Euthanasia and Physician-Assisted Suicide: Killing or Caring?
By Michael Manning, M.D. (New York: Paulist Press, 120 pages, $14.50, ISBN: 0-8091-3804-2)
For a concise and understandable summary of euthanasia, you could hardly do better than Michael Manning’s Euthanasia and Physician-Assisted Suicide: Killing or Caring? This short but thorough book begins by clearly stating what the euthanasia debate is: “Is it morally, and so ought it be legally permissible, for a physician to take the life of a competent, terminally ill patient who requests it, or for a physician to assist the competent, terminally ill patient in taking his or her own life?” The book is written from a Roman Catholic perspective.
After examining ancient practices and ideas, Catholic teaching, the idea of “the common good,” the role of doctors in medicine, slippery-slope arguments in both theory and practice, and the psychological and sociological impact of a lessening respect for the sanctity of life, Manning says it is morally wrong for a doctor to “help” a patient to die.
For those who think comparisons to the repulsive eugenics program of Nazi Germany is wrong, Manning presents a short and ominous history. In 1934, special Genetic Health Courts forced those at risk of genetic diseases to be sterilized. Soon afterward, it became standard practice not to treat the terminally ill. By August 1941 more than 70,000 “incurable” patients from mental hospitals were gassed (individual lethal injections became too cumbersome). Handicapped infants were routinely killed as were non-terminally ill adults who required long-term psychiatric care or the elderly who required extensive nursing.
Thus Manning illustrates how if one exception is made to the rule against doctors killing their patients, soon the rule will fall apart. Today in the Netherlands it is technically illegal for a doctor to kill his patient, but in practice about one in 20 Dutch people who die each year are euthanized. Once a doctor can assist in a patient’s own suicide (physician-assisted suicide), soon the doctor may be able to kill the patient—with or without permission.
Manning finds that doctors have a duty to “do no harm,” that the autonomy of patients should not include the right to kill oneself, that killing a dying relative is not often for “compassionate” reasons (compassion dictates we should explore palliative care), and that society or “the common good” is best served by protecting life, not killing the sick. The underlying assumption throughout the book is that life is sacred and thus man does not have a right to take it from an innocent person.
This brief, readable, and informative book is a clarion call to all those who think there is a wide gap between physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia, and why both practices are wrong. For fifteen dollars and a few hours reading, Euthanasia and Physician-Assisted Suicide will perfectly illustrate why those who are pro-life should oppose anything that lessens the sanctity of life.
