Assisted Suicide: A More Humane Death?

We cannot all collectively agree on what defines life. A doctor will say a pulse, a priest a soul, a philosopher a thought. What we can all agree on though is that an unhappy life is a life not worth living. After all, what point is there in living to be a hundred if it is a century of misery? We as a civilisation have been blessed with the ability to sustain life against previously insurmountable odds, but we have also been given the power to take it away. Our government, however; will not afford us this right. They will not give peace and relief to the thousands of Canadians debilitated by chronic pain or bedridden by crippling paralysis. They prefer to pour money into them until the day that Mother Nature chooses to end her cruel torture and gives them the peace that they crave. By legalising assisted-suicide we can humanly treat patients whose lives are no longer worth living.

There is no point in prolonging life if the time gained is spent fading away in a hospital bed. We have the machines necessary to replicate vital bodily functions. Life can be plugged into a wall. It is just a matter of when to pull the plug. Sue Rodriguez was diagnosed with the degenerative Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) in 1991 and given at most five years to live. She was told that the disease would eventually leave her unable to move, talk, swallow, and breathe. Her mind, however; would remain intact as her body slowly froze around her. In the last stages of her illness she would be kept alive by a respirator and a feeding tube until the disease finally caused complete respiratory failure. For Sue, this terrible fait was too grisly to imagine. She did not want to die like this. She wanted to die with dignity and on her own terms. For her, it was not about the quantity of her life, but the quality of it. Our society and our medical system are too preoccupied with trying to preserve and sustain life that they are unaware of the fact that their efforts are in vain. Another terminally ill ALS patient like Sue would be so medicated and sedated throughout the last stages of his life that he would be oblivious to the efforts by society to give him another week, month, or year of life. No one would say that living is lying in a hospital bed, yet our government will go to the ends of the legal earth to make sure our heart is kept beating. Length of life only matters if the quality is there to justify it.