In this episode Trent talks about how he was drawn into the debate over assisted suicide in 2014 and what you need to know about the history of this pernicious attack on human dignity.
Welcome to the Counsel of Trent Podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.
Trent Horn:
Thanks for stopping by to hear another episode of Counsel of Trent Podcast. I’m your host, Catholic Answers apologist and speaker Trent Horn. And today I want to talk about the secret history of euthanasia and assisted suicide. This is a subject I’ve been interested in ever since really 2014 is when I started to get interested in researching it. I had read about it for quite a while during my days of pro-life advocacy because I would cover the issue of abortion, but I also would occasionally be asked about euthanasia and assisted suicide. So since I was doing pro-life work, I wanted to be well versed in those areas as well. So I would read up on them, come across different books along the way. Probably one of my favorite authors on the subject was Wesley Smith, still is. He used to have a column at National Review. I don’t know if he has that anymore. But he wrote a great book on the subject called Forced Exit, and I’ve really enjoyed a lot of his commentary over the years on the subject.
And so I broached it then and that helped me in 2014 when the case of Brittany Maynard made the news. You probably remember this. This was the woman who had been diagnosed with a brain tumor, a malignant tumor. She was not expected to live longer than six months. And so she went to Oregon because Oregon had physician assisted suicide and asked doctors there to prescribe her medication so she could end her own life. And then she took her own life in November of 2014. And so while the story was progressing, there were a lot of local news stations in California that were covering it. And they reached out to me to talk about it because I wrote a blog article called On The So-Called Choice In Dying, for Catholic Answers Magazine online. It got a fair amount of traction going through news media, other venues like this.
So I found, I was trying to find the old interview I did. I found a very, very tiny clip for NBC Bay area up in San Francisco. The reporters just called me over the phone and I just gave an answer and they use like seven seconds of it in their video, which in the news industry we would call that a package. So I used to work for new stations, things like that, they’d say you got that package ready that’s made up, yeah, yeah, we’re working on it. So I’m sure they were like, you get that Catholic Answers crazy religious guy for the news package, yeah, we got him on the phone. And so that was back before people were really using, I guess people were using Skype, but they said telephone was fine. It would have sounded way better if we’d use Skype.
And so someone else heard about that though in down here in San Diego, the local news station asked me to come in and they actually called Catholic Answers and they said, hey, do you want to come down and present your position on assisted suicide? And I said, yeah, I’d be happy to come and talk about that. And it was a younger woman who was a reporter there and the reporters usually work with a camera guy and they have to get everything together. And she said, thank you so much, I’ve called and asked six priests and pastors to come down and offer their views and none of them wanted to do it. And that’s unfortunate, but I understand, especially if they were priests who feel like, look, it takes a certain amount of training to deliver soundbite answers.
And if you’re only used to giving homilies or giving answers to friendly audiences, you can’t necessarily be expected to give a well crafted answer for a news magazine or for other agencies that could easily take what you have to say out of context. Like when you’re asked to give an answer in a news format, you’ve got to keep a crisp, tight and clean. I mean short, 10, 15 second answers. You can’t go on and on and on because they’re eventually going to cut you off. You see that sometimes when you watch news channels, sometimes someone gives an answer and then you see them talking, but the sound goes away and the reporter comes back. But there is another side of the story that you haven’t heard yet. By the way, I love newscaster diction. There is a wonderful video online. I don’t have it queued up so I’m not going to play it here. But it’s a guy who he’s calling his mom to say that his dog is sick and they’re figuring out what’s wrong with him. But he uses what’s called newscaster diction. You know you’ve heard it, whenever you watch the evening news.
All newscasters end up talking the same way. Hi mom, it’s Brad. I called the vet to see what was wrong with the dog. He had to go poo. I took his poo to be examined. He’ll be all right. This is Brad, saying bye. They always talk in that weird kind of sing-songy esque voice. Oh, free for all Friday, I should write that down. I’ll save that for a future free for all Friday episode coming up here. How to talk like a newscaster and a hundred other professions.
