Last September, I found myself — confused, groggy and irritable — staring into the surgical dome light of my local hospital’s emergency room.
I had been found by a passing police officer, not breathing, and with no pulse, after my ventilator hose had become disconnected and severe hypoxia kicked in.
Cardiopulmonary resuscitation brought me back, and I’d been transported to the ER. I was alive — thanks to the determination of law enforcers and local medical personnel to keep me that way.
New York’s proposed Medical Aid in Dying Act threatens to undo this presumption in favor of lifesaving, especially for people with disabilities like me.
Given my own brushes with death over my 34 years — and those moments of staring into the suicidal abyss due to depression associated with my condition — I pray Empire State lawmakers take a step back, and rethink.
The bill, a mere 12 pages long, is deceptively enticing: It requires two doctors to sign off on a request for lethal drugs by a patient of sound mind with six months or fewer to live, with a diagnosed terminal illness.
It would offer those wracked by pain “death with dignity” on their own terms.
Death with dignity is a real thing — many ancient cultures speak of it.
But a good, dignified death cannot come at the hands of doctors helping patients dispatch themselves.
It cannot serve the cause of health insurers trying to save a buck.
I was born with a recessive genetic neuromuscular condition called nemaline myopathy.
I use a portable ventilator to breathe and a motorized wheelchair to get around. I often require assistance with basic tasks.
I’m not terminal — but many times, my own body can feel like a straitjacket.
God willing, I’ve got another couple of decades left. Under the law as proposed, I wouldn’t be eligible, all things being equal.
But all things aren’t always equal.
Eighteen years ago, bedridden for a month after major back surgery, I wished for more morphine than was necessary for pain relief.
For some, such existential moments can tip into a yearning not to exist — to escape it all.
Which is, of course, the point. If no one wanted physician-assisted suicide, there’d be no reason to make or keep it illegal.
Yet New York would go down a very dark moral path by enabling doctors to accede to such requests.
The way the bill is drafted is prone to abuse, lacking necessary safeguards to prevent nonconsensual physician-assisted suicide.
In fact, no legislative safeguards could possibly be adequate: Even with the most tightly drafted laws, patients and people with disabilities like me are likely to face subtle forms of coercion (“The treatment would be difficult and costly for your family; there is, of course, another option…”).
Equally troubling is the way in which legalized euthanasia and assisted suicide twist and distort the medical profession’s oldest commitment, turning physicians into angels of death.
Allowing doctors to help their patients kill themselves makes killing itself a legitimate medical option.
Most everyone has dealt with the byzantine bureaucracy of insurance companies and medical billing. Do we really want to make physician-assisted suicide a legitimate form of “treatment” in end-of-life cases?
We bemoan that people nowadays have fewer friends and lack close family members. Do we really want to construct an “out” to the natural burdens of familial love? Or to mere loneliness?
And even for those with a terminal diagnosis, we don’t know when our time is.
The logic of assisted suicide leads inevitably to the conclusion that those with doctor-approved expiration dates are living lives not worth living.
Lives unworthy of life, as the Nazis referred to people with disabilities when they set out to exterminate us with their Aktion T4 program.
I’ve heard echoes of that myself — from peers, from rivals, sometimes from myself: I haven’t been suicidal in a good number of years, but I can’t say that about my teens and early 20s.
The state of New York should give no reason for loved ones to abandon the frail.
It’s notable that some New York lawmakers are trying to push the bill in the wake of the death of Pope Francis, who was especially vociferous in decrying our “throwaway culture” that most afflicts “children, the elderly, the needy and the disadvantaged.”
Euthanasia epitomized that throwaway culture for Francis.
New York’s state Senate must vote down this charter of death. Failing that, Gov. Kathy Hochul must veto it.
As a young man with disabilities I tremble to imagine what this state would become if suicide-by-doctor becomes law.
All New Yorkers are imperiled when the lives of the most vulnerable are rendered cheap.
Dovie Eisner writes in New York. Adapted from UnHerd.