14 DAY TRIAL // Last week, on May 15, advocacy group Compassion & Choices filed a lawsuit against the state of California asking that legislators make it legal for people diagnosed with terminally ill diseases to seek medical aid in dying.
Plainly put, this lawsuit asks that assisted suicide be made legal in California.
Presently, assisted suicide is only legal in five US states, i.e. Vermont, Montana, Oregon, Washington and New Mexico. All other states consider it a crime and prosecute those who help terminally ill patients end their own life.
It all boils down to freedom of choice
In recent years, human society has come a long way when it comes to recognizing and promoting personal freedom. Look no further than anti-discrimination laws meant to protect the LGBT community for proof.
What’s puzzling is that, even though we seem to have at long last figured out that people have the right to live their life as they see fit, we are still reluctant about giving them the right to die with dignity and on their own terms.
Rather, it’s legal systems that are yet to include this right. Regular folks on the street, on the other hand, seem to have caught the gist.
Thus, a recent poll of 5,000 conducted by UK-based market research company Populus Ltd. found that 82% of the people interviewed were in favor of legalizing medically assisted suicide for terminally ill patients.
Making it legal for people diagnosed with incurable illnesses to seek medical aid in dying is about granting them complete control over their life and sparing them and their loved ones the ordeal of having to wait for disease to take them.
If and when a person is suffering and all efforts to treat their condition and ease their pain have failed, it makes sense to help them put it all behind them.
All human lives are valuable, there’s no denying it. The thing is that legalizing assisted suicide is not about denying life’s worth. Instead, it’s about giving people a choice in how and when they want to go when death is imminent and unavoidable.
Allowing medical aid in dying does not mean all terminally ill patients will be compelled to end their own lives when whatever disease is killing them becomes too much to handle.
It just means that those who think and feel that dying on their own terms is the best option for them are not denied the right to act on this choice.
In Oregon, assisted suicide has been legal for over a decade. Even so, only about 1,000 people in this state have until now sought medical aid in dying. Like them, many other terminally ill patients chose to hold on till the very end.
It’s not that some made the right call and others chose wrong. What matter is that these people were all given the benefit of a doubt and trusted to do what was best for them.
We will have to tread lightly though
Legalizing assisted suicide is the sensible thing to do, but this does not mean that the ones opposing this practice are entirely wrong. On the contrary, they do make some valid points.
For starters, there’s the issue that some might turn to medical aid in dying not because they have no other option but because treatment for their condition is expensive and they cannot afford it.
Besides, psychologists warn that many of the terminally ill are also depressed and that this might influence their decisions. Then again, this is precisely why proponents of assisted suicide say medical aid in dying would only be allowed after looking at the particularities of each case.