ASSISTED DYING
On my flight back from Liberty Food Fest in Bellows Falls, Vermont I caught up with my The Economist magazine's 2025 predictions issue. Quite a bit of ink dealt with the apparently growing movement toward initiatives around the world, especially in Great Britain, to legalize assisted death.
The overall justification, or goal, for the movement is the ability to die with "freedom, choice, and dignity." I was struck by the passion of various writers and policy makers using these terms to describe assisted dying. I will not take a position on this, but want to point out that I'm waiting to see someone equally passionate about freedom, choice, and dignity in living.
Having just spent two days at a conference dedicated to celebrating farmers and decrying their marginalization and consumer lack of choice, the juxtaposition between society's desire to assist dying versus its complete disinterest in assisting the living struck me as profound.
It seems to me that when a nation like ours uses taxpayer dollars to give Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP) recipients about $10 billion a year for Coca-Cola and Mountain Dew that's about as close to assisted dying as you can get. The same nation, of course, criminalizes an entrepreneurial single mom in an urban food desert who dares to plant a garden in a vacant lot and then use her kitchen to make hearty meat pies for her neighbors. Making such activity illegal is unconscionable. I would call such criminalization denying her freedom, choice, and dignity in living.
Isn't it interesting that people spend this much time talking about freedom to die when we can't seem to even start a conversation about freedom to live? Choice to live? Dignity to live? Imagine two neighbors collaborating to process a hog one of them raised. The neighbor who didn't raise the hog wants to buy 5 pounds of sausage to take home to his family. I suggest taking away the hog raising neighbor's ability to interact with his neighbor, as two consenting adults exercising voluntary freedom of choice, is the height of taking away dignity from the farmer.
How do we uphold the dignity of the farmer when we say selling homemade tomato soup from extra garden tomatoes is illegal? Or making and selling a quiche from excess spring egg production from a backyard flock of chickens? How does such interventive prohibition preserve dignity for either party? It does not, and therein lies the great blind spot in this whole movement to guarantee assisted death in the name of freedom, choice, and dignity.
More than 50 percent of American health care costs are expended to extend life about 6 months. Why? Anybody who has spent time around grossly suffering end-of-life friends or family would not want to go through that. And yet we cling to life to the point of bankruptcy to squeeze out a few more months.
When we're seeing a loved one go through the pain and trouble of these horrible life-ending situations, none of us wants to go that way. We say things like "I hope I just go to bed one night and don't wake up." All of us aspire to such an end, but then we move mountains to cling to another month or two. Why?
Certainly age makes a difference. Cancer at 20 is different than cancer at 90. I get that and would cheer on the 20-year-old to fight, to resist, to overcome. But what's the point in old age? What attracts my admiration is the very elderly person who makes a conscious decision to release themselves. My wife's grandmother did that as elegantly as anyone I've ever met. In her late 90s, she started some sort of internal hemorrhaging that required a blood transfusion.
The malady began with a transfusion once a year to keep her going well. She was mentally sharp right to the end. Then the transfusion visits increased to twice a year, then once a quarter. When they hit once a month, she told the doctor "this is the last time I'm coming in." He responded "you know what that means." She said, with clarity and resolution, "Yes. And I'm ready." About a month later, she passed. I call that freedom, choice, and dignity.
Now that I'm becoming an older person, I wonder how I would react to some terminal issue, diagnosed or intuitively known. Having watched both the expensive and painful heroic elongation versus the quiet and resolute resignation, I want to think I would choose to go and not stay. There is a time to live and a time to not live. The ability to choose how dependent to become on others, on doctors, or medical insurance is part of personal dignity and agency.
Perhaps if we exercised it more in life we'd have it more in death. And perhaps if we practiced it more in life, like choice in food, education, finance, it would give us a better chance at having lived a full life and therefore reduce regrets that demand another month to fix things. How about we focus on assisted living rather than assisted dying?
How heroic do you want people to be to prolong your life 6 months?