A Matter of Life and Death

There’s a black dog in my building that I sometimes see when I’m standing in the lobby waiting for the elevator. I don’t know his name, or even if he’s a he, but for now let’s just call him Rover. From what I can tell, Rover is very old and probably won't be around much longer. For him, every movement and every breath is laboured and I can tell by looking in his eyes that he’s in pain. To make matters worse, his owner doesn’t seem to care. When Rover is taking too long to limp into the elevator, his owner kicks him in the behind and scolds him as if to say “come on you dumb dog!” (I can only assume since Rover’s owner doesn’t speak English, at least not with Rover).

My heart goes out to that dog. So much so that if I had a magical serum that could put Rover out of his misery and send him into an eternal and peaceful state of rest, I’d load it into a syringe and inject it into the dog before his owner could get the chance to stop me. Coincidentally, such a serum actually exists. And I’m sure that if Rover’s owner cared enough to take him to the vet, that’s precisely what the vet would prescribe. The medical term for the procedure is called euthanasia and it’s standard protocol for treating old, injured, or sick animals who are in pain and are unlikely to get better. Even PETA, the world’s leading animal advocacy group - whom I’ve taken to task in previous blogs for what I see as their excessive lobbying on behalf of animals at the expense of their own species – swears by the practice, and euthanizes thousands of abandoned pets each year, many of whom aren’t even ill.

That’s why I find it so bizarre that we let animals die with dignity but when it comes to humans, we deny them the right to end their lives in a peaceful fashion with the aid of a medical professional. There seems to be a type of cognitive dissonance that prevents us from having a reasoned discourse about euthanasia in North America. Partly because of our Judeochristian indoctrination that tells us (with no evidence whatsoever, as is usually the case with religion) that our life is not our own, and partly because euthanizing the elderly and the disabled conjures up images of fascism and Nazi Germany.

This was illustrated by the recent uproar surrounding a note that former Alaska governor Sarah Palin posted on her facebook page in response to President Obama’s suggestion that panels of medical experts should provide guidance on the most appropriate course of treatment for patients nearing the end of life. The note implied that Obama was seeking to set up series of “death panels” that would determine whether these patients should live or die based on their perceived ability to be productive contributors to society. Leaving aside the irony that the status quo, which denies citizens equal care based on whether or not they have insurance, already amounts to a de facto death panel, this statement says a lot about the political climate surrounding end-of-life issues in America.

As stupid as Sarah Palin is, and she is pretty stupid, I don’t believe for a second that she genuinely interpreted Obama’s ideas as having anything to do with “death panels” or evaluating people’s productivity. Instead this was a calculated and disingenuous attempt to erroneously associate Obama’s new healthcare plan with a practice that the American public generally finds reprehensible, and she knew that, because of their cultural and religious baggage, a large portion of the electorate would be susceptible to such distortions.

Surprisingly, however, America, for all its conservatism, is more progressive on assisted suicide laws than much more liberal states like Canada and the UK. Since 1994, the state of Oregon has allowed doctors to assist terminally ill patients in ending their lives, and Texas, of all places, legalized passive euthanasia in 1999. In Europe, only Belgium, Holland, Switzerland and Luxembourg have laws that allow for active euthanasia. As a result, every year scores of people from around the world travel to these countries in the hopes of ending their lives in the most painless way possible. Meanwhile those who don’t have the means or the strength to make it to these overseas facilities, must suffer a fate worse than that of stray dogs, literally.