Pop media soft-peddling death
As usual, it’s being done under the disguise of compassion.
This storyline is getting mainstreamed, and even if well-intended, it’s dangerous.
I often think back on the tumultuous year that lapsed between my mother’s announcement that she wanted to “end things” and the night she succumbed to a lack of food and water, along with an intentional overdose of morphine.
The gulf in between is unchartered territory for families who haven’t been there yet, so this story is plausibly their eventual story, and they’re reading with an uneasy but inquisitive interest, no doubt.
What, I wonder, could my sisters and I have done differently? Should we have tried harder to talk her out of it? Insisted that she talk to a psychiatrist? Made sure she didn’t have access to lethal drugs or medications?
These are the kinds of difficult questions that face the friends and relatives of sick and elderly people who express a wish to end their lives. As my sisters and I can testify, the emotions stirred up by such a request can be intense and overwhelming. In our case, they ranged from sadness that our mother found her situation intolerable (she was suffering from advanced Parkinson’s disease), to disappointment that she was “giving up,” to anxiety at the prospect of being there when she did it.
As my friend Nancy Valko points out about this story, which she saw featured on Oprah a while back:
The moral is apparently that when we put our own so-called bias aside and support the suicial person who has “the predictable effects of living with a SERIOUS OR DEBILITATING disease”, we will all benefit. (emphasis added)
Valko says this is dead wrong.
We have to get the point across that suicide is always the wrong “choice” and that we cannot discriminate when it comes to suicide prevention and treatment.
She knows this firsthand, both professionally as a longtime pro-life nurse/bioethics expert and personally as the mother of a young woman who tragically ended her own life.
Suicide is an unmitigated horror that is being soft-pedaled to the public while putting vulnerable people at risk as well as destroying our medical and legal ethics.
Don’t buy into this pop culture PR about ‘death with dignity’ because it isn’t. And what they’re peddling as ‘self-determination’ is nearly always someone else’s determination to hasten death exonerated by semantics.
Take the advice of Terri Schiavo’s family. Don’t wait until it happens to you to get informed about what to do, when it may be too late.
