From the NYT:
A Georgia grand jury indicted four members of an assisted suicide group Tuesday on charges they helped a 58-year-old man with cancer kill himself.
The four — the Final Exit Network’s former president, its former medical director and two others — were formally indicted by a Forsyth County grand jury on charges of offering assistance in the commission of suicide, tampering with evidence and violating the state’s anti-racketeering charges.
They were arrested more than a year ago and charged with assisted suicide in John Celmer’s death at his north Georgia home. The arrests came after an eight-month investigation where an undercover agent posing as someone seeking suicide infiltrated the group.
The Final Exit people are controversial in the right-to-die world because they advocate that anyone who’s suffering, not just the terminally ill, should be able to get help killing themselves.
Which only makes sense: Once you pave the philosophical path to assisted suicide—it isn’t a sin, the afflicted deserve rest, adults have sovereignty over their own bodies—anybody will be able to walk down it.
It’s also green. As long as the body’s disposed of properly.
But Jeebus says it’s a sin! Oh noes!
If you make suicide legal, everyone will want to do it!
I’m all for right-to-die groups, but you do eventually start wading into some murky moral ground. For example, how much suffering from mental illness does someone need to endure to deserve permission to die? How can someone in that state make a decision about their own life?
A lot of really horrible diseases are not terminal, not until you go through years of stuff you wouldn’t want to watch your mother or your worst enemy endure. If assisted suicide’s a choice, it should be an actual choice, no matter what.
What about the guy who killed himself locally today?
I’d rather have assisted suicide than people jumping from bridges or onto rails.
When you kill 900,000 babies a year it’s a small step to offing old people.
@7 – why do you hate our military so?
As awful as suicide is for those left behind, I think everyone has a right to die. And not just because the planet is already horrendously overpopulated.
This may be hard to believe, but I mean no sarcasm when I say that at least an assisted suicide group has a supportive credo. In the case of the Final Exit Network, it’s “To offer free service to all who apply, providing relevant information, home visits if possible and compassionate counseling for individual and family.”
Which means that unlike all the people who kill themselves out of loneliness or depression, these people had at least one extra level of “sanity-checking” and counseling to verify that this is a decision they really want, and not an impulsive (depressive) whim, and that the people in their lives that would be affected would be forewarned and to some degree aware of the process. They will have a will; they will be able to say their final goodbyes. There will be less of the ambiguity that surrounds most suicides.
@8 – thank you! best zinger of the day…
@9 – you make a great point, but i think ‘because the planet is already horrendously overpopulated’ is a close second. unless we can convince these fukin catholics to stop having 5+ children per couple, we’re all doomed. oh wait, they found water on the moon, so we have a small chance…
My body, my life and fuck the holier than thou fucking assholes.