Colleen Kegg hasn’t worked out the details of her exit plan yet. But about one thing, Kegg is clear: When she can no longer feed herself or go to the bathroom without assistance, she will take steps to end her life. A rare and incurable neurological disease is gradually stealing the things the 60-year-old Santa Barbara-area resident lives for, and she wishes a California physician could legally prescribe life-ending medication, as doctors can in Oregon, Washington and Montana. Instead, she’ll have to find another way.
“I know I can stop eating and drinking,” Kegg told me one evening in her sister’s home, her speech already slowed by corticobasal degeneration, a condition somewhat similar to Parkinson’s and Lou Gehrig’s disease.
To Kegg and her family, it seems unjust that how she must die is dictated in part by law, and influenced by religious convictions and social mores she doesn’t share. Starving herself could make death drag out for a couple of weeks, while just north of the state border, people can say their goodbyes and leave on their terms, quickly, comfortably and peacefully.
Well, at one level that’s the problem for all of us. The law prohibits things that we might be okay with, and for reasons we don’t share. I’m sure more than a couple of murderers in the US have had how they must die dictated in part by law, and influenced by convictions and social mores they don’t share. While this is cast as a freedom of choice issue, it is really just another example of something universal – live in a broader group with laws, and those laws will govern your life whether you agree with them or not.
More fundamentally, no person is an island alone to themselves. If society opts to remove the stigma and prohibition on suicide in certain circumstances, then it is almost impossible for it to also put funds and social support into people not suiciding in those circumstances. Why fund costly palliative care when that’s just the hang-up of religious types and there’s a cheaper option for society?
Your right to choose in this instance takes away (or profoundly limits) someone else’s right not to choose.
RE: “To Kegg and her family, it seems unjust that how she must die is dictated in part by law, and influenced by religious convictions and social mores she doesn’t share.”
Of course, the main issue is that “how she must die” involves *co-optiong* and allowing other person to make moral decisions that allow her death!
Rightly, the law says “no — you may not enjoin a physician to prescribe you drugs to kill yourself — go pull the trigger yourself if you must.”
Once euthanasia is legally allowed, of course, physicians will then be forced to go along, or “refer” to another physician, and then discriminated against because they do not — just like the physicians who are not pro-abortion or pro-birth control. Fascism all goes together, and in this case, the people who don’t have the willingness to place a gun to their temple and blow themselves away wish to force others to give them the drugs or worse, force others to actually *deliver* the death dealing blog themselves.