MEMORANDUM OF OPPOSITION

Informed by classical Jewish tradition which teaches that all human life is sacred, and possessed of the firm view that laws that undermine the sanctity of human life send a message that is profoundly dangerous for all of society, Agudath Israel’s interest in the issue of legalizing suicide is especially keen.

Our belief is that a doctor’s role is to provide healing, not to hasten death. Doctors who assist in the commission of suicide, even when motivated by the most humane of concerns, exceed the bounds of their own Hippocratic mandate and undermine public confidence in the medical profession. Anthropologist Margaret Mead—herself a supporter of certain forms of euthanasia, so long as they are under lay initiative and control—has urged that “the medical profession should not be compromised by participation” in euthanasia; “[t]he physician’s dedication to the saving of life is of incalculable value to humanity and must be protected from repeated efforts to involve the doctor in lethal activities.” M. Mead, From Black and White Magic to Modern Medicine, 22 Proceedings of the Rudolf Virchow Medical Society 131 (1965). Agudath Israel views with considerable alarm the transformation of the physician’s calling envisioned by the bill in question, which would enable doctors to provide suicide medication to patients.

Moreover, as representatives of a people whose numbers were decimated little more than half-a-century ago by a society that “progressed” from its “enlightened” practices of “mercy killing” to the mass slaughter of millions of human beings deemed physically or racially “inferior,” Agudath Israel is particularly sensitive to the legal assignment of diminished levels of life protection based on diminished levels of life “quality”. The bill under consideration reflects this dangerous trend away from the recognition of life’s inherent sanctity and presents a stark challenge to our nation’s social morals.

There are particularly strong reasons to reject the view that the generally accepted doctrine of personal autonomy in medical decision making should allow patients to commit suicide. The potential abuses of legalizing suicide have been well catalogued by a host of legal and medical observers. For example, in its landmark report opposing assisted suicide, the 24-member New York State Task Force on Life and the Law, speaking unanimously, noted the following concerns: the pressures patients would feel, from their doctors and their families, to opt for suicide; the inherent inequalities of our health care delivery systems which tend to discriminate against the poor, the handicapped and the elderly; the psychological vulnerability of the severely ill; the risk of misdiagnoses of the patient’s condition; the likelihood in many cases that adequate treatment of pain and depression would dissuade the patient from seeking death. New York State Task Force on Life and the Law, When Death is Sought: Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia in the Medical Context 121-34 (1994). Indeed, these risk factors will often raise serious doubts about whether a patient’s request for help in committing suicide is truly an expression of the patient’s autonomous will. We concur with the Task Force’s observation (Report at 121) that “as a society, we have better ways to give people greater control and relief from suffering than by making it easier for patients to commit suicide or to obtain a lethal injection.”

We urge the legislature to reject this bill. Legalizing suicide would be a rapid descent into a moral abyss where the millennia-old rejection of suicide is being cast aside in the name of humanitarian “progress.”