Life and Dignity

Harry Neuwirth

Harry Neuwirth is a freelance writer living in Silverton, Oregon.

Who cannot see the danger of assigning to the medical community the responsibility for determining when death is appropriate; of implementing death, turning healers into killers even as we relegate the human body to the status of a machine whose usefulness, or obsolescence, is diagnosed by real machines operated by technicians? Assisted suicide is yet another partial excision of the spiritual muscle that raises mankind above the lower animals.

A growing number of people will insist that God, or god, has nothing to do with this; that the spirit in mankind that runs deeper than life itself is simply a figment, an intellectual invention. Yet our mythology, our literature, our history, our most poignant memories are of people rising above bodily strength protecting their children, saving their comrades in battle, persisting beyond stamina and breath to bring the news of victory across Marathon to Athens.

We pretend to fortify spirit at home, in school, in church, but we must do more than pretend. Spirit is inherent in human life, in savage tribes as well as in sophisticated communities. Yet we denigrate it in our legislative halls, the secular press, our leisure pursuits.

We are a religious nation, primarily Christian as statistical surveys consistently reveal. We are a religious nation and, Christian or not, religion-all religions-hold life sacred. There is a spiritual element in homosapiens; a gift of God: the God of the Koran, the Vedas, the Bible. We cannot destroy the body we see without killing the spirit we cannot see.

In little more than a century travelling westward across America we also travelled away from a nation of pioneers who endured intense discomfort, who undertook sacrifice; travelled toward a nation that insists upon ever greater comfort and security; a nation on the verge of permitting its citizens to die in comfort, at a time of their own codiciled choosing.

Of our own choosing, but let there be no doubt that assisted suicide, under law, will evolve as all other social-policy-under-law has done. The definition of legally assisted suicide under thus-far-exclusive Oregon law will not remain as is. It will inevitably evolve toward greater ease of implementation; of ever greater convenience to society just as restraints on pornography, divorce, and violence have atrophied. Geriatricide and infanticide hover on that horizon.

As tomorrow's children reach maturity under the anemic ethical standards of the new America, public opinion will become ever less demanding until the monolith of "bread and circuses" will stand where once proud human spirit stood.

To the question, "Why prolong life that is soon to end anyway?" I readily admit that I don't know, anymore than I know what life is, or why that gift has been given. But it must be wrong to take what we cannot give or understand!

There is a spirit in humankind that reaches beyond intellect, that enlivens heroism, brings tears to hardened eyes, that inspires mind and soul. That spirit is lost with the spent body. We propose to kill it before its time.

As for the suffering that is the putative justification for assisted suicide, the Oregon experience has been that the majority of such procedures are performed to the relief of despondency rather than pain. Still, under the hand of technical man who can and does sustain life by heroic means, frequently to the accompaniment of intense pain and despondency, two obvious responses have been, and should continue to be made:

We must act to restrain near-death heroics while alleviating the pain of those fatal final hours. "Death with dignity" is the rallying cry of assisted suicide advocates in the land. Close but wrong, that cry should be "life with dignity" as it draws to a close.

Thou shalt not kill. ?