So I went down and I spoke with her. And so I go down there and we do the interview and she asked me three or four questions and I give my answers. And they’re kind of quasi-leading questions. It’s easy to stumble into a trap if you don’t know how to answer them. So she asked a question, do you think people should have a choice when they die? Because now assisted suicide is not called assisted suicide. It’s called choice in dying. And instead of saying, no, people should not have a choice when they die, this is a euphemism for killing and we shouldn’t kill. You could either come off as a fuscatory, Is that how I pronounce it? I’m probably mispronouncing it. You could either come off as dancing around the question and not really know how to answer it or as just insensitive stomping over the question. Rather a better approach of questions like these is to reframe them, to find common ground and reframe. So what I said to her was, I absolutely believe people should have choices when they die. Absolutely. They should have a choice for example, but whether they want to die at home in the presence of loved ones, whether they want to be in a hospital or maybe in hospice care, which is specifically dedicated to end of life care.
But I don’t believe that anyone should have the choice to hurt themselves or other people that we don’t say to healthy people, oh, go ahead and end your own life. We help healthy people out of this destructive choice. I’m just saying we should help sick people in the exact same way and treat them equally with healthy people, because they both have equal dignity. And that was the gist of my answer and I kept saying as I went through my main argument and they said this is Trent Horn from Catholic Answers, but I didn’t mention the catechism. I didn’t mention the Bible. Not because I’m ashamed of these things, far from it. But I know that if people hear me say that the reason assisted suicide is wrong is because God has a plan for you, and he does, or that your life is not your own God gave you life. If I say that I’m going to lose. I’m going to lose because people say, see opposition to assisted suicide is a religious belief that should not be imposed on other people. So we should pass this law. If you are religious, don’t do it, but don’t tell other people what to do.
So instead, I appealed to principals of reason, saying, look, we already keep people from committing suicide if they are healthy. If they are a healthy person who is going to jump off the Coronado Bay bridge down here, we use force to stop them from doing that. But for some reason we say, oh, you’re a sick person, you’re an elderly person. Nevermind, you’re not as valuable. You don’t deserve our help. That’s basically what we’re saying. And when people bring up assisted suicide and they say, why won’t you let people end their own lives, I turned the question back on them. I say, look, now I’m starting to sound like Bernie Sanders. I’m recording this right now. So I’m pre-recording things because I’m about to go to Australia. So I’m trying to jump ahead on my episodes here.
I use my Counsel of Trent YouTube channel to sometimes reply to things if they require a quick reply. But I like having the podcast set up in advance so I can juggle everything else here. So when I said, look, I think I’m thinking about Bernie Sanders too much because I’m reading, it’s Monday now. Super Tuesday is tomorrow. Who knows what’s going to happen. I don’t know. But look, okay, you’ve got millionaires and billionaires who are running everything. I mean not millionaires because I’m a millionaire now. You have the billionaires. So regardless, whoever wins from all of this in politics, things like that, I always appreciate somebody in office who at least has mannerisms and a voice that I can have fun with here on the show. And Bernie is certainly among them. Other presidents have been along the line, but I won’t torture you with anymore of my terrible impersonations.
So the point I wanted to make to people was that we should treat all people with equal dignity. And especially if you only have a short amount of time left in life, your life is even more valuable and worthy of protection because you have so little of it left. And that’s how we should treat those who are terminally ill, who are elderly, who are disabled. Oh, and what I said to people that say, well, people should be allowed to end their own lives. I asked them, do you think that for everybody? They don’t believe that about the healthy guy who’s going to jump off the Bay Bridge because his girlfriend broke up with them. They don’t believe that. Well just someone who is suffering and who has six months left to live. Okay, well if it’s suffering that matters to you, what about the person who has 30 years left? What about a quadriplegic? What about a paraplegic? What about someone who is in chronic pain or depression because they’ve suffered the death of a spouse or a child. When you start drawing lines, that slippery slope pushes the line back until we don’t care if anyone ends their own lives, and that’s not a good world to live in.
