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Is Death a Constitutional Right?: The Sanctity of Life
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11436 |
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CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
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4 / 1994 |
1,912 Words |
| Author
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Brian Young
Brian Young is vice president for government affairs of the
American Life League. |
Death is good. Killing is compassionate. Dignity is delivered through a gas mask. The world of Jack Kevorkian is upon us in all its Orwellian splendor. It petitions American courts to declare the crime of "assisted suicide" not just legal but a fundamental constitutional right. It requests the healing art of medicine to view killing the innocent as a treatment option. It asks society not to work for the solution to a problem but to authorize the termination of those with the problem.
How the Kevorkian movement fares in these efforts will reveal, to a great degree, the nature of the American character at the end of the twentieth century.
That Kevorkian's vision of "assisted suicide" has emerged as a national phenomenon is not surprising. It is, after all, a logical extension of the self-autonomy concept that flowered in the sixties. "Doing your own thing" and "controlling your own body" have evolved into the greatest of paradoxes: self-exaltation through self-destruction.
Yet, the idea that a doctor should, under certain circumstances, fill his patient with poison is still a shocking notion to most. Ballot initiatives to legalize physician-assisted suicide in Washington and California were each rejected by 54 percent of the voters. It seems that even current generations, fed incessantly through television tubes with the message that they are their own masters, revere life enough to be troubled by the concept.
What, then, fuels some people's acceptance of "self-deliverance" as preached by Kevorkian? Is it the grand metaphysical concept that we are the makers of our own destiny or the more mundane, but very real, fear of pain? Or is it something more?
As in Solzhenitsyn's Russia, many in the United States have forgotten God. Specifically, they have put aside the belief that God is the author of life and, as such, is the only one with a "right" to decide when to take it. And with no Higher Authority in the picture, or at least in focus, there is no moral basis upon which to assert that individuals do not "own" their bodies.
If, indeed, people believe there is no One to whom they belong, why shouldn't they have "control" over their deaths? Why shouldn't they have "freedom of choice?" Actually, the practical answers to these questions are many and, for anyone truly interested in individual freedom, compelling.
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