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Posted on 11/10/2014 12:19:09 PM PST by wagglebee
Beware movements that word engineer and deploy gooey euphemisms to further their agenda. It generally means there is something very wrong with the agenda.
In the wake of Brittany Maynard’s death, suicide promoters are now using the word “dignity” as a synonym for suicide, more than implying that dying naturally is not dignity.
That is not only cruel, it is wrong.
Dignity is intrinsic. Sick and dying people seeking to be assured they still have it look at us–our faces–like mirrors. If they see us thinking they are less than they once were, it can be devastating.
In the Guardian, Brian Smith–obviously no relation–says his father should have been able to commit dignity rather than die of old age and the effects of post-polio syndrome. From, “What Do You Tell Your Father When He’s Ready to Die?”
But over time, his body began to break down, and breathing became labored. The polio had come back, this time in the form of post-polio syndrome, which weakens muscles that were affected the first time around. Dad’s ailment would slowly strip him of his independence, his ability to move and, eventually, his ability to breathe. If this was death’s door, he was rapping it with what knuckles he could. His decline would last nearly a decade before his doctors gave up on treatments and assigned visits from hospice nurses.
For my father’s disease, there is no cure.
But there is always care–and love–which Smith family apparently gave dad in bounteous quantities. Good.
But Mr. Smith continued to decline:
As his days devolved into a drudgery of pills, bad daytime TV, and constant reliance on a breathing machine, Dad told us he was ready to die. “I’m done,” my father said. But choosing to die, or even assisting someone who wants to die, is a felony in California. Our options to humanely end the suffering were limited.
Self-starvation and dehydration remain the only legal ways to help someone choose when they die in the state. But few of us can muster the strength to starve to death, and caretakers – including Medicare-supported hospice nurses – are not in the business of starving people.
Saying, “I’m done,” isn’t the same thing as saying, “I want to commit suicide!.” Yet, that is what Smith wished for his father. Indeed, Smith never writes that his father asked to be killed.
I have been there. When my dad was dying of colon cancer, a moment came when he was sitting on his bed and we were talking. He suddenly looked up at me and sighed deeply with an expression that said, “I’m done,” more loudly than if he had uttered the words.
That wasn’t the same thing as saying, “Kill me.” Dad wasn’t saying, “Get me the poison pills.” He was saying, “I am done fighting.”
We moved to hospice mode, and he died a few months later–with true dignity. He did not commit suicide.
As the column notes, people can make themselves dead if they really want to. Do we really want to make suicide easier?
And note the consequences of accepting the destructive meme that suicide is dignity. One commenter takes Smith’s advocacy to its logical place:
The Oregon law is a good beginning, but it should apply also to those facing incurable pain, paralysis or imprisonment that could go on for years.
Exactly right. When it comes to assisted suicide, in for a penny, in for a pound.
The question isn’t terminal illness. Many people suffer more and for longer than the dying
The issue is whether facilitated suicide is a right. If it is, it can’t be limited to the dying. Indeed, perhaps other than to those with only a transitory desire to die, it can’t be limited at all.
So, let’s have an honest debate. A right to facilitated suicide? Yes or no. Just don’t call it “dignity.”
P.S. My good friend, the late poet and disability rights activist, Mark O’Brien, contracted polio at age 6 and lived the rest of his life in an iron lung. Mark was adamantly against assisted suicide. He too died from post-polio syndrome. He died with dignity, not by suicide.
Few people realize this and if it IS somehow a right, that means that the right to life is not unalienable.
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we are the very edge...of the most dangerous set of legal decisions to ever have come down in the U.S.A.
There will be protests by “Suicide RIghts” groups....backed by the worst eugenics scum on the planet.
Having the right to do something and deciding whether to do it are two different things. An individual can choose not to exercise that right. That doesn’t mean it’s not inalienable.
Contrast that with Lauren Hill who fights for every day she can. Lauren is living her life with dignity.
http://www.wcpo.com/news/local-news/everyone-loves-lauren-hill-and-they-should
Suicide IS NOT choosing to not exercise a right, it is choosing to alienate it.
Well said....
While I understand everybody in life at some point gets depressed and thinks about suicide, actually advocating it as a right is really outrageous. Suicide is extremely selfish and the trail of pain that it leaves behind is long.
This opens up a really big can of worms IMO.
So what is it if you choose not to exercise your right to life?
Suicide is a tragedy. It is not dignified. The death culture controls Big Media and the sheeple follow them blindly. Life is precious to those who have a conscience.
So slow painful suicide is OK, fast painless suicide isn’t. Refusing food is every bit as much suicide as taking a pill.
You are attempting to turn a right into an obligation in order to buttress your religious belief.
‘For my father’s disease, there is no cure.’
Life itself is a terminal illness whose only cure is death.
I agree. It sounds high-minded and unsympathetic to blanket this issue as being pure evil. There are people who live every second of every day in terrible pain and can’t medicate it away without a lethal dose of medicine. While I’m weary of the possible slippery slope here, in the end, it’s the decision of the individual involved and their loved ones.
‘As his days devolved into a drudgery of pills, bad daytime TV,.....’
No Netflix?
I was watching a St. Jude’s commercial last night. Those brave little kids. They are in the fight of their lives. And yet they exhibit all the human virtues in the face of an enemy. Not one of them would ever think of offing themselves. They are brave little souls.
The track record of the medical community in anything doesn't give me a lot of confidence about their predictions.
Not only are they often wrong, it doesn't leave room for a miracle that God could do.
And they do happen.
I met a pastor from Africa who was diagnosed with Stage 4 colon cancer. He had pictures of himself in the hospital and he was a wreck.
God healed him and he's back in his home country pastoring a church again.
Agreed. If you dont own your own life. What do you own?
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