This past week, news broke that the Canadian government would offer euthanasia to those who have mental disorders, including people with addiction problems. This is on top of the existing euthanasia policies from our neighbors to the north which promote doctor-prescribed suicide as a healthy alternative for the sick, the disabled, or the depresseda medicine placed on par with any other wholesome healthcare treatment. The sanctity of life, once held as a paramount virtue, is finding itself challenged by a new ethos that seeks to redefine the very heart of morality. If we allow this trend to continue unchecked, we may find ourselves in a society that values life not for its inherent worth, but rather for its perceived qualitya perilous threat to the very foundations upon which our civilization is built. <\/p>\n
Our Canadian neighbors have embraced this perverted culture of death with open arms, legalizing euthanasia at an alarming rate. This has cast a shadow upon much of our own country, for such decisions by modern political leaders are spreading throughout many of our own states, marking a significant departure from the steady values that have long governed our society. Oregon, for example, just recently extended its own euthanasia law to non-residents, making all Americans eligible to travel to their state, fill a simple script from a doctor at one of their local pharmacies, lay down in a hotel room, swallow a cocktail of poison that destroys their organs, and kill themselves. To ensure these physician-assisted suicides are done with dignity, however, social workers come by afterwards to collect the bodies. <\/p>\n
Societies should not be judged on the basis of how well they provide for the happiness of their young, healthy, and wealthy members, but for how well they provide for their elderly, their sick, and their poor. The former group relies, to a greater extent, on their individual strength to carry them through their pursuit of happinessthe latter relies on the aid of others. That the strong members of a society are happy proves virtually nothing about the character of that society. On the contrary, that the weak are happy comes to prove that others have helped them, demonstrating that the bonds between family, friends, and neighbors are loving and efficacious, and that the social fabric of such a society is strong. In our case, the happiness of the elderly, the sick, and the poor of West Virginia can be proof that our people are knit together in a resilient community, rather than thrown together by mere geographic proximity. <\/p>\n
For this reason alone, it is necessary that the practice of euthanasia, which intentionally encourages and ultimately enacts the suicide of the elderly and the infirmed, remain as foreign to the common life of West Virginia as it is to the health of any just and reasonable society. Instead of that unconditional commitment to love and service by which individuals transcend their own individuality and begin to live as a community, euthanasia offers only conditionality, which measures each and every person against standards of living that may well find them wanting. Instead of occasions to test and prove the promises we make to love each other no matter what, euthanasia degrades infirmity, old age, and the compassion these weaknesses can elicit into occasions to care for each other only so much, within a narrow extent, and under only finite conditions of convenience. In this manner, euthanasia, while allegedly limiting its impact only to the end of life, actually demoralizes everyone at all stages of life, limiting our noblest social impulses by characterizing life itself as only conditionally worth living, while reducing the care for those who suffer to a mere option, rather than the sacred duty of those who have to give of themselves to those who have not. <\/p>\n
The desire by those who are suffering to kill themselves is not a sign of a banal need to be met by the provision of some appropriate technology, but a sure sign of social collapse. No one with a love for our state and its people could provide such suicidal desire with the means to its destructive end. Good conscience and common sense urge us to instead eradicate whatever grim causes of suicidal desire afflict our West Virginia community. To do otherwise would be to adopt an unequal and irrational policy by which suicidal ideation in the young and otherwise healthy is treated as an illness in want of a cure, while suicidal ideation in the elderly and infirm is treated as a demand in need of a supply. Such a two-faced answer to the timeless question of whether life is worth living makes a mockery of good and prudential government, while giving credence to the cynicism that so often sees in the rule of law nothing more than a favoring of the strong over the weak. Ultimately, such a dreadful policy forces the state and its representatives to determine between good and bad suicide, thus expanding the states authority beyond every reasonable limit, inciting it to act as a god amongst men. <\/p>\n
To any such apparent demand for euthanasia, nothing but a society wide effort of reform will serve as an adequate response. Such a campaign against the despairing loneliness and lack of meaning in life, spreading from the nihilism of our present age, must include the active encouragement of friendship, intergenerational family life, meaningful work, civic participation, the uplifting of our communities with beautiful architecture, festivals and holidays to celebrate our common life together, compassionate medical care, a culture of genuine love and appreciation for the elderly, and the unequivocal affirmation that every human life, no matter what suffering it bears, is never a burden to be done away with, but a gift of infinite and interminable goodness from that which is True and Beautiful. <\/p>\n
It is not the case that the technical consent of the infirmed and elderly to their own suicide renders euthanasia as something just and good. We are social creatures, apt to act on each others desires and meet each others expectations in order to keep a broad and abiding peace. When a society enshrines in its law, decrees in its conventional wisdom, and affirms in its practice the possibility of licit suicide, it is a vain pretense to imagine that such validations are not themselves formative of individual desirethat they do not suggest, in morally-empowered terms, suicide as a responsible and law-abiding solution to the problem of pain. The very possibility that doctors, whose authority in our society can be profound, may prescribe suicide as a solution to a terminal disease or disheartening prognosis, presents the act as a medicine rather than as the definitive rejection of all medicine, and so encourages suicidal desire to flourish. Euthanasia is not a solution to a need, but is rather productive of the very need that it purports to fulfill. <\/p>\n
Our great state of West Virginia ought to preemptively reject euthanasia by an amendment to our state constitution, for this accords with our tradition of patriotism. A healthy commonwealth relies on the virtues of its members, and a well-functioning republic demands that those who participate in it embody a minimum of goodwill, prudence, and fortitude by which the individual is enabled to love the common good and to sacrifice his own interests for its sake. A community which does not foster this patriotism is a community in name only, a mere collective mix of individuals unwilling to live as members of a social body that both includes and transcends them. <\/p>\n
This patriotism, which sustains and nourishes West Virginia, is a seed sown in the soil of the family and a lesson learned in the school of friendship. These lessons of love are severely disrupted by euthanasia, which would encourage healthy residents of our state to facilitate the suicide of those whose age and infirmity would otherwise call forth their loving sacrifice, even as it would encourage those in our state who suffer to see themselves as a burden to their friends rather than as an occasion for their heroic love and virtue. A people accustomed to euthanizing their fathers are not a people prepared to sacrifice themselves for their fathers home, and children raised under advertisements recommending suicide are not children who are being raised ready to suffer and give of themselves for the good of our state. Euthanasia destroys the solidarity of the family, and through this root, it would ultimately help destroy the character of West Virginia. <\/p>\n
The rejection of euthanasia as utterly foreign to the spirit of West Virginia is a commitment to keeping our hands free of innocent blood and to professing, in all humility, a limitation to the power of the state, which cannot administer death as a cure for pain without usurping divine prerogatives. Such a limitation is also a protection against the avarice and cynicism of a wealthy elite who stand to gainand profitthrough the disruption of the stable and peaceful custom by which families in our state love each other, bear with one another, and care for their sick and dying. <\/p>\n
Against this culture of death, we must offer a vision of a restored and rejuvenated West Virginia, a community whose strength is known by the happiness of the weak, the infirmed, and the elderly, who are not only aided and assisted by their family, friends, and society until the day they die, but whose very suffering is the irreplaceable means by which we may transcend ourselves, enter deeply into communion with one another, fulfill our nature as social creatures, and learn the sacrificial love that can so often give life true meaning. <\/p>\n
(Pat McGeehan is a six-term state delegate. He resides in Chester). <\/p>\n
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