And this is a belief as I said, and the reporter, she said, wow, that was really good. I said, what do you mean? She said, well I just thought you were going to quote the Bible a bunch, but you gave me a lot to think about and I could tell she was going into the interview being on the other side and she reconsidered it a little bit. So that’s what we have to share with other people. So what I want to talk about today, not so much the arguments for and against. I mean, I gave you some brief arguments you can use like ask people if you’re for assisted suicide, who should be allowed and where do you draw the line and really how can you draw the line there that’s going to end up being arbitrary? Why not value all human lives? It’s kind of like abortion. Why do you draw the line at birth? Why not just value all human beings? So I’d say that this is not a strictly religious issue.
You go back 2,500 years to the Hippocratic oath, the Greek physician, Hippocrates, this is what he said in the Hippocratic oath. I will use treatment to help the sick according to my ability and judgment, but never with a view to injury and wrongdoing. Neither will I administer a poison to anybody when asked to do so, nor will I suggest such a course. Similarly, I will not give a woman a pessary to cause abortion, but I will keep pure and Holy both my life and my art.
And so this is something that along when Christianity became the dominant religion in the Western world, this ethic continued to be understood until relatively recently. And in fact the history of modern euthanasia and assisted suicide, common law understood it to be wrong, understood it to be something as a crime to put someone to death, even if you thought that you had good reasons for doing so. Now some assisted suicide proponents will say, well, we’ve outlawed, suicide used to be a crime. It’s like, what’s the penalty for assisted suicide, death? And we understood, but as modern medicine advanced, we saw that yes, suicide is harmful, but it’s harmful because a person is usually clinically depressed, and so they’re not in a rational state of mind. They’re still harming themselves.
We don’t consider it a crime because the person lacks culpability. But someone who is of sound mind and faculties who helps someone who is an unsound mind end their own life, that can be a crime. And in fact, there have been news stories recently of women who have gone to jail because they coaxed and berated boyfriends and partners who had mental illnesses to end their own lives. We saw, look, this person harm themselves, they’re not culpable. You are of sound mind and body. You shouldn’t encourage them to do something this destructive. And yet when a doctor is willing to go along with a patient who’s terminally ill or may just be losing their bodily faculties. Most of the time when you read surveys about why people seek out assisted suicide, it’s not because of uncontrollable pain, rather it is because of a fear of being a burden upon others and a fear and embarrassment of losing control of one’s faculties, the ability to go to the bathroom by oneself, to be independent. And so it’s a fear of being an emotional, physical and a financial burden on other people.
And so when you make assisted suicide legal, you encourage other people to think, I’m a burden and it’s legal. So maybe I should just do that too for the good of my family. And let’s hop into terms here and then we’ll go through history a little bit. So euthanasia from the Greek words, eu and thanatos, means good death, means killing a person because you do it out of mercy, a misplaced compassion. You want to ease their suffering. It can be voluntary. The person asks you to end their life or involuntary, a person is killed out of a “mercy killing”, either they’re unconscious, so without their consent or against their consent, when they say they want to live and doctors say, well, your life is not worth living anyways.
Active euthanasia occurs when a person is actively killed like with an overdose of morphine. Passive euthanasia occurs when a person is killed, the deprivation of that which they need to live. This is not the same as if someone is already dying and you don’t give them food and water because their body can’t handle it anymore. That is not passive euthanasia. It’s also not passive euthanasia to withdraw disproportionate care. So if something like a ventilator is providing minimal benefit to a patient and let’s say it seems that they are irreversibly comatose and there is no prognosis for healing and they’re on this ventilator and so it’s a financial burden on the family and doesn’t appear that they will ever gain consciousness again, a ventilator might be something that is determined to be disproportionate care.
And so that can be removed when care is disproportionate, when it provides a little benefit to the patient this is what the Catholic church teaches, when disproportionate care is care that provides a little benefit to the patient and is very burdensome either physically, emotionally, or even financially. But it wouldn’t be euthanasia if you remove the ventilator because you felt like, well it’s kind of burdensome and the person just started breathing, like, oh there they can breathe. And that happens sometimes when people are removed from ventilators. It would be active euthanasia, however, if you went like one floor over the Cuckoo’s nest style and just smothered that person, not with a pillow, I guess with a comatose person you would probably smother them. But on MythBusters, I think they said you actually couldn’t.
