Last September, I found myself — confused, groggy, and irritable — staring into the surgical dome light of my local hospital’s emergency room. The doctor and my parents at my bedside informed me that I had been found by a passing police officer, not breathing, and with no pulse, after my ventilator hose had gotten disconnected and severe hypoxia kicked in. Cardiopulmonary resuscitation brought me back, and I’d been transported to the ER. I was alive — thanks to the determination of law enforcers and local medical personnel to keep me that way.
New York’s proposed Medical Aid in Dying Act threatens to undo this presumption in favor of lifesaving, especially for people with disabilities such as me. This month, the bill passed in a vote of 81 to 67 in the Assembly, the lower chamber of the state legislature. It is now on its way to a vote in the state Senate.
If the Empire State joins the 10 states (and the nation’s capital) that have made assisted suicide legal, it will be adding killing to the options available in doctors’ toolkits. Given my own brushes with death over my 34 years — and those moments of staring into the suicidal abyss as a result of depression associated with my condition — I pray Empire State lawmakers take a step back, and rethink.
This isn’t, and shouldn’t be, a partisan issue. Just last year, John Carney, then the Democratic governor of Delaware, vetoed a similar bill that had passed the state’s General Assembly. In 2012, when Massachusetts voters re-elected President Barack Obama by a whopping 23 points, they also rejected a ballot measure to legalize physician-assisted suicide.
In Britain, former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn bucked his party to vote against legalization, while former Prime Ministers David Cameron and Rishi Sunak broke with their fellow Tories to support it. Republicans may be more against legalization than Democrats, but Democrats’ long tradition of protecting the vulnerable should militate against Empire State lawmakers passing this bill.
The bill, a mere 12 pages long, is deceptively enticing. At face value, it requires two doctors to sign off on a request for lethal drugs by a patient of sound mind with six months or fewer to live, with a diagnosed terminal illness. The bill proposes, without using such language, to offer those wracked by painful, terminal illness “death with dignity” on their own terms.
Death with dignity is a real thing — many ancient cultures speak of it. In the Jewish religion in which I was raised, a good death is considered a kiss from God. Dying well is likewise an art in the Catholic faith I adopted as an adult. But a good, dignified death cannot come at the hands of doctors helping patients dispatch themselves. It cannot serve the cause of health insurers trying to save a buck. Still, any opponent of the legalization of physician-assisted suicide has to grapple with the fact that the demand for it is there for a reason.
I was born with a recessive genetic neuromuscular condition called nemaline myopathy. Over the years, it’s developed to the relatively stable point where I use a portable ventilator to breathe — hence, my blacking out last September — and a motorized wheelchair to get around. I often require assistance with basic tasks. I’m not terminal — at least, not without taking into account that life itself is terminal, for all of us. But many times, my own body can feel like a straitjacket, and that’s without the physical pain that surges from time to time.
I don’t want to die, and God willing, I’ve got another couple of decades left, at the very least. Under the law as proposed, I wouldn’t be eligible, all things being equal. But all things aren’t always equal. Eighteen years ago, bedridden for a month after major back surgery, I wished more morphine than was necessary for pain relief had been available to me. Watching my late grandfather wasting away in his last six years in a hospital bed at around the same time, I could and still can empathize with those who favor medical aid in dying.
For others, such existential moments can tip into a yearning not to exist — to escape it all.
Which is, of course, the point. If no one wanted physician-assisted suicide, there’d be no reason to make or keep it illegal. But there is such demand. Yet New York would go down a very dark moral path by enabling doctors to accede to such requests, even — as of now — in the extremely limited circumstances of terminally ill patients with six months or fewer to live.
The way the bill is drafted is itself prone to abuse, lacking the necessary safeguards to prevent nonconsensual physician-assisted suicide. A lot has been made of abuses in other countries, such as Canada and the Benelux region, where the category of people approved for suicide-by-doctor has steadily expanded to include the mentally ill, those with autism and ADHD, even teenagers.
