Ross Douthat’s feelings about euthanasia are similar his take on the vagina: it’s icky, messy and not to be considered in polite company.
[…] We are all dying, day by day: do the terminally ill really occupy a completely different moral category from the rest? A cancer patient’s suffering isn’t necessarily more unbearable than the more indefinite agony of someone living with multiple sclerosis or quadriplegia or manic depression. And not every unbearable agony is medical: if a man losing a battle with Parkinson’s disease can claim the relief of physician-assisted suicide, then why not a devastated widower, or a parent who has lost her only child?This isn’t a hypothetical slippery slope. Jack Kevorkian spent his career putting this dark, expansive logic into practice. He didn’t just provide death to the dying; he helped anyone whose suffering seemed sufficient to warrant his deadly assistance. When The Detroit Free Press investigated his “practice” in 1997, it found that 60 percent of those he assisted weren’t actually terminally ill. In several cases, autopsies revealed “no anatomical evidence of disease.”
Kevin Drum makes all the obvious arguments against this weak slippery slope, but I want to go a bit farther. Why is it any of the government’s concern that people in all sorts of pain want to die? As long as all the reasonable safeguards are in place (checks for treatable depression, sufficient painkillers, etc), why is it grossly unpalatable that they are assisted in their journey from this vale of woe by a compassionate care provider? Is it so much better that they gargle some lead from a shotgun, walk in front of a bus or have a sketchy one-car accident? Because that’s what they’re doing in this messy, icky world of ours, despite the disapproval of scolds like Douthat.