A Cry of Desperation, a Plea for Love

When physician-assisted suicide first became legal – or Medical-Aid-in-Dying (MAiD), as it’s now known – the assumption was that the typical MAiD patient would be someone like this: a very old person, who was suffering from an incurable and terminal disease, who was in egregious pain, and who had no further treatment options. Such a person would be making their decision out of their own free will, without pressure or coercion, and with the counsel of their trusted and long-time physician.

But this recent Public Discourse article considers whether that kind of patient has in fact become the representative MAiD case, now thirty years after the “treatment’s” legalization. It tags the above caricature as the “autonomous Uncle Louis,” and it argues that the more typical MAiD case is the “Aunt Mary” type: “a woman who had a progressive chronic condition, who feared dependence on her family and others, and who was depressed. Mary probably did not have proper medical coverage or access to counseling and thought MAiD was her only option.” For a given MAiD request, the article argues, this is the more likely sort of candidate to be making it.

The piece concludes by claiming that in such cases and those similar – cases of people with perfectly healthy bodies seeking MAiD for conditions like “incurable depression,” for instance – the plea for death may be understood more accurately as “a plea for help and love.” “In reality, it is not intense pain that motivates the drive for euthanasia and assisted suicide,” the author argues. “Rather, the cry for death is in reality a cry of desperation from the depressed and isolated, in short, the plea for love.”

It is a point well-put. The question of euthanasia is one that begins to touch on something of the mystery of our fallen human condition. There’s a strangeness to the ways we tend to feel about euthanasia in that what we think about human life, culturally, doesn’t always seem to motivate how we’re operating or feeling. We could put the point like this: in a lot of ways, where God has been eliminated from the equation, euthanasia is not an illogical response to human suffering. For if one believes that life begins and ends with our physical being, that there is nothing beyond the grave, and that, as the Book of Wisdom puts it, “we were born by mere chance, and hereafter we shall be as though we had never been” (2:2), it follows that if one wants to opt out of their senseless life, they ought to be free to do so. Many lives are enmeshed in profound pain, after all, and despite sentimental claims to the contrary, to be alive is often nothing but suffering. So to choose not to endure such a life could be viewed as a perfectly reasonable decision.

And yet, that doesn’t quite sit rightly with us. The case of an “Aunt Mary” receiving MAiD (or even an “Uncle Louis”) has become socially acceptable only at a stuttering pace, and with controversy continuing to haunt the laws which allow for it. And this is despite the secularization of the West. We’ve gotten ourselves to believe that there’s no God who brought us into being, no eternity to deal with, that our lives are purely and simply our own to deal with, and yet, when we find ourselves confronted with those wanting to make the choice for death, we find that there is something deep within us that tells us that human lives are supposed to have meaning, and that willingly taking one’s own life is more accurately a counsel of despair than an exercise in logic. This is perhaps why the present, typical MAiD case has so often involved psychological illness and loneliness, too. Pain is not the ultimate evil in our lives. Meaninglessness is. We try to call euthanasia a “beautiful” death, but we know there’s no such thing. Death is an enemy, whatever we pretend to say about it. And it’s only the conviction that our lives and suffering have no value that drives us to usher such an enemy into them.

As a result, it’s important to keep clear why it is that Christians don’t and can’t warrant euthanasia. It’s not because we believe that life and pain aren’t actually all that bad, and so we should all be happy to be alive just as we are. Our reasons are founded on three different truths entirely: first, that our lives don’t belong to us, and we have no more right to take them than we have to end someone else’s. Second, that physical death is not actually the end of our existence, and so the worth of our lives cannot be determined by our present, immediate experience. And third, suffering, even very great suffering, when understood rightly and held out to God through Christ, has a purpose that transcends us and gives our pain purpose. It can even make our suffering the most meaningful part of our lives, though we may not be able to see, fully, how it is so.

Of course, such truths don’t find many welcome places to land in a world that has run very far from our crucified Lord. But the “plea for love,” as this author suggests, we have not managed to get away from. And that plea is motivated, through and through, by the loss of a real sense of meaning and community in our present age, which remains the source of our deepest suffering, and our real despair. May our Christian witness be a stand against such despair, and may it be a stand rooted in truth: the truth that our suffering is real and often deep, and that, for that very reason, the love which may be found in the midst of it can be real and deep, too.