Physician assisted suicide and the Christian ethic

Noel Coghlan

Issue 393, vol.99, Spring 2010

The Royal Netherlands Medical Association moved quickly to lay down guidelines, the first of which insisted that the request be voluntary, considered and persistent. But the guidelines can be said to have fallen at the first fence : a 1990 survey carried out for an official Commission found that in over half the relevant cases, the patient had at no stage indicated a wish to have life shortened.

“Suicide is a very good possibility to escape from a situation you can’t alter”, says Dr. Ludwig Millini of Switzerland’s Dignitas clinics. But this presents the issue of life or death as a highly reductionist polarity – There are no modalities : perhaps the patient might be signalling a cry for help – or be suffering from depression – or be a victim of societal pressure; perhaps palliative care might be effective; perhaps there might even be a spiritual dimension to human existence.

Even more disturbing is the suspected readiness to view euthanasia as a method of regaining control over scarce medical resources – as a management option.

Today’s (neo)liberal ethos reduces the terminally ill to mere objects of medical intervention – objects whose very personhood is put in doubt, if one is to define personhood in terms of consciousness, memory, cognitive capability, capacity for communication. The culture of our age reveres the healthy, glorifies the athletic – and can edge dangerously close to the Nietzschean under-class concept of the Minderwertig [of-a-lesser-valuation] : the vulnerable and incapacitated discardables.

From a Christian perspective, the quality of an individual life lies not in its (economic) utility to others, but in the possibilities which it opens up to seek and enjoy spiritual and interpersonal goods in community with others. (And community involves dependence : there is no total autonomy). Earlier traditions of empathy, of solidarity, of simple human decency have not disappeared from our cultural/religious heritage. This culture always viewed death as being just as much a psychological process as a physiological one. The appropriate response, then, has always been to assist the gravely ill in their new circumstances – rather than to foreclose on a life that might yet offer new horizons and fresh experiences in the limited but precious time remaining.

Noel Coghlan is a former Eurocrat and an active member of the Theological Circle of the Anglican Diocese of Dublin and Glenadlough.