Dignity, not Death

How do we determine the value of a life?

I opened my Substack inbox on April 1 and was struck by the very pretty face of a young woman leaning contentedly on a man’s chest. The story headline read, “I’m 28. And I’m Scheduled to Die in May.” It wasn’t a joke.

As I read the story, I was more and more horrified that life has become so cheap that unhappiness is often enough to generate assisted suicide in many parts of the West. The woman, age 28, said that her decision to die was based on her depression, autism, and borderline personality disorder, none of which classifies as a terminal illness, and each of which can be successfully treated. She wants to be “freed from life.”

Her story (I choose not to name her here) serves as an illustration of what happens when the value of human life is determined by superficialities like unmet expectations, feelings, and a culture that has abandoned any notion of God. One of the people interviewed for the article said that, in his term on a Dutch euthanasia review board, death as a last resort morphed into a default option for a society that has both destigmatized suicide and glamorized death.

There is no question that a mental health crisis covers much of the Western world. Some blame technology, while others attribute it to the isolation of the COVID protocols. Whatever the cause, suicide rates have increased the last few years, and there is mounting pressure for legalizing medically assisted suicide across the West.

“Some people describe medically assisted dying as the next big shift in social attitudes and that, just like the abolition of slavery, the emancipation of women and the legalisation of gay marriage, the voices raised against it will at a certain point be overwhelmed by the tide of opinion in its favour, and it will come to be seen as a further step along the path of individual human rights…sometimes the rightness or wrongness of a thing can only be tested by trying it out.”
(Wittenberg-Cox, 2022)

To equate suicide by request to slavery and suffrage is a horrifying thought. Emancipation and civic participation sought to improve lives, communities, and nations, not create a pathway to easy death. The AMA Code of Medical Ethics clearly states, “Euthanasia is fundamentally incompatible with the physician’s role as healer, would be difficult or impossible to control, and would pose serious societal risks.” The current trend toward physician-assisted suicide bears out the ethical implications of the AMA code. There is a vast difference between palliative care, even to sedation, for patients at the end of life and murder, which is essentially what euthanasia is. Physician- assisted suicide is not a route to dignified death, but rather a slippery slope to genocide. Canada postponed expanding its “Medical Assistance in Dying” (MAiD) laws because poor people were already offered assisted suicide as an alternative to expensive, government-funded treatments for chronic conditions. Choosing death in Canada no longer requires imminent natural death by age or disease as a limitation. Now mental illness, disability, and chronic illness are sufficient for medically-assisted suicide, as long as

“the person has been informed of the means available to relieve their suffering, including, where appropriate, counselling services, mental health and disability support services, community services and palliative care and has been offered consultations with relevant professionals who provide those services or that care”
(Statutes of Canada, 2021).

If the bar is set so low already, how long will it take to extend the opportunity to gracefully bow out of living and reduce the burdens on governments, caregivers, and families for any illness or disability? The Dutch woman celebrating her imminent “freedom from life” may well become a heroine of the pro-death organizers rather than a wake-up call.

For those who argue that there are safeguards in place to limit systemic abuse of physician-assisted suicide, I point to the already devolving “safeguards” in Canada and the Netherlands, along with places in the U.S., Australia, and several other Western countries. MAiD, for example, was conceived to protect doctors who offered lethal doses of morphine or other drugs to their patients who were near death and dealing with unrelenting, untreatable pain. In only a few years the law has been amended to require physicians and pharmacists to either administer the deadly dose or refer patients to someone who will. Additionally, Catalina Devandas, of the United Nations Human Rights Office, said in 2020,

“People with disabilities are genuinely concerned that these developments could result in new eugenic practices and further undermine social acceptance and solidarity towards disability – and more broadly, towards human diversity.”
(OHCHR, 2020)

If, as right-to-die advocates hope, “death kits” will be readily available to those who can afford them, there is no reason not to expect black market versions to hit the streets soon afterward. Anyone who has paid attention in most suburban towns across the US can testify to the number of Semaglutide or THC signs that popped up on every corner as soon as the drugs were either decriminalized or made available for off-label uses. Someone will be willing and able to fill a market need for something to end lives in socially acceptable ways. Already, Kenneth Law of Canada successfully sold “suicide kits” containing lethal doses of sodium nitrite for $75 online. He was charged with 14 counts of second-degree murder, among other things, but he also sold up to 1,200 kits across the world (Newton,2023). He won’t be the last one to offer discounted services.

