Is our government too authoritarian? If you are a Tea Partier or a Republican (am I correct to distinguish between them?) your answer is almost certainly “yes”. I couldn’t agree more strongly. A woman no longer with us, Terri Schiavo, presumably shared our viewpoint, though she couldn’t have articulated it from that day in February of 1990 when she suffered massive brain damage due to cardiac arrest. Our government, including even the President, denied her the right to die with dignity during a 7-year litigious free-for-all. What I believe I have in common with her, and with her husband, is the right to designate – or to have my loved ones designate for me – the conditions and perhaps the day of my demise.
Starting with the day my life is deprived of any meaningful quality, I will begin to despise my government for not letting me have the right to call it quits. Someone elses morality and laws based on scripture deprive me of the right to deal with my useless body and my failed mind in the way I deem most appropriate.
If government, the church, and the medical community had less power, then all of my most important decisions would belong to me or to relatives I trust. I wish in vain for the right to die in dignity at the time of my own choosing. I yearn for the day when my country will be adult enough to discuss dispassionately the issues that Dr. Kevorkian tried to help us confront. The irony is that this will all come about, but not in my lifetime.
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