Like you know how a movies, someone kills a person in a hospital bed, they hold a pillow up to their face for like eight seconds and then they go unconscious and they die. I think MythBusters is shown that’s actually impossible with hospital pillows. But active euthanasia would be if you suffocated them covering their mouth and nose, inject them with morphine. Or passive, if you said, okay, well they’re breathing well, let’s just stop feeding them to make sure they die or removing the ventilator, hoping that they die. If you took a healthy person who was on a ventilator who will recover in 24 hours and you take the ventilator off because you want them to die, that would be passive euthanasia. And so death cannot be willed as something that is directly intended, but it can be foreseen of course if it’s the result of removing care that is disproportionate to the patient. You may foresee that death will occur but it’s something that you never intend to happen.
So what happened is euthanasia became popular in the 19th century after the Civil War, doctors discovered morphine and its uses for soldiers during the Civil War, you would just pump them full of morphine when you had to saw off their limbs that had blown off by a musket ball or something and you would inject them with morphine so that you could perform these amputations without putting them into shock. And then some people, they were not physicians actually, they’re non physicians who argue that regular people should have access to morphine if they no longer want to live. So it was non-physicians who argued for this and the medical community pushed back and they have still pushed back mostly to this day. There’s a lot of fracture in the medical community when it comes to recommending either euthanasia or assisted suicide, but will continue. So it was actually the euthanasia movement was really popular in the U.S. in the 1920s and the 1930s was picking up a lot of steam though state legislatures are trying to pass euthanasia bills, but then popular support for euthanasia dropped off rapidly after World War II. Can you guess why that was? Well, because after World War II, people figured out what the Nazis were doing and that the Holocaust began with a Nazi euthanasia program. Specifically, it was called, I think it’s called Aktion. I’m going to butcher my German like I butcher everything else.
Aktion T4, so it was the Nazi T4 program. It was a postwar name for a mass. Well, after the war, it was called T4. I think during the war was called T9. But T4 is an abbreviation of, let’s see if I can do this right. Tiergartenstraße 4, for a street address of the chancellor department set up in early 1940 in the Berlin burrow of Tiergarten, which recruited personnel associated with T4. So this is the place where people were sent who are quote, deemed incurably sick after most critical medical examination and they would be administered mercy death. In October, 1939, so 1939 is the war’s beginning, Hitler signed a euthanasia note backdated to September 1st, which authorized called Brandt and Reichsleiter Philipp Bouhler, to implement the program.
The killings took place from September, 1939 to the end of the war and somewhere around 300,000 people were directly killed in psychiatric hospitals in Germany and Austria. And during this time, the Nazi government was creating propaganda campaigns to promote euthanasia and assisted suicide. This is one called Ich klage an, which means in German I accuse. And it’s about a man who helps his wife to commit suicide because I think she’s a piano player, but she’s dying from some kind of terminal conditions. She doesn’t want her husband to see her waste away. And she can’t even play the piano anymore. So he ends up killing her based on her wishes. And he goes to trial and at the very end of the trial, he points at the camera and he says, Ich klage an. Now who is, Arnold Schwarzenegger? Ich klage an, get in the chopper, I had to do this, come on. Anytime you do an Arnold Schwarzenegger impersonation, you have to have. Every single movie without fail. So, and he says Ich klage an, I accuse, at the camera and he’s accusing the viewers, the jury of they’re the real barbarians because they think that this is a crime when it shouldn’t be. So here’s actually a clip from the actual 1941 Nazi propaganda film where the wife is talking to her doctor, asking him to leave medicine behind so she can take her own life.
