Saturday evening after vespers a young professor who is teaching at Loyola University told me how Thursday afternoon during a shopping trip he and his wife and daughter had heard sirens and had seen police block off a section of Dempster Street in Skokie. They could see the flashing lights of ambulances and police cars in the distance. Several cars had been flipped over.
According to news reports, a driver sped down Dempster at 70 mph, running three red lights until it smashed into a car stopped at a red light. The driver of the speeding car survived, but the three unsuspecting men sitting in the car that was struck were all killed. They were 29, 35, and 39.
Was this tragedy caused by a high-speed police chase? Mechanical failure? No, the driver of the speeding car was Jeanette Sliwinski, 23, who told investigators she intentionally drove her speeding car into the men's vehicle in an attempt to kill herself. Her parents and a lawyer have issued a statement from her hospital bed: "I pray and beg for forgiveness from everyone who is saddened by the deaths."
She was charged with three counts of first-degree murder and two counts of aggravated battery in connection with the fatal crash.
Clearly the young woman needs help. It is a horrible tragedy in more ways than one that she tried to kill herself. Three funerals will be held because someone else wanted to commit suicide.
What I can only imagine some people saying about this incident is not that it shows the danger that suicide poses to society, but that it shows that we need laws that allow people access to reasonable means for committing suicide.
That is a typical response of many moderns to a problem: let's find ways to ameliorate the situation and make suicide safe for everyone. It's of the same species as "let's pass out condomns to 14-year-olds in case they might get pregnant or contract or spread an STD." Symptoms are addressed with bandaids and laws or policies or even education that draw lines too tightly and firmly are abandoned as illiberal and oppressive. Better to pass out condoms and Planned Parenthood business cards in case of a pregnancy than to teach that abstinence before marriage really works in cutting down pregnancies out of wedlock, not to mention STDs. Better to legalize assisted suicide and cut down on the number of failed attempts that go bad. Perhaps a new organization, Planned Suicide?
The right to suicide, unlike the right to virtually unregulated, has not advanced quite as far in our legal system. But it's not because assisted-suicide laws haven't been envisioned and proposed.
The latest ploy in this effort, I suspect, is to hide it within a bundle of end-of-life choices. In fact, there is an organization called End-of-Life Choices that seems to do exactly that:
We believe that it is an individual’s right to choose with dignity, compassion, and control how to end their life. We advocate for the patient who is already in the dying process.
Our long-term plan includes raising awareness and building both community coalitions and individual support for a patient’s right to end of life choice. This array of choices should include a patient’s right to choose to have a physician’s aid in the dying process. Equally important to Choices is a physician’s right to be protected under the law from any prosecution when a patient chooses this form of dignified deliverance.
Members have access to programs that help them and their loved ones examine the full range of their end-of-life options, including the option of hastening the dying process.
This sounds so sane and sensible to the average citizen who might not ask hard questions about exactly what they mean. While they might advocate for "the patient who is already in the dying process," it doesn't, surprise, stop there. The average citizen, and perhaps you, probably didn't know this about End-of-Life Choices: it use to be called The Hemlock Society.
At the website of the International Task Force on Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide, the following are documented, with a note that Hemlock changed it's name to End-of-Life Choices in 2003:
Hemlock extols assisted suicide for elderly people who are not ill.
* "Some couples choose to die together, regardless of whether both are in poor health, or only one….That the couple would wish to die together is a tribute to the strength of a loving relationship."
Hemlock's Medical Director admits that plastic bags and gas are used for Caring Friends' assisted suicides.
* "We have had to shift to techniques using plastic bags and helium. That, remarkably has become an acceptable method of hastening death….It is a very speedy process and it has never failed in our program." [7]
Hemlock's description of the plastic bag and gas method of assisted suicide:
* A plastic bag and helium produces "gentle, quick and certain death." [8]
* The gas "disperses easily and is difficult to trace in a corpse." [9]
* During the dying process "a little twitching in the arms and legs" should be expected. [10]Hemlock advises that Caring Friends be present at assisted suicides.
* "Even if we published Helium for Dummies, we still think that having someone with expertise present is better." [4]
* "[E]nding your life can be complex, you only do it once, and failure could be disastrous." [5]
Just ask the families of three young men tragically killed in Skokie. But that's no reason to lift the ban on suicide and acquiesce to Hemlock's deadly designs.
"Encouraging or facilitating the death of someone who above all things needs to be carried into light and warmth and reassurance is a despicably callous act. To call it mercy is to deal in arrogance and the utter mockery of grace, the spurning of individual worth and redemption.
"It is also an impertinent attempt to deafen people to the Word-who-was-made-flesh, the Man of Sorrows who would sing the patient sufferings of ephemerals into the Eternal music, thus binding forever, in the mending of the world, the lays of mortal men to the imperishable evensong of Love."
Posted by: Baillie | July 19, 2005 at 02:38 PM