A way of degrading life...

By David Legg

For too long, American lawmakers have pursued an invasive strategy of regulating the right to decide upon the use of one's body. Legislators have made repeated attempts to subjugate reproductivity, sexuality, and health care to their control. These attempts lack all respect for private decisions regarding the one kind of property, the human body, which must never come under the ownership or regulation of the state. No person in whole, nor any function of the body, can be controlled by the government or anyone but the self, without degrading that person to a kind of partial slavery.

Laws abridging the individual's control over oneself can only be made when there is sufficient proof that the individual's actions would be harmful to others. Cigarettes are regulated because of the dangers of second-hand smoke. In any legal decision regarding the use of the body, whether sex, reproduction, or assisted suicide, a court must only weigh the rights of the individual against the potential harm to society.

Civil law is not a product of divine will and no law is justified through religious doctrine. Government's responsibility is to its living citizens and not their afterlives. Laws can only regulate actions of the living when they affect the living. To do otherwise places the public sphere dangerously under the influence of the supernatural, where for as far as the diversity of American opinions goes, the Pope's opinion is as valid as a Greenwich Village Voodoo Queen's.

For these reasons, the government has no legitimacy regulating a person's right to die in the manner they see fit. The problem comes when a person without the means asks for assistance. By banning physician-assisted suicide, the government would unfairly discriminate against those handicapped by illness or otherwise from exercising the basic right of control over their own lives. They therefore leave the option of death only to those who are strong enough to carry it out themselves. Since no government can prevent the latter, how can they justify denying the former?

A physician or health care specialist has a duty to aid the body in this process when requested by a patient. If an individual is comfortable with death and would prefer to aid the body to die rather than suffer a long, painful ordeal that still ends in death, then he has a right to demand assistance. Asking a doctor to do nothing to prolong life is, without question, within the patients' rights. Assisted suicide is only questioned because Americans are so uncomfortable with the thought of their own death that they don't understand that ending life is part of caring for the natural extinction of the body. The goals of all kinds of medicine must be reconsidered with an eye towards completing and assisting in the life cycle, and working with the body and the patient, not against them.

The unfortunate costs of all kinds of health care place unnecessary restraints on the patient and can force unwanted decisions on patients and their families. However, the costs of sustaining life in a terminally ill patient may weigh heavily on the mind of a patient who wants to live but is unwilling to burden the family. America must not only grant the right to physician-assisted suicide, but must provide, free of cost to the family or patient, means to live, die comfortably and naturally, or even die with a doctor's aid.

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