If I keep getting worse, I can see what’s coming. My left arm is paralyzed, my right one is beginning to go. I’m not afraid of dying. I’m afraid of lying here. I’m afraid of being just a lump of meat, not a human being. So maybe we have listeners who, I’m paraphrasing the German, I’m not translating it. I’ve got the subtitles in front of me, but I couldn’t find the full film. But that was what people watched and movies conditioned people in that regard. So the support collapsed after World War II. Interest in euthanasia and assisted suicide though emerged in the 1970s the latter part of the 20th century in the U.S., after some very famous cases involving euthanasia and assisted suicide. One of these in 1976 was Karen Ann Quinlan. So Karen Ann Quinlan overdosed on drugs and ended up in a persistent vegetative state. She was on a feeding tube and a ventilator and her parents fought to have the ventilator removed and eventually a court order. The hospital would not remove the ventilator. They said that would be killing. We can’t do that.
The court ruled that the parents had the right to remove Quinlan’s ventilator and when they did that, she was able to breathe on her own actually. So she continued to live for another nine years, but that started a lot of legal work on a right to die and especially the right to refuse medical treatment and the right for other people to refuse medical treatment on our behalves.
Another important case is in 1990 the Cruzan case. Nancy Cruzan, 1990 she was in a car accident thrown from her vehicle. She landed in a shallow ditch, filled with water face down. And by the time she was found or brought to the hospital, she was in a persistent vegetative state. And then her parents wanted to remove the feeding tubes that were being used to keep her alive. So unlike Quinlan, she could breathe, but she needed feeding tubes too to keep her alive. And the hospital said, well, no, you can’t do that. You can’t remove her feeding tubes. That would be killing. We cannot do that. And so the case eventually went to trial though after the hospital withdrew from the case, Cruzan’s feeding tubes were removed. But the Supreme Court case, the Cruzan case, said that there was no constitutional right to die. No one had a right to die and the hospital was in its rights to say that they needed clear and convincing evidence that Cruzan did not want to have feeding tubes for them to withdraw the tubes.
So that started the clear and convincing evidence standard for care for those who were incapacitated. And that motivated a lot of people who draft up living wills. These are documents saying, if I am ever in this particular situation, I want to decline this kind of care. I would say no, do not get a living will, however, because a lot of times with living wills, you make medical decisions about things that are very far away and removed and you might change your mind later. You could have it written in your will 20 years ago, I don’t want to I don’t want a feeding tube. And then going forward you could change your mind on that, but it’s still in the document or you can have an idea about treatment and be removed from it and think that it’s scary or burdensome when it actually isn’t or you just have very vague language like I don’t want to live on tubes, like what if you only need them for just a few months to keep you alive.
Better than a living will that outlines where and when, what circumstances you want to be placed under, something better is a will to live. I’ve heard some Catholic documents put it this way, a will to live or what’s called an advanced directive. You can go to places like the National Catholic Bioethics Center to get a will to live or a healthcare proxy and advanced directive and that puts someone who you trust, who understands what you want and desire and can especially make sure that your end of life care coheres with Catholic moral and medical principles. So be sure to go and check. I’ll try to leave a link in the show description for a will to live or advanced medical directive from the NCBC.
But so that was how euthanasia policy began to develop in the 20th century. And around this time there is also development in assisted suicide laws. So euthanasia, notice in these cases we have with Quinlan and Cruzan, they’re incapacitated. They can’t say what they want. And that leads to the dilemma for the people who are involved. Assisted suicide did not catch on as much because it involved people who wanted to end their own lives and most people wanted to treat them with a compassion that others suicide victims deserve, which is to not accede to their requests but to find them help to value the life that they do have.
In 1980, Derek Humphry, who is a British born American journalist, founded the Hemlock Society to help people commit suicide. He did this because his wife Jean Humphry ended her life back in 1975 and he was at her side when she did that. She intentionally overdosed on medication because she had terminal breast cancer and he wrote about it in a book called Jean’s Way, but then later in 1991 he published a handbook called Final Exit. And it was a book telling people here’s how to commit suicide in a painless way. Here’s how to do it in a legal way. And it it encouraged people to end their own lives.
