Hi there,
There can be no more persuasive explanation than an attractive, intelligent young woman with tears trickling down her cheeks. As she dabs at her eyes, the trembling words always sound heart-piercingly right. Perhaps from an evolutionary perspective, we're programmed to agree with her, because young women are meant to transmit life.
It's the tears that sweep us away in the videos which Brittany Maynard has made with assisted suicide activists at Compassion and Choices, not the ideas. With more than 9 million hits on YouTube, it must have been the best-ever advertisement for right-to-die lobby. The ideas are pretty shop-worn. Marcia Angell, a campaigner for assisted suicide and a former editor of theNew England Journal of Medicine, puts them in a nutshell in a recent Washington Post op-ed: "people are increasingly asking why anyone -- the state, the medical profession, religious leaders -- would presume to tell someone else that they must continue to die by inches, against their will."
Laws must be changed, in other words, to support Brittany's absolute autonomy. But if this is the case, isn't it discriminatory to restrict this to the terminally ill? Why not lovelorn teenagers or impecunious grandmothers? It's a blindingly obvious objection which is not refuted in the video.
Ironically, tears were used by the Nazis to persuade Germans to support assisted suicide. Brittany's beautiful wedding photos, her artfully scripted message, the lachrymose piano chords, her family's words of love and support -- they all remind me of a competent 1941 German melodrama called Ich Klage An (I Accuse). The beautiful young wife of a doctor begs for release before she becomes "deaf, blind, idiotic"; the family doctor refuses; her husband obliges. In a final speech to the jury her grieving husband accuses the law of being inhumane.
It seemed like a good argument then; it seems like a good argument now. A big problem though, in both cases, is what comes afterwards...
Thankfully Brittany has decided that life is still too good to say farewell. She wants to live and she has cancelled today's rendezvous with death. She is a beautiful, intelligent woman. I hope that she sticks around for a lot longer.
It's the tears that sweep us away in the videos which Brittany Maynard has made with assisted suicide activists at Compassion and Choices, not the ideas. With more than 9 million hits on YouTube, it must have been the best-ever advertisement for right-to-die lobby. The ideas are pretty shop-worn. Marcia Angell, a campaigner for assisted suicide and a former editor of theNew England Journal of Medicine, puts them in a nutshell in a recent Washington Post op-ed: "people are increasingly asking why anyone -- the state, the medical profession, religious leaders -- would presume to tell someone else that they must continue to die by inches, against their will."
Laws must be changed, in other words, to support Brittany's absolute autonomy. But if this is the case, isn't it discriminatory to restrict this to the terminally ill? Why not lovelorn teenagers or impecunious grandmothers? It's a blindingly obvious objection which is not refuted in the video.
Ironically, tears were used by the Nazis to persuade Germans to support assisted suicide. Brittany's beautiful wedding photos, her artfully scripted message, the lachrymose piano chords, her family's words of love and support -- they all remind me of a competent 1941 German melodrama called Ich Klage An (I Accuse). The beautiful young wife of a doctor begs for release before she becomes "deaf, blind, idiotic"; the family doctor refuses; her husband obliges. In a final speech to the jury her grieving husband accuses the law of being inhumane.
It seemed like a good argument then; it seems like a good argument now. A big problem though, in both cases, is what comes afterwards...
Thankfully Brittany has decided that life is still too good to say farewell. She wants to live and she has cancelled today's rendezvous with death. She is a beautiful, intelligent woman. I hope that she sticks around for a lot longer.
Michael Cook
Editor
BioEdge
Editor
BioEdge
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