X-Message-Number: 4210
Date: Sat, 15 Apr 1995 16:53:26 -0400 (EDT)
From: Ben Best <>
Subject: Choosing the Moment of One's Own Death

    I recently read a review of Dr. Thomas Szasz's book CRUEL COMPASSION,
which has returned my thoughts to the relation of cryonics to suicide and
euthanasia. Dr. Kevorkian rejects the view that suicide is a human right,
asserting that suicide is only justifiable with medical assistance for a
person who is experiencing intense suffering caused by a fatal illness. 
Dr. Szasz, by contrast, holds that suicide IS a human right, and that a
medical doctor is not needed for suicide.

    Dr. Szasz is most noted for his railings against the power of 
psychiatrists to imprison people by declaring those people to be mentally
ill. He has also attacked the state-sanctioned monopoly that gives people
access to drugs only when thay have a prescription from a physician. In 
CRUEL COMPASSION Szasz criticizes the idea that physicians should be given
the power to determine who can commit suicide and when they can do it.
He supports the idea that all drugs and chemicals, including painlessly 
fatal ones, should be available without prescription.

    At the November cryonics conference Mike Darwin raised the issue 
that in the "normal" dying process the cerebral cortex may become ischemic
long before the medulla does. In that case, even the most rapid application
of a heart-lung machine after heart stoppage (and declaration of legal 
death) could not prevent considerable ischemic damage to the brain. Cases
of Alzheimer's Disease and brain cancer raise hard questions about when
the moment of death should be, especially if they do not involve obvious
pain. I believe that most cryonicists favor the idea that these choices 
should be their own, and not those of a physician. 

    The argument against the human right to suicide that I find most 
persuasive is that witnessed suicide and assisted suicide create 
legal-epistemological problems. How can it be proven that the death really
was a suicide if a physician is not in control? A free society would 
presumably result in suicide-certification agencies, but we cannot wait
for a free society. If witnessed suicide and assisted suicide were 
completely legal then there would certainly be people who would opt for
cryopreservation on the grounds that the future may be much better than the
present. And if physician-assisted suicide is approved in some North 
American jurisdictions, cryonicists may face a tough battle against people
who claim that cryonicists are hastening death by fostering false hopes.
This will be true even in cases of intense suffering caused by fatal 
illness.
                      -- Ben Best ()


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