We have some evidence from this, New York Times in 1993 published this article shortly after the book’s release. So in 1993 the Times said, a popular suicide manual has had a noticeable effect on the methods people use to kill themselves in New York City and nationally. Research has shown the book Final Exit recommends that terminally ill people wishing to end their lives, rely on asphyxiation, which the book calls self deliverance via the plastic bag. You’ll find as we get to other people involved with this, the people who are involved in the “right to die” movement, they don’t call it right to die anymore. They call it choice and dying. I feel bad for them and I feel bad for someone who sees their spouse commit suicide right in front of them, but they end up going on to promote, gosh, creepy, creepy things combined with drugs for sedation.
In the year after the book’s publication in March of 1991, the number of suicides by asphyxiation rose to 33 in New York City. A new study has shown compared with eight in the year before the manual came out. In nine cases, the city medical examiners office found Final Exit at the scene of the suicide. In other cases, suicide note mirrored verbatim a note suggested in the book. And now here is Humphry himself. This was a presentation he gave in 1989, this is back when it was called the National Hemlock Society. Hemlock was the drug Socrates used to end his own life while he was executed. He was told you had to drink the hemlock, it’s a very poisonous plant. This was part of an address he gave for the National Hemlock Society at one of their annual meetings.
Derek Humphry:
Assistance in suicide remains a crime throughout the Western world. You must not help, according to the law, another person to die, no matter how sincere the request, how compassionate, the request and so forth. There is no defense. You must not do it. Your only defense to the crime is that you didn’t do it. Now, this may be right for people who are mentally disturbed and unhappy and depressed and so forth. But is it right for people who are dying in a painful, distressing manner and merely want an accelerated death? We would call it self-deliverance or accelerated death. But the law, because it’s suicide and assistance in suicide is a crime.
Trent Horn:
So notice the use of language here. It’s not suicide. We’re not calling it suicide. It’s accelerated death. It’s a choice in dying. So what people would try to say is this isn’t suicide. They’re going to die anyways from this illness. They want to choose how they die. But here’s the thing, we’re all going to die. We’re all going to die if pain and suffering is what Humphry and others are concerned about, then what about someone who is going to have suffering for 30 or 40 years? Imagine someone who is a quadriplegic or someone with chronic pain who’s not terminally ill. They may say, if this terminally ill person can end their own life cause they’re sick of the pain, why not me? I’m going to have more pain than them. If you hold the logic of assisted suicide and you’re concerned about being “compassionate”, compassion though is not getting rid of pain by any means. Compassion means to suffer alongside someone.
Then if you defend assisted suicide, you don’t really have a leg to stand on to deny someone who is quadriplegic, paraplegic, someone who has diabetes and amputations. What about someone who is just depressed? Someone who’s struggling with the death of a spouse, the death of a child, they don’t want to live anymore. Why is it that, oh, if someone wants to die because their spouses die, well, they’re just depressed. But if someone wants to die because they only have a few months left to live, or they’re older, or they’re disabled, or they have multiple sclerosis, well then they’re in the right state of mind. Now we’re making a judgment about whose lives are worth living and whose aren’t.
So they worked throughout the 90s. That was in 1989 when Humphry gave the talk to try to change the law. And the advocates got success in 1997 when Oregon passed the Death With Dignity Act. And so they failed before and they finally got it passed in 1997 by framing opposition as being purely religious in nature. It was upheld in a voter referendum and then in 2019 it was expanded to remove, there was a two week waiting period if you wanted suicide pills is what they give you, they prescribed you. You had a 15 day waiting period. So you’d have to wait two weeks before you get the pills and that was waived if you’re “gravely ill”.
And then some Oregon insurance companies started telling people, well, hey, look, your cancer treatment is not covered, but by the way, assisted suicide is covered just in case you’re wondering because it’s always cheaper to prescribe someone poison than it is to cover their expensive or experimental cancer treatments. Probably the most famous individual during this time who was getting a lot of notoriety when it came to the assisted suicide debate was Jack Kevorkian, AKA Dr. Death, a Michigan doctor, I put doctor in quotation marks around him, who helped dozens, if not hundreds of people to end their own lives with the help of his suicide machine.
