September 20, 2013 8:03 pm
The right to die will put us on a very slippery slope
By Christopher Caldwell
Stephen Hawking’s views are being distorted in a misguided campaign
This week, lobbyists for euthanasia appeared to be winning people over to their way of thinking. The 71-year-old physicist Stephen Hawking gave an interview to the BBC in which he was asked whether he supported assisted suicide. “Those who have a terminal illness and are in great pain should have the right to choose to end their lives, and those that help them should be free from prosecution ...” he replied. “But there must be safeguards that the persons concerned genuinely want to end their life and are not being pressurised into it, or having it done without their knowledge and consent.”
Mr Hawking would be a prized ally for those who favour a “right to die”. More than any scientist since Albert Einstein, he enjoys a reputation as the world’s deepest thinker. Since opponents of euthanasia generally argue that one can lead a fulfilling life even as the body fails, Mr Hawking, immobilised by motor neuron disease, can judge from experience whether a rich inner world is sufficient. The Australian, a newspaper, headlined “Hawking’s U-turn on euthanasia”, noting that he was no longer as sceptical as when he last spoke on the matter in 2006.
This was the thesis of almost all news stories on the interview, and it is false. What Mr Hawking said seven years ago concerned a Hong Kong man, paralysed in an accident, who had asked for euthanasia. “The victim should have the right to end his life, if he wants,” Mr Hawking said back then. “But I think it would be a great mistake.”
In other words, Mr Hawking’s views have not changed. He didn’t believe in criminalising suicide then, and doesn’t believe in it now. In this week’s interview, he even added warnings about patient consent. He is clearly not talking of euthanasia at all, only of assisted suicide. He would not advocate euthanasia in any of the dementia cases in which it is commonly urged.
By using the most euthanasia-unfriendly part of the old statement and the most euthanasia-friendly part of the new one, the media has wrongly made Mr Hawking sound like a man whose opinions are evolving. The encouragement for euthanasia supporters lies not in anything Mr Hawking said but in the willingness of the press to act as advocates for their position. Physician-assisted death is available in Switzerland, Belgium and the Netherlands, as well as four US states. It is a hot issue in Australia. In Québec, provincial activists began hearings this week on Bill 52, which would create a “right to die”. Abetting suicide is illegal in Britain, although a 2010 guidance from the director of public prosecutions discourages prosecuting friends and family who speed the death of loved ones in pain.
But who count as a “friend”? In August, cricket broadcaster Jonathan Agnew revealed he had offered to take his wife’s ex-husband, now deceased, to an assisted-suicide clinic in Switzerland. And who counts as family? The US Congress was called into a special session in 2005 to debate the case of the vegetative heart attack victim Terri Schiavo. Her husband was given the authority by a Florida court to end her life, although he had started a new family with another woman. This empowerment of the man of the house to settle the fate of family members looks suspicious, since the prerogatives of spouses and parents have been curtailed in almost all other areas – including domestic violence, corporal punishment, abortion and birth control, nutrition and school attendance.
There are good reasons why euthanasia has not yet caught on in most countries. Many arguments for it are suspect. Euthanasia advocates sometimes allude to the cost of caring for people in the last year of life. They sometimes fail to distinguish between agony and ennui. One Belgian testifying against Bill 52 said his mother had been euthanised on the say-so of one psychiatrist. Perhaps the very availability of euthanasia leaves older people feeling “pressurised”, as Mr Hawking puts it.
A survey by the Canadian Medical Association found that 26 per cent of doctors would euthanise patients if they could, and 54 per cent would not. If the practice were to be introduced now, in a world of doctors schooled on the principle “first do no harm”, its immediate effect would be minimal. But that would change. A doctor permitted to kill patients under certain circumstances inhabits a different ethical world. The real test of euthanasia will come a generation hence, when doctors unencumbered by the axiom of not harming are making decisions. One worries about what will happen then.
There must be something the advocates of a “right to die” are not telling us. The right to die, after all, has no need of advocates. It is a right that, over the long term, no human being has ever been denied.
The writer is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard
No comments:
Post a Comment