Freedom must include right to die

Freedom must include right to die
June 12th, 2011, 12:00 am
posted by Thomas J. Lucente Jr.

Who owns your body?

Judging from our nation's body of law, the ruling class wrongly believes the government does.

However, you own your body and, with that ownership, you have a God-given natural right to do what you will with it, even if that means ending your life.

That is the lesson we should take from the life of Dr. Jacob "Jack" Kevorkian, who died June 3 at the age of 83. As he once said, "Dying is not a crime."

Throughout the 1990s, Kevorkian advocated the right of the terminally ill to end their lives in a safe and painless manner. By his own admission, he helped more than 130 people take their own lives and eventually spent more than eight years in prison on a murder charge.

Yet, little has changed since Kevorkian was actively pushing for right-to-die legislation.

Today, only three states allow the terminally ill to humanely end their lives, Oregon, Washington and Montana.

In California, the FBI is harassing 91-year-old Sharlotte Hydorn, who is selling mail-order do-it-yourself suicide kits. Apparently the federal government has nothing better to do than harass a nonagenarian for selling stuff anyone can buy at a hardware store.

Hydorn is not the only one, however. There are numerous websites selling materials and information on how to take your life. Lawmakers, including those in the U.S. Congress, are struggling now to determine what it means to assist.

That question would be moot, however, if they accepted the fact that people have a right to die with dignity.

It is inhumane for government to prevent terminally ill patients from safely and humanely ending their lives and forcing them to die lingering, painful deaths. We do not even force that fate on animals.

I am a Roman Catholic, so I recognize that not all subscribe to the belief that a person has the right to die.

Like religion, however, the decision to end your life is a personal one. No one is forcing those opposed to physician-assisted suicide to seek that option. If one wants to live a life of pain and suffering, that is his or her choice. In a free society, however, no one has the right to force that fate on others. When a person is suffering beyond all hope of recovery, subjecting that person to further suffering is not respecting life; it is simply cruel.

Here we are in the 21st century. It is time we leave our Dark Ages mentality concerning life and death behind us.

There is a bigger issue at stake here than death.

Ultimately, this is a question of personal freedom. After all, everyone has a right to self-determination so long as it doesn't interfere with someone else's right to self-determination. This is the primary right due every individual in every circumstance regardless of who may be offended by it, so long as they are not harmed by it.

Freedom is more sacred than keeping sick individuals alive against their wishes. Any restraint on liberty should be completely justified by the restrainers.

But no one has been able to forward a legitimate reason why physician-assisted suicide or voluntary euthanasia should not be allowed.

There are those folks who oppose assisted suicide because of the potential for abuse.

But the state has used that argument time and again to assert its ownership over us: smoking bans, gun ownership bans and mandatory seat belt laws to name but a few. The medical community is quite capable of creating a set of regulations to govern itself in the institution of assisted suicide or voluntary euthanasia.

America can look to Oregon for an example of a physician-assisted suicide law that works. In 2010, 65 souls availed themselves of this humane procedure.

Perhaps we should learn from the story of Percy Bridgman, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist who, at 79, was entering the final stages of terminal cancer. On Aug. 20, 1961, Bridgman shot himself to death, leaving a suicide note lamenting the fact that he had no better option available to him.

The note said, in part, "It is not decent for society to make a man do this to himself."

Fifty years later and this indecent situation has not improved.

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