They would push a button and it would intravenously put poisons into their body and the people would die and the guy is, if the Grim Reaper took a job as a regular doctor, it would be Kevorkian. The guy, they called him Dr. Death and he looked like the Grim Reaper wearing a shirt and tie. He was a creepy, creepy guy. He had an obsession with death in his younger medical studies. He would look in the eyes of people who were dying to see how they changed as they died. People try to make them out to be as someone who cared about those who were dying. And he probably did care about those who were, he didn’t like to see people suffer. There’s probably some misplaced compassion there. But he was also a creepy guy involved in the whole thing. So here’s a clip from the New York Times from one of their older reports, they compile old news footage, talking about Jack Kevorkian, AKA Dr. Death.
Speaker 6:
This is the suicide machine. All Janet Atkins had to do was push a button and lethal chemicals started flowing. Dr Kevorkian said he took Mrs. Atkins to this park in a van with the machine inside.
Speaker 7:
The first time Kevorkian used his machine was on a 54 year old Alzheimer’s patient, Janet Adkins.
Speaker 8:
She was conscious of what you wanted to do. She understood that she wanted to die. She wanted to end her life.
Speaker 9:
He was clever enough to develop this so-called suicide machine. The delivery mechanism was an artifice. At that time too, to avoid the charge of murder.
Speaker 10:
The patient starts this machine himself or herself?
Speaker 8:
Yes, through pushing the button on the side.
Speaker 11:
The doctor who invented a suicide machine has been charged with first degree murder.
Speaker 9:
His lawyer, Geoffrey Fieger, said to the district judge, Michigan has laws against murder. It’s illegal to kill yourself, but there’s nothing against assisted suicide. And the judge scratched his head and said, oh yeah, you’re right. And that was that.
Speaker 12:
We’re here to discuss the wishes of Sherry Miller.
Speaker 7:
Kevorkian continued helping people die and Michigan continued trying to stop him.
Speaker 13:
We were opposed by the prosecutor, the governor, the legislature, the police and the churches. They did everything they could to get him event.
Speaker 7:
Eventually, the State outlawed assisted suicide.
Speaker 14:
Hit the road Jack, and don’t you come back no more.
Trent Horn:
What’s interesting is that was a state rep in Michigan. That was a Democrat back then and they were working together to oppose that. And then finally in 1999 a Kevorkian went to prison for killing a guy. And I think it was because he did it and videotaped it and showed it on 60 Minutes and that was the last straw, and he broke the law. And he went to jail. He was released a few years ago and then I believe he since passed away.
In that same year in 1999 the Supreme Court upheld in Washington versus, Glucksberg nine to zero that there’s no right to assisted suicide. So in 1999 the Supreme court said nine to zero unanimously the constitution does not have a right to assisted suicide. So what that means is that you can’t say assisted suicide has to be legal in 50 States. But the court said that States could pass their own laws if they wanted to. There’s just no right that has to be recognized in all 50 States, kind of like the right to abortion. So Roe V Wade says you can’t outlaw abortion. Washington V Glucksberg said you can outlaw assisted suicide or you can make it legal depending on what the State wants. And then later on this was passed in the State of Washington, and then finally in California through the Brittany Maynard case. And then we had updates in euthanasia in 2002, the Netherlands passed a law to euthanize someone who is suffering with no prospect of improvement, even if they’re not terminally I’ll. And here’s the most chilling part, the patient can be as young as 12 years old. And in Belgium I don’t think there’s any age limit for the euthanasia of children.
Then of course, the other famous case in the 2000s, was 2005, Terri Schiavo, the debate about Terri Schiavo having her feeding tube removed. Her parents wanted it to remain. She was in a persistent vegetative state. Her husband, Michael Schiavo, who had since gone on to remarry another woman and start a new family, wanted to have Terry’s tube removed and then he eventually succeeded and she passed away. She died, she was killed. Then Terry’s brother, I think his name’s Bobby Schiavo went on to start the Terry Schiavo foundation. He does a lot of work with euthanasia, assisted suicide and things like that. With the Brittany Maynard case, so to tie it back together, that’s when I got really involved and interested in this issue. There was actually a story going around circulated from, and this is why actually when I did my story on the news, someone else wanted me to go do a kind of a debate/discussion with an assisted suicide proponent. And I could have done it, but this guy, he had a backstory that his wife had died of cancer.
