BRITTANY MAYNARD is the latest poster child for the pro-suicide movement. Diagnosed with brain cancer not long ago, Maynard, 29, has decided she will kill herself on November 1 to avoid acute suffering. Compassion and Choices, the former Hemlock Society and a leading advocate of laws legalizing assisted suicide, has produced an artful video of Brittany that has gone viral with more than five million views. I was visiting a relative in a nursing home the other day, surrounded by the sick and disabled, when I heard on a nearby screen this self-absorbed woman being interviewed. The media can’t go wrong with a story like this. It rends emotions and stirs controversy. Organized suicide is great for the news business. I wondered how many people in how many nursing homes and hospitals around the country were watching this willful, painfully superficial woman explain how pointless suffering is.

Maynard believes she is entitled to a life of health and adventure. Deprived of that, she has chosen to plan her own suicide, and, while she is at it, promote the idea for others. Some who also have terminal illnesses, understandably agitated by her story, have begged her to reconsider. Little do they know they are playing the part of useful fools to the propaganda machine at “Compassion and Choices.”

Dave Andrusko writes:

Maynard’s case is what groups like Compassion & Choices live for. A beautiful young woman apparently about to be cut down in the prime of her life. It matters not that such cases—terminal illnesses—are always the opening wedge after which, once the principal is established, the “right” to be “assisted” expands to a whole panoply of reasons none of which are about terminal illnesses.

The principles of Compassion and Choices are perfectly consistent with assisted suicide for those who are not terminally ill but are experiencing unhappiness and chronic illness of some kind. Legal suicide, much farther ahead in Europe, has already gone in that direction in Belgium, and it will likely go in that direction in the United States too.

The ironic thing about Maynard’s case is that the art and science of relieving pain are highly developed and she apparently has family and friends willing to care for her. But she sees no point in living a little longer unless she can have it her way. She is planning to continue to travel and have fun after her death too. Sadly, it seems to never have occurred to Maynard that she may experience intense suffering after her death.

— Comments —

Hurricane Betsy writes:

This dying girl doesn’t strike me as any more “self absorbed” than anyone else who has been given a death sentence.  “Willful, painfully superficial woman”?  Not in my books. If she were much older, maybe those words would be a correct description, but what do you expect of such a young person?  Why expect her to have wisdom beyond her years?  I’d say she is remarkably mature.  We can sympathize with her, I know I do, without giving in to the manipulative “death with dignity” crusade. I don’t believe she is reading from a script.  I think she is who she appears to be.

As to the sick and disabled in the nursing home you refer to, how do you know none of them wouldn’t appreciate a quick needle?  When I would visit my mother (who wasn’t in terrible shape) in the nursing home, I saw women there who I would have euthanized if they had asked me and if I could have gotten away with it.  My dad, a farmer, would shoot animals who were in better condition than these godforsaken souls.

Laura writes:

The people who you would have liked to shoot like animals were going to die in a short time, a few years at most.  A person who is incapacitated can still experience life-changing events that may exceed in importance everything else that has occurred in their lives. Suffering is not useless. Death is the most important moment of our lives.

I blame the organization which is exploiting this young woman first, but Maynard has accepted the attention. I don’t sympathize with her public promotion of suicide. She is willful because she wants to control completely the timing and nature of her death, and will leave her family with the painful or ambivalent aftermath of suicide. She is self-absorbed because she does not in this carefully staged video express true gratitude for the life she has had or acknowledge that in caring for her, friends and family might have the chance to express their own higher qualities. She is superficial and proud because she is obviously an atheist who is excessively attached to this world and her purpose is purely the avoidance of pain and humiliation. She has not thought through the principles she is promoting.

But it is not too late for her to change.

Josh F. writes:

The sole marketing strategy accepted industry-wide in selling white self-annihilation of all sorts is in all the particular self-annihilating “acts” being reduced into a “right” to an ultimate “freedom.”  But ALL “successful” socialized orders require an end-of-revolution accounting that always equals a mass culling of the citizenry in order to straighten out the “books.”  In the “enlightened” world, this culling is coercively voluntary and subject to increasingly “creative” means of framing the acts of self-annihilation as a normal and commonsense choice one has as an option “in life.”  There seems something inevitable about a mass euthanasia of Western Man.

Michael S. writes:

Clearly, Hurricane Betsy has no supernatural faith whatsoever.

A reader writes:

I thought this was a good article on Brittany Maynard.

Hurricane writes:

“She is superficial and proud because she is obviously an atheist who is excessively attached to this world and her purpose is purely the avoidance of pain and humiliation. She has not thought through the principles she is promoting.”

Not a one of you would object to being kept artificially alive, i.e., temporarily “saved”,  through the application of incredibly unnatural, expensive, high tech medicine. Treatments that violate every known law of God and nature.  The alternative would be your, or your children’s, earlier-than-desired death. That in my books is cowardice. It is no better than Brittany’s actions. That, too, constitutes the “avoidance of pain and humiliation”.

Why any of you here would consider Brittany’s lack of courage any worse than your own unpublicized, private cowardice, shameful behavior and sinful deeds –  known only to yourselves and the Creator – escapes me.

