California has long had a reputation for “advanced” social legislation, and the decisions of its supreme court often preview the future legal climate of the nation at large. There is such concern to zap manufacturers and suppliers of defective products that even an injured bystander (one who is neither buyer nor user of the product) can successfully sue without having to prove negligence. And in October, California became the first state to legalize the right of a terminally ill patient to end his life. This bill signed into law by Governor Jerry Brown—a religious syncretist who has moved well beyond his former role as Jesuit seminarian to create state days of prayer modeled on an Eastern ashram—allows the preparation of “living wills,” renewable every five years, which will direct physicians to “pull the plug” if the “testator” finds himself on a life-sustaining system that only postpones inevitable death. What is to be said of such a notion theologically?
At first glance, the idea doesn’t seem particularly bad—and may even appear morally neutral. Time magazine quoted the bill’s sponsor, Democrat Barry Keene, who declared that the “living will” offered a way out for those “who have no hope,” such as friends of his who died slowly of excruciating cancer. When compared with the Roe v. Wade abortion decision of the U.S. Supreme Court and the New Jersey supreme court’s ruling in the case of Karen Anne Quinlan, California’s right-to-die law seems downright innocuous: at least the patient himself makes the decision to pull the plug; it is not made for him by others (as in the removal of the mechanical respirator from Miss Quinlan—who, however, outfoxed the state by continuing to breathe without it—or as in the innumerable abortions now occurring in which the lives of the pre-born are unceremoniously snuffed out not by their own decision but generally because of the economic, social, or psychological inconvenience they cause to others). Whereas legalized abortion and pulling the plug without the patient’s consent must be classed as homicide (“the killing of one human being by another”), the California right-to-die law is, at worst, only suicide.
But surely “suicide” is too strong a word—even as “homicide” is too strong a word in the Quinlan situation—when the person would die naturally anyway without the benefit of an artificial life-support system? The utter fallacy of this argument, so often appealed to even by some evangelical ethicists, can be illustrated by the venerable California case of People v. Ah Fat (which the recent legislators evidently did not recall). In the days of the Chinatown tong wars, Ah Fat was a cowardly fellow who went out with his murderous friends but hid when the fighting between the gangs commenced. Finally his friends informed him that unless he got into the fray, they would divide his cranium with a meat cleaver. So on the occasion of the next fight, Ah Fat waited until he saw another brother deal a mortal blow to one of the opposition, and then with an appropriate whoop Ah Fat cut off the dying man’s head.
The whoop was apparently heard by the police, for Ah Fat was arraigned on a homicide charge. His lawyer argued that whatever else Ah Fat might be guilty of, it wasn’t homicide, for the victim would have died anyway: Ah Fat merely “accelerated the inevitable.” The judge rejected this contention as a matter of law, replying: “That’s what homicide always is.”
And the “artificiality” of the life-sustaining procedures doesn’t alter the situation in the slightest. Would it be any less murder if, instead of shooting a person, we deprived him of his iron lung or of his insulin on the ground that these are “artificial” means of keeping him alive? If doing such things to another would be homicide, then doing them to oneself would just as certainly be suicide.
A little reflection on the question of “dependence” will also reveal that no one—at any stage of his existence—is really independent of others or of his environment, “natural” or “artificial” (if the distinction really has any meaning). We depend upon others, including manufactured devices, for our very survival. (If you doubt this, try not using your furnace this winter.) Far more unites the fetus, the terminally ill patient, and the healthy, adult reader of this article than separates them. All three are dependent, and their dependency, instead of offering a potential ground for destruction or self-destruction, is a common bond. “Never send to know for whom the bell tolls,” John Donne reminded humanity: “it tolls for thee.”
Christian Scientists and other “mind science” crazies have persuaded many Christians that to rely on the Lord is to eschew “artificial” healing by grubby old unsanctified physicians. “Let the Lord work,” they say, convinced that he works only immediately, not mediately. But surely the “artificial,” done or made by man, is ultimately God’s own work. Had he not bestowed on us the skill to create modern medicine with its variegated life-support systems, we could never have made them. To be sure, the use or misuse of such devices might conceivably be a greater of evils in a given case (e.g., where only one machine is available and it is not used for a young person in need because already plugged to a terminally ill patient), but except in such morally ambiguous situations one must regard life support as God’s work, not the devil’s.
Scripture still stands directly opposed to suicide: every instance of it in Scripture is related to spiritual collapse, from Saul to Judas (1 Sam. 31:4; 2 Sam. 17:23; 1 Kings 16:18–20; Matt. 27:5; Acts 1:18). The classical theologians of orthodox Christianity, such as Augustine, have set themselves firmly against it, while modern support for “voluntary euthanasia” has come from situationists who refuse to recognize the existence of absolute biblical principles (e.g., Joseph Fletcher, Morals and Medicine).
As America takes the legal route to voluntary individual self-destruction, it displays the paradoxical combination of its self-made, do-it-yourself image gone wild (“do-it-yourself death”) together with the collapse of the individual courage and strength of character for which Americans have been famous. How unlike Socrates, who would not take the easy way out by escaping from even an unjust sentence because to do so would set a bad example and lower society’s moral tone. Today’s hero becomes not Socrates but Hemingway, who carried his hubris to the ultimate by not permitting even death to subject him to its timetable.
God’s way is the polar opposite: “the Lord gives, the Lord takes away: blessed be the name of the Lord.” Let us do all we can to counter the declining respect for life in our nation. The life we save may be our own.