And so I knew in that discussion I could have all the right arguments, but people would be more empathetic to him than to me. So I knew strategically it wasn’t a good debate dialogue for me to go into. So I asked Jimmy to go in my place, Jimmy Akin. Why? Because Jimmy could do the same arguments if not better than me frankly. And Jimmy’s wife had also passed away from cancer as well. And so he had an emotional connection to the issue. So when this guy talked about his wife passing away, Jimmy could also offer his perspective of being in the same shoes, but of not wanting recourse that he and his wife both did not want recourse to assisted suicide or euthanasia. In fact, his wife was scared that she would be euthanized in that condition. So that was back during the Brittany Maynard debate. And so sometimes those people who can speak from that position are so incredibly helpful when it comes to the issue. That’s why I’m going to end with, here’s a clip from Phillip Johnson. He was a seminarian at the time who was diagnosed with brain cancer and he was on CNN and he discussed his view on the matter. So here, let me play that. He was invited onto Don Lemon’s show.
Don Lemon:
Philip, you were diagnosed with an incurable brain cancer back in 2008 at the age of just 24 years old. So how long were you given to live?
Philip Johnson:
I was told that the median survival time for my tumor was about 18 months, maybe two years, if I’m lucky. But as Brittany said, when you’re so young, even if somebody tells you that you have a few years to live, it seems like you’re going to die tomorrow. So it’s enough people in your whole life, it really crushes all of the plans that you had.
Don Lemon:
Yeah. You don’t really agree with what she’s doing, but I’m sure you can, obviously can empathize here.
Philip Johnson:
Oh, of course. That’s the reason I reached out in the first place. I was almost in tears when I saw her video because I know what she’s going through. As Brittany said, until you’ve been in my shoes, you can’t understand what I’m going through. And that’s really true.
Don Lemon:
Yeah.
Philip Johnson:
And I felt like since I was in her shoes, I am in her shoes, that I could reach out and maybe offer a different perspective.
Don Lemon:
You said, dear Brittany, our lives are worth living even with brain cancer. You wrote, I agree that her time is tough, but her decision is anything but brave. Why isn’t she brave in your eyes?
Philip Johnson:
Suicide in itself, obviously, I’m Catholic and I disagree with it, but she’s undergoing so much fear right now. And as I wrote in my article, as I’ve been suffering, I’ve looked for any kind of way out of the suffering that I could find.
Don Lemon:
She shouldn’t have had the choice to die on her own terms?
Philip Johnson:
I don’t think so. I believe that God made us with human dignity and that human dignity continues whether or not we’re alive and fully functioning or if some of our faculties are taken away or even if we’re laying in a hospice bed, I don’t think that somehow my dignity when I’m laying in my bed dying is less than it is right now.
Trent Horn:
So I think that’s a beautiful testimony from it. And that’s important. Notice with Don lemon and others, they don’t want to use the phrase kill oneself because there’s a hesitancy to want to talk about killing. You don’t talk about killing with abortion. You don’t talk about killing with assisted suicide. In fact on assisted suicide death certificates, a lot of times people will petition for the cause of death to be brain cancer or cancer or whatever the terminal illness was, when that wasn’t the case. It was not cancer. This person ended their life by their own hands, with the assistance of others and that’s not what we ought to do. We should help people once again, all people, regardless of their medical conditions out of this destructive decision, not further into it.
So I hope that was helpful for you all. Thank you so much for stopping by and hope you enjoy it. Go to trenthornpodcast.com for bonus content. I think we’ve got audio clips from the Made This Way audio book and a Catholic via socialist, tour of my office. Lots of great stuff up there and soon we’ll be doing open mail bags, lots of other great things. I hope you’ll check it out and at least leave a review at iTunes, Google Play if you haven’t already. Thank you all so much and hope you have a very blessed day.
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