A few days ago, Hugh Hewitt hosted a webinar with Rick Warren and Robert Barron on California’s assisted suicide law, and suicide laws generally. After dealing with the theological and ethical issues at play, Hugh interviews relevant legal experts; identifying appropriate “next steps” for those of us concerned with the sanctity of life. I can’t recommend the webinar highly enough.
There’s not a clear “Christian” way to vote on many things; those laws relating to assisted suicide—like those recently passed in California and Colorado—are not such things. That the End of Life Options Act passed by a 2 to 1 margin in the Centennial State is as grievesome as it is wicked.
My dad—a pastor and chaplain—taught me that our inability to see the dignity and humanity in people as they die says more about our callousness than it does about their direness. As always, legal renewal must be preceded by cultural renewal, which of course must be preceded by spiritual renewal.
In addition to the webinar, I’d recommend two other resources. First, check out Matthew Dickerson’s The Mind and the Machine: What it Means to be Human and why it Matters. While the book is not specifically about assisted suicide, the subtitle should be a clue as to its relevancy. Second, I would recommend picking up Harold OJ Brown’s Sensate Culture (published in ’96), specifically to reference his section on medical ethics. I’ll conclude with an excerpt from Brown:
“Hippocrates himself never spoke of ‘ending suffering’ but only of healing. If human life has no meaning beyond the pleasures and pains of bodily life, if there is nothing to look forward to after death, it is apparent that an excess of suffering will make living seem a burden to be thrown off as speedily as possible… One will reject this convenient solution only if one has ethical fixed stars, such as used to be provided by both the Christian faith and the Hippocratic tradition.
Medicine, like engineering or industrial production, is often considered a technique rather than a philosophy or worldview. In fact, however, medicine brings its practitioners into touch with a broach range of human existence; changes in the culture sooner or later must affect medicine, and changes in medicine cannot fail to affect the entire culture.”