“Allowing doctors to help their patients kill themselves means that killing now becomes a legitimate medical option.”
The problem is that no safeguards could possibly be adequate. Even with the most tightly drafted laws, patients and people with disabilities are likely to face subtle forms of coercion (“The treatment would be difficult and costly for your family; there is, of course, another option…”). Equally troubling is the way in which legalized euthanasia and assisted suicide twist and distort the medical profession’s oldest commitment, turning physicians into angels of death.
True, the principle of primum non nocere (“first, do no harm”), to which doctors are bound, has on occasion been reinterpreted such that “harm” is taken to include permitting a patient to suffer. At times, we allow medical care or nutrition to be withdrawn, despite the certainty of death. But the trouble is that allowing doctors to help their patients kill themselves means that killing now becomes a legitimate medical option.
My situation as someone with serious physical disabilities may be unusual. But most everyone has dealt with the byzantine bureaucracy of insurance companies and medical billing. Do we really want to make physician-assisted suicide a legitimate form of “treatment” in end-of-life cases? We bemoan the fact that people nowadays have fewer friends, or even close family members. Do we really want to make it so that there’s an “out” to the natural burdens of familial love? Or to mere loneliness?
I’m lucky to have a family and friends who love me. But others aren’t so fortunate, and even my family, by the natural way things go with time, won’t always be around. In medical dramas like Grey’s Anatomy or The Pitt, the medical profession is portrayed as valiant teams of heroes coordinating to save lives — and, don’t get me wrong, plenty of doctors, nurses, phlebotomists, and radiologists are heroic. But reality is far more chaotic and disorganized.
If not for my constant vigilance at my recent stint in the emergency room last year — the price of which was not sleeping for nearly the entire two days I was under observation — I’d have been administered several painful antibiotics I didn’t need, received precious little nutrition, and ended up with a tracheostomy in my windpipe. And that’s with doctors having no right to kill any patient. Let them do that — legally? You can bet death will become an easy option.
Advocates of physician-assisted, when not resorting to subterfuge, insist that the terminally ill who want to live out their remaining days should be able to do so. So what differentiates them from those who advocates say should be allowed to die? Pain, physical or spiritual. And don’t we all suffer pain? Aren’t we all terminal? Six minutes, six days, six weeks, six months, six years, six decades — one day, the curse of Adam will catch up with us all. I’ve lost friends to tragedies who I thought would live 100 years.
Simply put, we don’t know when our time is. If that’s the case, then the logic of assisted suicide leads inevitably to the conclusion that those with doctor-approved expiration dates are living lives not worth living. Lives unworthy of life, as the Nazis referred to people with disabilities when they set out to exterminate us with their Aktion T4 program.
A life not worthy of living. Well, I’ve heard that before. From peers, from rivals, sometimes from myself. I haven’t been suicidal in a good number of years, but I can’t say that about my teens and early 20s. I’ve had my fair share of heartbreak and physical pain that might have crushed many. Yes, no one wants to end up like Tithonus, locked away to wilt and fade while still breathing. But neither should the state of New York give reason for loved ones to abandon the frail. I’m one of the lucky ones. I fear for a world in which life is cheap.
It’s notable that some New York lawmakers are trying to push the bill in the wake of the death of Pope Francis. The late pontiff was especially vociferous in decrying what he labeled “throwaway culture,” a culture of waste that most afflicts “children, the elderly, the needy, and the disadvantaged.” Euthanasia epitomized that throwaway culture for Francis, and should New York enact the Medical Aid in Dying Act, the trend would only intensify.
The New York Senate must vote down this charter of death. Failing that, it would be an act of supreme political courage for Gov. Kathy Hochul to veto it. As a young man with disabilities — albeit ones that, with assistance, would still allow me to live a full and familial life — I tremble to imagine what this state would become if suicide-by-doctor becomes law. All New Yorkers are imperiled when the lives of the most vulnerable are rendered cheap.