There is good reason that the top eight medical professional groups oppose physician-assisted suicide. A position paper in the Annals of Internal Medicine notes, “Society’s goal should be to make dying less, not more, medical.” Addressing end-of-life care through hospice and palliative care is not the same as ending life through a medically assisted death. Palliative care offers dignity and compassion by mitigating pain and increasing comfort to the dying, not hastening death. Dignity and compassion address the value of a person, made in the Imago Dei. A twisted view of self-determination and individual autonomy says that progressive postmodern secularism includes a right-to-die as an extension of the my-body-my-choice debate.

The value of life is not self-determined. The three Abrahamic religions of the world each teach that life is a gift from the Creator. Only God, who created humans in His image (Imago Dei) must determine the length of days for each. Life’s value is intrinsic, not instrumental. Only humans experience the sacred, across religions and cultures. Battlefields are often marked as sacred, houses of worship are considered sacred, even moments in time may be considered sacred. The angels see the sacred, but cannot fully experience sacredness (1 Peter 1:12). Humans represent the pinnacle of God’s creation; through the fifth day everything was good (טוֹב), but not until the creation of humans did the Lord call His work exceedingly good (טוֹב מְאֹד).

The notion that human life has no intrinsic value underscores both absurdist and nihilistic philosophies. Perhaps the most famous (infamous?) nihilist, Nietzsche, followed the ideals of the early Skeptics, whose primary belief was that nothing is certain and knowledge itself does not connect to truth, but rather to things people want to believe. Modern versions of nihilism include the post-modern claim that truth is individualistic: “My truth” has a direct correlation to the desire to be “freed from life.” “My truth” is patently ridiculous, as the two terms are mutually exclusive; if there is no Truth, it doesn’t matter whose it is.

Absurdist playwrights ably illustrate a world without Truth and where human life has no intrinsic value. John-Paul Sartre’s vision of hell (No Exit) as a waiting area where nothing happens and Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, wherein characters kill time in idle conversation waiting for someone to arrive, express the futility of being human in a meaningless world:

“Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it’s awful…We’ll hang ourselves tomorrow, Unless Godot comes.”
(Beckett, 1957, 28, 69)

If life has no meaning and if nothing is sacred, then it’s no wonder people whose lives don’t seem to go according to plan, choose to opt out of living. But life does have meaning and there are sacred things and experiences in this world. Personal dignity results from being created in the image of God. Whether or not a person believes in the authority and grace of God does not change the Truth. No matter how many gods a culture embraces or creates, nothing creates order without Truth, and Truth has a name: Jesus. Moreover, Truth declares that humans are beloved of God the Father.

The psalmist wrote,

When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars, which you have set in place,
what is man that you are mindful of him,
and the son of man that you care for him?

Yet you have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings
and crowned him with glory and honor.
You have given him dominion over the works of your hands;
you have put all things under his feet,
all sheep and oxen,
and also the beasts of the field,
the birds of the heavens, and the fish of the sea,
whatever passes along the paths of the seas.
(Psalm 8:3-8)

God gave humans dignity when He positioned man as a little lower than the angels. Humans didn’t earn dignity or worth; it was bestowed upon them without regard to anything material like ethnicity, gender, or social status. No matter what the culture may promote, people bear the fingerprints of God on their very being.

Furthermore, God loves people. Jesus taught that the greatest commandment was “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength,” adding “the second is like it: love your neighbor as yourself.” Why does love for God and neighbor come before all other commands? Because God’s love is what gives individuals value. Or, as Thielicke (1969) offered “God does not love us because we are so valuable; we are valuable because God loves us” (110). If God’s love instills value and dignity into humankind, then it is that same love that allows people to love God and others in ways that elevate their worth.