 Laura writes:

Not a one of you would object to being kept artificially alive, i.e., temporarily “saved”,  through the application of incredibly unnatural, expensive, high tech medicine.

You’ve changed the subject. Brittany has not reached the point where she is being kept alive by machines. You can see that very well from this video, which was made weeks before her planned suicide.

I never said Brittany’s lack of courage is worse than my own sins. She is publicly promoting suicide. That is wrong and she may suffer as a result.

Oct. 15, 2014

Mary writes:

It occurs to me was that there is a false sense that Brittany Maynard is somehow being prevented from committing suicide by the laws against government assisted suicide. Nothing of the kind: people successfully commit suicide every day (tragically); the terminally ill receive all kinds of assistance easing out of the world (some would say too much already), via hospice, friends and family members, etc. This young woman of all people, with the support she obviously has, would be able to manage suicide quite nicely without any fanfare. But modern young people are raised to adore the camera – they are geniuses of self-promotion – and with a do-gooder, “I want to make the world a better place” brand of volunteerism, so this young woman has succeeded in the way that matters most in the world today: she has a 7,000,000 view youtube video, the holy grail of social media. She has left her mark. Now it is left to others to surpass this high-water mark. Of course I still hope and pray she changes her mind.

Sympathy for this woman must be limited to that for the state of her soul, and cannot justly be expressed without mention of, sorry, but, the *unspeakably grave* harm she does to most vulnerable people in our society, for she is swaying hearts and minds with this video. This cannot be made light of: it is truly diabolical, for if (when) this idea of helping the terminally ill commit suicide becomes legal it will quickly expand to include the depressed, as it did in the Netherlands thirty years ago, and then on from there. Millions upon millions of Americans are on anti-depressants: the lonely? the handicapped? the remorseful? The elderly are obviously particularly vulnerable to being infected with the feeling of shame for being a burden on others and will feel guilt for not taking an “out” when it’s available. But anyone in middle age or later, years beyond their “sell by” date, past their sexual peak and earning potential, not to mention the grieving, the unemployed, those who need assistance in day to day life; those who don’t feel loved – or those are actually loved by no one, estranged from their families and friends; the unpopular teen with no friends? What of these? The reach of these laws will eventually be beyond imagination.

As Matt Walsh says in his piece (linked above), two contradictory narratives can’t be advanced at the same time: either it’s brave and dignified to endure suffering until the end, or it’s brave and dignified to take your own life to avoid suffering. If it’s brave and dignified to take your own life then suffering has no value. Is losing one’s ability to care for oneself physically also a loss of dignity? Absolutely not, but our treatment of and attitude toward those who are helpless helps them retain dignity in the face of incredible suffering, which has benefits for both parties in ways which will always exist but are not valued or spoken of much anymore. We are being robbed of our very humanity.

I have a close elderly family member who said after his wife’s funeral that contrary to what others thought his wife was no burden to him: it was a privilege to care for her, to spend those years with her when she was helplessly ill; he wouldn’t have it any other way. Witnessing another elderly family member endure total physical decline while maintaining complete mental clarity changed my life, for in his dignity and holiness I knew a saint on earth. Life-changing.

The left’s attempts through social engineering to eliminate physical suffering, limitations on pleasure, etc. cause untold suffering, exponentially greater than would ever have existed without their “help”, which comes in the form of laws such as these, laws that deconstruct moral order. Many souls have been deadened and hearts hardened.

Laura writes:

Thank you for many good points.

However, I don’t agree that Maynard is the subject of such fanfare because of narcissism; at least, it’s not only that.

This was staged and planned by a well-funded organization that wants suicide publicly affirmed.

Josh F. writes:

You say, “She is publicly promoting suicide.”

Exactly. She is a celebrity self-annihilator. Her only real purpose is to recruit others towards self-annihilation whether she is conscious of this or not. What is becoming ever more clear is that those who advocate, promote and publicly practice all the various forms of self-annihilation should have NO PUBLIC VOICE that isn’t first qualified with this basic understanding. Certainly, our civilization cannot be manned by self-annihilators.

Bert Perry writes:

First of all, when I looked up the young lady’s disease on Mayo’s website, the thing that struck me is that they note that those who treat it do indeed have better outcomes than those who do not.  Now that might or might not apply for her specific degree of it, but as bad as Stage Four cancer is, it is treatable with some success.

Now I can understand why some might not want to try–a friend of mine decided not to treat his pancreatic cancer last winter–but having spent time with him, and others close to death, I remember and treasure those last days as the die was being cast.  As God was cutting the threads, not man.

Plus, do we really want doctors running around killing people, or apothecaries prescribing poisons?  One of the key rules of my profession (quality engineering) is that if you don’t want an outcome, you make it impossible for your workers to implement it.  Make it possible–put poisons on the apothecary’s shelves or lethal injection on the doctor’s “to do” list–and it will be misused.

For example, about one in eight deaths in Benelux is now euthanasia, and a significant portion of those are involuntary deaths, while there are entire categories of death that are probably medically induced but not strictly called euthanasia.

In other words, it’s being misused as doctors seek to bury their mistakes and heirs seek to gain a quicker, larger, inheritance.  As anyone who understands the use of poison in history could have told you.

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