There’s been plenty to read on Andrew Sullivan’s blog this week on the question of assisted suicide. Amongst the posts and pieces to which Andrew has linked is this one by the New York Times’s Ross Douthat to which Mother Jones’s Kevin Drum had this fine retort:
So what’s the objection to assisted suicide? This is where it gets weird. Douthat argues that it’s a slippery slope: if terminally ill patients are allowed to kill themselves, what’s to stop anyone else who wants to do it? Nothing, he says, as the example of Dignitas, a Swiss assisted suicide clinic, shows. And technically that’s true: about a fifth of Dignitas’s clients aren’t terminally ill, but merely weary of life. But think about that number: it means that perhaps 200 weary people have used Dignitas’s services over the past decade or so. That’s something like 20 per year.
In other words, even after a decade in business, Dignitas almost certainly isn’t doing anything to spur suicides and it hasn’t created a tidal wave of people wanting to die. Like so many other things, it merely provides an additional option for the well off (Dignitas charges about $6,000 to perform an assisted suicide). The less well off simply continue to swallow bottles of aspirin or jump off bridges.
So, again: what’s the problem? More than anything else, I think this column illustrates the perils of taking a religiously motivated belief and trying to justify it on secular grounds. It just doesn’t work. The slippery slope here pretty obviously doesn’t amount to much, so you’re left with a simple disapproval of people deciding to take their own lives. And what’s the argument for that? Douthat doesn’t provide one. He simply declares it murder and calls it a day. Without recourse to his underlying religious objections, that’s really his only choice.
But of course, that’s the real slippery slope. If the state is allowed to prohibit me from killing myself, what else is the state allowed to do? Can it force me to accept medical treatment that will save my life? Can it force me to accept medical treatment that might save my life? If not, why?
Quite.
Douthat responds here:
The slippery slope that I discussed in the column doesn’t amount to much if you don’t disapprove at all of people deciding to take their own lives.
To which one must point out that it is possible to disapprove of something without believing that it should be made illegal.