By Rollin Grams, Bible and Mission.
Introduction
When suicide is discussed in terms of ‘assisted suicide’, the category of care for the suffering is brought into focus. One is no longer speaking of suicide in Roman terms as an honourable death. Nor is one siding with the Greeks in the virtue for medical practice of doing no harm. As we shall see, we are not thinking of suicide in the repulsive, Darwinian sense of eugenics. We are now casting the matter of killing in terms of care.
Assisted suicide separates ‘killing’ from ‘care’. Euthanasia involves combining the two: someone else makes the decision—from a sense of caring—and performs the act. When someone insinuates him or herself into another’s suicide, one is not simply offering assistance. One is actually abandoning medical and other forms of care and becoming complicit in the act. Coercion from family, friends, medical providers, and/or insurance agencies is also possible, and I would say probable. Once a practice is established in a culture for suicidal assistance, the culture will develop a narrative that underlies and undergirds the moral convictions, which will become entrench the practice in the culture. One of the questions that must be asked is, ‘Do we really want to be this sort of people?’, not just, ‘Should this person not be assisted with his or her suicide?’
As the culture moves toward accepting assisted suicide, the government can step in to legislate, provide services for, and enforce the practice. The more centralised and powerful the government, the more it will engage in social engineering to enforce the convictions and remove dissidents. This is one of the major concerns that those opposed to assisted suicide entertain, especially in socialist countries with national health systems. A society moves from care to complicity to coercion to enforced convictions.