I’m not happy to tell you that I live in the same state as the disqualified pathologist, Jack “the Dripper” Kevorkian, Dr. Death. But his diabolical campaign to legalize “physician-assisted suicide” (PAS) is just one of a dozen or more frontal assaults that are charging across the moral landscape at the end of the Twentieth Century. Never could it be more rightly declared: “Modern man is staggering between Vanity Fair and Armageddon.”
Of course, what has brought this graying of the soul is not simply the graying of the North American population, but the slow erosion of the value of human life. If I was not made in the image of God, but am merely a random cosmic accident, what do I matter? If my coming into the world was an amoral choice–offered by the courts–to allow tissue to become Me, does it matter that I am Me?
No longer does suffering count for anything in the Western mindset. If there was no Purposer who made me on purpose, then obviously there is no purpose to suffering–or to life in general, for that matter.
The trivializing of life and death was seen in a recent editorial cartoon. A physician was peering at the index finger of a well-built young man. “That’s a nasty looking sliver,” says the doctor. “Have you considered euthanasia?”
In this Issues issue of Uplook we do consider some of the ethical questions being discussed in college dorms and office lunch rooms. We would do well to think through the Bible’s position on these present-day controversies. We ought to “be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you with meekness and fear” (1 Pet. 3:15).
Suffering avoidance is one of the main motivations for many of the immoral decisions being made today. Babies are aborted because the mother is disadvantaged, unwilling to bear the inconveniences her pregnancy is about to bring into her life. Both “passive” and “active” euthanasia are said to provide the terminal patient with an alternative to unbearable suffering. But as the barriers fall in this area, it’s not always the patient’s suffering that is critical in the decision-making process.
The Netherlands has winked at, if not sanctioned PAS for some years. The Dutch government reported that–in what was a “voluntary” program–1,000 patients were killed without their consent being given!
Edmund Pellegrino, professor of medical ethics at Georgetown University Medical Center (metropolitan Washington, DC), is quoted in a recent Christianity Today article: “It is often more compassionate for the frustrated physician or hurting family than it is for the patient. In fact, assisted suicide is really a noncompassionate form of moral abandonment.”
In another telling quote from the same article, Pellegrino asked a Dutch physician, “How does it feel to do euthanasia?”
“It’s hard the first time,” was the response.
Dennis was an acquaintance I had met in Manitoba. He had suffered most of his life. The Lord took him Home a few years ago after a battle with an increasingly debilitating disease. I believe he was 44 years old.
It may be fifteen Manitoba winters ago that I was having meetings out there. Dennis, as I recall, had been on his way to the hospital by ambulance when it was involved in an accident–or so we would call it.
When I arrived at his hospital room, his thin face broke into a smile, and he greeted me as if he was enjoying the view from a lawn chair on a perfect summer day.
“Brother Dennis,” I asked, somewhat taken aback, “what are you thinking right now?”
He pointed to a verse in his open Bible and quoted it for me: “I will mention the lovingkindnesses of the Lord, and the praises of the Lord, according to all that the Lord hath bestowed on us, and the great goodness toward the house of Israel, which He hath bestowed on them according to His mercies, and according to the multitude of His lovingkindnesses” (Isa. 63:7).
For Dennis, suffering avoidance was a non-issue. He knew that his Father knew best.