CLAIM:
I agree that it is murder if the person doesn’t consent to assistance in dying. Signing legal papers to be assisted in suicide is entirely legal in more and more places. Those people also have to be mentally evaluated several times and have to say yes several times before they can even be given the okay for it. So, no. Assisted suicide is NOT murder. The safety measures are in place to keep it safe.

REBUTTAL:
The claim argues that legality reflects correctness and can ensure safety. Both premises are deeply flawed:

The Trouble with Legality
The American lawyer-poet, John Godfrey Saxe (1816-1887), once observed:

“Laws, like sausages, cease to inspire respect in proportion as we know how they are made.”

What was his point?

Making laws is a messy business. The process is typically a culturally and geographically influenced tangled web of personal agendas, reflecting a point in time for people within a particular location to create laws ultimately to support the view of the majority. The results can be disastrous.

Take, for example, the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, which required citizens in free states to assist in the capture and return of escaped slaves. Refusal to comply could result in fines and imprisonment. At that moment, the majority (nearly 61% of the Congress) thought this was a good idea. Obviously, it was not.

The problem with the Fugitive Act was not the process but the premise. The process was transparently spelled out: comply or suffer for it.

The premise, however, is easily lost in the debate. The premise was that it is OK to buy, sell, and enslave a class of people deemed less than equal by their color and origin. Once you realized slave owning and trading was fundamentally wrong, the process for enforcing slavery became irrelevant.

As stated in an earlier installment on this topic, arguing for the right to self-terminate presumes that self-termination can be or is a good thing. Like slavery, the premise is the problem.

When the United States decided to declare independence, it stated the following as a fundamental truth:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

The pertinent right is life. Its inherent value comes not from the declaration of imperfect people but from the endowment of life’s Creator. Life is the prerequisite for all other rights, including autonomy. Any argument for autonomy must be subordinate to the Creator’s view of life.

As Christians, we learn about God from his word. The Bible reveals God as the author of life. As such, he reserves rights for himself, including initiating and terminating life (Deuteronomy 32:39). He has explicitly instructed us not to take life without his permission (Exodus 20:13; James 2:11), which would include self-termination.

We see no need to debate autonomy when it is based on the faulty premise that we have the right to end life if and when we wish.

The Trouble with Safety
The safety concern about assisted suicide rightly focuses on the role of desire and permission. The idea of consent is central to the exercise of autonomy. The problem, however, is that it ignores three factors: precedent, authority, and judgment.

PRECEDENT
As of this writing, assisted suicide is legal in some form in at least 25 jurisdictions worldwide. In many of those places, what was initially legalized has already expanded. The path has become familiar. So-called “safety provisions” restrict requesting assistance in dying to someone being in control of their senses and making a request for assisted suicide without any compulsion. That is how it begins, which sounds like “safety measures are in place to keep it safe.” Then, subsequent legislation and judicial rulings start addressing the questions of what to do when we “think” someone would want assistance in ending their life but could not state that request because of an unexpected illness or accident.

In some places, advocates of assisted suicide have argued that parents should be allowed to request assistance in having the lives of their disabled children ended because, as their guardians, they exercise rights on their children’s behalf.

Studying what has been done in other jurisdictions regarding assisted suicide since it was initially permitted will reveal that it remains a slippery slope.

AUTHORITY
There are always gray areas when judging the competence of those who wish to make this decision. When it is unclear whether a person was in their right mind when making the request, who decides, and on what basis? What about children or newborns with profound disabilities? Because it is an irreversible decision once carried out, who holds the power to make it when it cannot be made autonomously?

JUDGMENT
Making laws is messy and imperfect, and decision-making on any issue is, too. We are all imperfect and inclined to do wrong things (Genesis 8:21; Romans 8:7). Lacking an objective authority to judge the merits of a decision, whose flawed judgment do we trust?

Nothing is safe by embracing solutions outside the objective truth of God’s word. Even God’s venerated servants struggled with flawed judgments (Romans 7:19). There is only one reliable guideline for making correct decisions: God’s word (John 17:17).

And this brings us back to God’s word. If it sounds like a circular argument, it is. To accept objective moral truths means there must be a higher authority by which those truths are established. Christianity is uniquely positioned to reveal those truths. More than that, Christianity provides the alternative to the despair that compels one to seek assistance in dying: God’s people to be Christ-like in caring for others and easing their suffering (Matthew 25:35-40; Luke 10:30-37; Galatians 6:10).

The claim fails to support the premise that assisted suicide is morally permissible (even when legal) and that when legalized, it is always safe. At best, it is wishful thinking; in reality, it is just plain wrong.