me, is no you do not. Because your life is not just your own, and you have duties and responsibilities to the rest of us as well. And yes, for the sake of everyone else, you do have a duty to live out those last six months of your life, painful as they are – because there are some lines that society cannot cross without inviting an ocean of unintended but inevitable consequences.
Until we make that argument head on, we’re all wasting our time.