☕️ Medically assisted suicide, and suicide in general?
I’ve been sitting on this question for a while, because I feel like my expressive writing ability has been on the fritz. I’m trying to get it back.
So I’m going to start from the general (suicide in general) and go to the specific (medically assisted suicide/active euthanasia).
First and foremost, I believe that bodily autonomy is an absolute human right with zero exceptions. As long as a person’s choice about xyr individual body is informed and uncoerced, anyone should be free to do whatever ze wants with xry own body always and forever.
“Informed” and “Uncoerced” are key, there. Informed – if they understand that the action they take is likely to result in their death, and they understand that death is permanent and irreversible, and that if a person is not being coerced into the decision, then, if a person wants to take action likely to result in xyr death, no one should have the power to stop xem.
After all, if a person wants to make that choice, the only way to stop xem would be to infringe on their bodily autonomy (e.g. by restraining them) which is unacceptable.
So ultimately, yes, a person giving informed, uncoerced consent should be free to end xyr own life.
Most humans, most of the time, have an extremely powerful survival instinct.
If we didn’t, we would have gone extinct long ago.
When a critical number of people have lost that survival instinct, that’s a massive warning sign about those people’s living conditions.
If people are denied the freedom and resources to live and thrive as their authentic selves, and this drives them to lose their survival instinct, they are not making a free, informed, uncoerced choice to end their lives; they’re being socially murdered.
Circling back to medically assisted suicide in particular, here we have left the realm of individual personal choice of one’s own body – medical euthanasia is not merely an individual’s choice, it’s an official, government-sanctioned stance of the medical community, society, and the state, that death is the best solution to some people’s lives. When a person seeks medical care and the doctor says “Have you considered just dying instead of being a useless eater burden to your family and society?” this is not a matter of individual choice. This is the combined forces of every social institution declaring that disabled lives are not worth living.
People are “choosing” medically assisted suicide after being denied healthcare, housing, incomes, or freedom. This is no choice at all. This is social murder. Individuals should be free to end their lives if they choose to, but doctors certainly should not be able to suggest it as a treatment option.
Consider also how the spectre of suicide is used against different parts of the disability community differently. For psychiatrically disabled/Mad/Neurodivergent people, suicide is held up as the threat justifying the necessity of incarceration and forced drugging. “If we let this person have bodily autonomy, they might kill themself, therefore, we have to lock them up and chemically restrain them.” For physically and especially mobility impaired people, suicide is pushed as the medically, scientifically, socially, and morally objectively correct “choice” (“No one would want to live like that and be a burden on their family”). The term “death with dignity” is so telling – “dignity” is defined as incompatible with disability, better to die abled (“with dignity”) then to live as disabled (“without dignity”).
In summary: Bodily autonomy should be an absolute, no-exceptions human right. No one should be denied bodily autonomy for the sake of “preventing suicide”. However, “choosing” to die by suicide when someone’s life has been made unlivable by systemic ableism, oppression, deprivation, or abuse is not a “choice”; it’s a murder.
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