Commentary
Americans committed to building a life-affirming culture need only cast their eyes to our northern neighbor to see what awaits if our vigilance wanes.Canada’s promotion of suicide is creeping south, and the United States would be wise to stop its advance. A nation such as ours, built on hope and the idea that everyone has value and potential, should protect and celebrate life at every stage from its beginning to its natural end.
Currently, 10 states—California, Colorado, Hawaii, Maine, Montana, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon, Vermont, and Washington—and the District of Columbia allow physician-assisted suicide. New Mexico’s law, the Elizabeth Whitefield End-of-Life Options Act, goes well beyond legalizing physician-assisted suicide; it also mandates that a doctor take crucial steps to help the patient commit suicide, including referring for assisted suicide and providing information about it.
Public policy should promote human flourishing. Nowhere is this more apparent than in health care. There are stringent requirements to enter the medical profession, and rightfully so, but abandoning one’s deepest convictions shouldn’t be one of them. However, under the New Mexico law, if medical professionals don’t participate in the assisted suicide process, they could be subjected to civil or criminal penalties and even lose their licenses.
We trust doctors to heal, not harm. We trust doctors to provide compassionate care and comfort when healing is no longer possible. No government should be issuing doctors a “license to kill,” let alone threatening to end the careers of those who refuse to.
In Little Sisters of the Poor, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that pro-life nuns shouldn’t be forced to provide abortifacients and other drugs that destroy human life in their health plans. The court, in NIFLA, also protected pregnancy resource centers from being forced by the government to advertise state-funded abortion. If the free speech and free exercise clauses of the First Amendment protect the right of conscience for those who care for the poor, the desperate, and the vulnerable at the beginning of life, then they apply equally to the caretakers of those in need at every other stage of life.
Every life has value, and, therefore, every suicide is tragic, as it always raises the painful question, “What might have been?” New Mexico’s law compounds the tragedy of suicide by forcing those who have dedicated themselves to the preservation and improvement of life to participate in ending it.
In a nation founded upon the self-evident truth “that all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” it should follow that life itself is sacred. Life, no matter how it began, how difficult it may presently be, or how uncertain its future, is worth protecting. It’s a lesson sometimes learned through tear-dimmed eyes that joy and pain, triumph and defeat, beginning and end, all combine to make life what it is—beautiful.
A culture that views life as circumstantially disposable instead of as a gift of God has suffered a self-inflicted wound that could prove fatal if not treated. Ending the practice of physician-assisted suicide would be a noble first step toward a remedy.
