The Reason Tribune

Dr. Jack Kevorkian — Possibly the most notorious figure on the topic of patients choosing euthanasia

From birth until the age of 8, I was raised by a Catholic mother (who, by the way, I hold in the highest regard despite my personal views on religion) and a Baptist father. From the age of 8 on, I was raised (still) by my mother and an agnostic stepfather — to whom goes a great deal of the credit for giving me the strength to come to terms with my own doubts on religion.

I have been taught my entire life that suicide is a sin. Not only a sin, in fact, but one of the worst kinds, the sort that will surely result in an eternity in Hell. I have also been taught that the path to righteousness must be chosen and cannot be forced upon me, that I must choose between the path to Heaven and the path to Hell. The path may not always be easy to see, but it is MY responsibility (and no one else’s) to choose correctly.

It is, therefore, extremely shocking to me that the religious community has demonstrated such zealous determination to take even that choice away from us in the legal battle for our right to die. It isn’t enough, apparently, to take away a woman’s right to choose to have an abortion, or a man’s right to be responsible and use a condom. Not only do you not have the parental right to ensure your unborn child isn’t delivered under circumstances that will make his/her life unbearably difficult (much as I disagree with that, I can at least understand and even empathize with that position), they want to take away your right to end your OWN life when it has become unbearably difficult to live.

Now, I realize that the ‘right to die’ battle is nothing new. I’m sure many of my readers will recall the tremendous publicity, over a decade ago now, that brought such widespread attention to the work of Jack Kevorkian. For those of you who are not familiar, Dr. Kevorkian, often dubbed ‘Dr. Death’ by his detractors, provided mobile assisted-suicide services in the US to folks with terminal illness (and ONLY those with terminal illness) who wished to die with dignity, on their own terms. He never killed anyone. He basically set them up in a suicide chair in the back of his van and let them inject themselves with a painless yet lethal poison.

So why am I bringing this up now, over a decade later, on a website devoted to secularism? Because the religious community has decided to once again stick their collective noses into other people’s business, this time in Canada.

The Catholic Organization for Life and Family recently spoke out, instructing the mindless sheep of their flock to ‘oppose any attempt to legalize euthanasia’. The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines euthanasia as ‘the act or practice of killing or permitting the death of hopelessly sick or injured individuals in a relatively painless way for reasons of mercy’. Now what, I ask you, could possibly be wrong with that?

Religious types will, no doubt, pounce on the meaning of ‘hopeless’. Well, the Merriam-Webster dictionary takes care of that, too. It defines Hopeless as “Not susceptible to remedy or cure”.  Now, the Church can go on about spiritual Hopelessness and the always-available Hope of eternal afterlife til they’re blue in the face, but they cannot claim that religion can provide a remedy or cure for terminal illness. Even Mother Theresa could not cure the Lepers she tended. They also cannot convincingly argue that a person who does not share their religious views will draw any sort of hope from their religious belief in an afterlife. If I’m an atheist, why should I (a) care one way or another about where a book in which I do not believe says I deserve to go, or (b) be required to reconcile my medical decisions with someone else’s religious views?