The nihilists and absurdists may deny Truth, but when they do, the resulting relativism serves to negate their ideals of truth. Thielicke said it better, “As soon as truth ceases to be a binding authority that stands above a man, it becomes a merely servile function whose purpose is to give some kind of legitimacy to his interests” (24). In the case of medically-assisted suicide, the consequences of turning truth into a servant of self-interest are permanent. No opportunities for repentance, rethinking, or renewal exists for the one who chooses death over treatment of mental illness, poverty, or existential nihilism. Thielicke added,

“The real nihilist is frequently a man who is wallowing in his wounds in a self-tormenting masochism. He does not keep silent about his dreadful secret; he talks about it. And he talks about it with exclamation points and with a smile that one may well dread. He gazes into the abyss until the abyss gazes into him; he is intoxicated by its vertiginous fascination. He actually seeks out the lonely, echoing mountain walls from which he hears the echo of the agonizing mockery of his own laughter.”
(Thielicke 26)

The young woman whose decision to schedule her assisted suicide illustrates the final step in the mockery. She is completely self-absorbed in her mental and emotional pain, which is real, but because she declines to see the sacred experiences of life, the only thing she gazes into is the abyss of herself. The abyss stares back and all she can do is “draw a line and call it quits” (Thielicke, 29). Her view that there is no God and that life with pain and suffering is meaningless. If there is no God beyond the self, life is absurd.

Christians, building on the traditions of their Abrahamic forebears, hope with expectation more than absurdity or nihilism. There is meaning to life. There is value and dignity in each individual and in that individual’s place in community. No one is useless. No one is without intrinsic worth. Peter wrote,

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! According to his great mercy, he has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, to an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you, who by God’s power are being guarded through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time. In this you rejoice, though now for a little while, if necessary, you have been grieved by various trials, so that the tested genuineness of your faith—more precious than gold that perishes though it is tested by fire—may be found to result in praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ. Though you have not seen him, you love him. Though you do not now see him, you believe in him and rejoice with joy that is inexpressible and filled with glory,obtaining the outcome of your faith, the salvation of your souls.
(1 Peter 1:3-9)

Suffering is part of the human condition, but it is temporary. It is not a sign that life is futile, nor does it indicate the depth of a person’s value. C.S. Lewis (1940) wrote that excluding the possibility of suffering within the existence of free will in nature excludes life itself. The reality of suffering and the goodness of God coexist in this current world. That people cannot reconcile the two does not mean that the world is absurd and living is futile, but rather that the human mind cannot comprehend the paradox. Lewis added, “It passes reason to explain why any creatures, not to say creatures such as we, should have a value so prodigious in their Creator’s eyes” (388). He continued,

The problem of reconciling human suffering with the existence of a God who loves, is only insoluble so long as we attach a trivial meaning to the word ‘love,’ and look on things as if man were the centre of them. Man is not the centre. God does not exist for the sake of man. Man does not exist for his own sake…We were made, not primarily that we may love God (though we were made for that, too) but that God may love us.
(Lewis 388)

Suffering drives people to God by destroying the illusion that humans control anything or that they can be self-sufficient. Pain, when understood in the context of free will, points to the need for repentance and redemption. Pain is the place where justice intersects with mercy. God’s allowing of pain in human lives is not to deprive people of happiness or satisfaction, but to draw them into the joy of unity with Him for which they were created.

The Church must work with renewed energy to fight against the absurdity that leads to self-annihilation. She must remind the culture that the Creator loves and imbues people with value, worth, and dignity. Life is a gift. Dignity does not manifest itself in murder, but rather in the genuine love and comfort from one person of worth to another. To care for the sick, the widows, and the orphans is the calling of the Church. That call seems increasingly difficult to work out in the postmodern, post-Christian world, but it has never been more important.

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Resources

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