Last week, the Supreme Court, in a 6-3 vote in Oregon v. Gonzales, struck down the right of the federal government to prohibit doctors from prescribing lethal doses of medication to patients who want to commit suicide. The court was weighing Oregon’s controversial, voter-approved Death with Dignity Act, which applies to patients who have been diagnosed as terminally ill and who have six months or less to live.
The federal Controlled Substances Act, however, permits the government to permit a drug’s use only for a “legitimate medical purpose.” According to a CT news report, “In 2001, Attorney General John Ashcroft issued a directive ‘that assisting suicide is not a “legitimate medical purpose” … and that prescribing, dispensing, or administering federally controlled substances to assist suicide violates the CSA.’ “
Apparently states now have the right to decide whether suicide is a “legitimate medical purpose.”
Absent a push in Congress for a law specifically targeting euthanasia (not likely given public sentiment related to last year’s Terri Schiavo case), expect more states to enact such legislation now that the high court has given them the green light.
This is a return to the paganism of ancient Rome, when the old were left to die. Yes, sometimes pulling the plug is the only compassionate option we have, such as in cases of brain death. But expect the pressure to increase on those with much less dire conditions to seek their own demise.
As Diane Coleman of the disability rights group Not Dead Yet notes, “Making suicide easy and socially approved for people who . . . feel like burdens on their families, is discrimination against a socially devalued group. Assisted suicide is not a benefit; it’s a threat.” Indeed, a report on assisted suicides under Oregon’s Death with Dignity Act found that in 47 percent of the cases, one of the motives in the decision was “concern about being a burden on others.”
In the Netherlands, which legalized euthanasia in 1995, old people also feel pressure to end it all. Arno Heltzel of the Catholic Union for the Elderly supports “voluntary euthanasia,” but even he acknowledges the existence of “social pressure” in Holland toward old people because of high medical costs. “Old people have to excuse themselves for living,” Heltzel told The Wall Street Journal. “When they say that all of their friends are dead, people say, ‘Maybe it is time for you to go too,’ rather than, ‘You need to find new friends.'”
The Oregon law also tempts doctors to violate their Hippocratic Oath to “do no harm.” According to David Stevens of the Christian Medical Association, “This lethal violation of medical ethics erases a prohibition that has protected patients since the time of Hippocrates. Before Hippocrates, patients couldn’t know for sure if their doctor would heal them or kill them. This decision moves the practice of medicine one step closer to ethical mayhem.”
Beyond all this, we seem have forgotten that suffering often brings blessings to those who are trained by it, especially followers of Christ. As James wrote to suffering believers, “Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds, for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness. And let steadfastness have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing.” Pain, which C.S. Lewis called “God’s megaphone,” is a necessary part of life in this fallen world.
Robertson McQuilkin resigned in 1990 as president of Columbia Bible College and its graduate school to care for his wife, Muriel, who was in the grip of Alzheimer’s. McQuilkin told me that one night he was wondering why the Lord had removed him from public ministry.
“The next day,” he said, “we went out for our walk around the block. I’d have to hold her hand to balance her. I heard this shuffling behind me. I looked back and here’s a local derelict. He looked us up and down. And then he said, ‘Tha’s good—tha’s real good. I like that.’ And then he wandered off, mumbling, ‘Tha’s so good.’ And I chuckled.
“When we got back to the garden and sat down, all of a sudden, it hit me. I said, “Lord could you speak to me through a half-inebriated voice of an old derelict? You did, and if you say it’s good, that’s all I needed to hear.’
“So I had that assurance all along, that this was my assignment and was pleasing to him.”
Sadly, too many Christians have absorbed the world’s pagan outlook and forgotten that life, in all its beauty and complexity, is a gift from God, and that not all of our assignments are what others would call pleasurable. Yet it does not cease being a gift even when its pleasures are removed.
One of my relatives cared for her bedridden husband for long, lonely years before he finally died in November. I believe the assignment ennobled her and brought her closer to God in a way that a season of ease never could. No, we never look for suffering, but when it comes, God can use it like a diamond to etch beauty in our sin-hardened souls—if we will let him.
We are not hedonists. Life is about more than simply minimizing pain and maximizing pleasure. As the apostle Paul told the church in Rome in a different context, life for the Christian involves sacrifice: “I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.”
We are not our own. The ultimate evil in life is not suffering. It is failing to live for God, the source of life, both in good times and in bad.
Stan Guthrie is a senior associate editor for CT. He blogs at StanGuthrie.com.
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Related Elsewhere:
Other recent Christianity Today articles on Oregon v. Gonzales include:
Supreme Court Upholds Oregon’s Suicide Law | Says federal law regulates illicit drug dealing and trafficking, not “medicine.” (Jan. 17, 2006)
Reaction to Oregon v. Gonzales | What prolife groups are saying about the assisted suicide case. (Jan. 17, 2006)
It’s Okay to Be Against Suicide | Are social conservatives hypocrites for being anti-Roe and anti-Oregon? A Christianity Today editorial (Nov. 30, 2005)
