Making an end of it

Radley Balko talks about death:

"Death with dignity" isn't some touch-feely euphemism. The last days of life can be horrifying. Terminal cancer patients typically lose control of their bladder and bowels. More likely, narcotic pain relievers constipate them, requiring enemas or manual cleansing of the colon. They vomit and bleed. They periodically stop breathing, and gasp and convulse for air. Some become delusional. Some slip into a drug-induced haze, far off from friends and family. The overwhelming majority die in hospitals, not at home. Death can come subtly, or it can come violently. It can come with family all around, or it can come unexpectedly, when few are around.

Contrast that to barbituate cocktail used in assisted suicide, which puts patients to sleep, then guides them into a coma, and then, finally, to death. More than 80 percent of the cases so far in Oregon were done at home, surrounded by friends and family. Patients were lucid, and able to say goodbye.

There are plenty of reasons to approach the "right to death" idea with caution, but if we cannot choose how and when to end our own lives, we cannot be said to own ourselves. Self-ownership must allow the decision of how to end one's own life to be the decision of the person, not the state.

Undoubtedly there are sick or elderly individuals who would be hustled off to an unwelcome end . . . because that already happens now. Probably more than any of us are aware: how ironic is it that those whose deaths are attended by friends and family may end up suffering more than those who die unmourned and unwatched?