Where do people go when they die? Beginning soon, the answer might be California.
Jerry Brown, the state’s Democratic governor, signed a bill this week that he said was about “whether the state of California should continue to make it a crime for a dying person to end his life.”
Gov. Brown isn’t telling the truth. He did not merely repeal a state law against suicide. Rather, he signed a bill that allows certain licensed professionals to become accomplices in the killing of others.
The new law empowers doctors to prescribe lethal drugs to patients who request it, provided they have been diagnosed with a terminal illness and given less than six months to live.
There is a very good reason the American Medical Association opposed this bill and has consistently opposed others like it, for it’s been two and a half millennia (at least) since our forebears recognized that “helping others kill themselves” is a recipe for social disaster. In the Fifth Century B.C., Hippocrates forbade those he trained as doctors from administering poison to anyone, even if they asked for it. The Hippocratic Oath set the reasonable standard that killing is not a form of health care.
One reason for this pre-Christian ethical norm was to preserve the integrity of the medical profession. Hippocrates’ exhortation to “do no harm” has instilled public trust in the medical profession over the millennia and made doctors the most admired professionals in society. Doctors are trusted because they are healers with a moral code, not just scientific experts who possess the knowledge and skill to heal or kill as they feel the situation dictates.
Suicide is something anyone can choose and commit and something society rightly tries to discourage, even if no law can prevent it. But when the state empowers third parties to help in the killing, and specifically those entrusted with the power to preserve life, it is effectively giving suicide an endorsement.
This state sanction of suicide, and its sanitization through the involvement of the profession that the public still instinctively trusts, will put new pressure on those who suffer from painful or expensive illnesses to think themselves a burden on others. As it has already in other states and in some European countries, this law will change the expectations placed upon those who believe they are approaching the end of life, such that a “right to die” becomes a perceived “duty to die.”
Moreover, the promise of a state-sanctioned accomplice will offer what seems to be a good way out for those suffering from the undiagnosed depression that often results from terminal medical diagnoses. California’s new law offers no screening or other protection for the depressed, nor for those who have simply been misdiagnosed or told they have months to live when they might have years instead.
Under the California law’s own terms, oversight of the process will be non-existent. Family members, who might otherwise try to persuade their loved ones not to kill themselves, can be kept in the dark — again, with state sanction. No witness to the death is required to ensure that the “patient” took the drugs voluntarily rather than coerced or even murdered after having second thoughts.
As the law states, information reported to the state by doctors about patients’ suicide “shall not be disclosed, discoverable, or compelled to be produced in any civil, criminal, administrative, or other proceeding.” Given that language, standard for purposes of medical privacy but not typically associated with killing, no doctor could ever be sued by a grieving family for mistakenly or deliberately helping poison a perfectly healthy person. Doctors may soon find themselves in greater legal peril when they try to heal patients than when they help kill them.
The Netherlands legalized assisted suicide in 2002, and it has since come to account for about 4 percent of deaths in that country. California’s law is an almost incredibly irresponsible measure. It implicates the state government and the medical profession in killings of the innocent. It will also give more power to the strong, and increase the vulnerability of the weakest in society.
