Euthanasia and the pressure to die

Each week, The World and Everything in It features a “Culture Friday” segment, in which Executive Producer Nick Eicher discusses the latest cultural news with John Stonestreet, president of the Chuck Colson Center for Christian Worldview. Here is a summary of this week’s conversation.

This week, California Gov. Jerry Brown, who once trained to become a Jesuit priest, has signed a new law permitting physician-assisted suicide. California is home to more than 38 million Americans, and it joins four other states with combined populations of another 12 million, where euthanasia is legal. That means 15 percent of the United States’ population, or about 1 in 7, can have a doctors prescribe a lethal dose of drugs so they can kill themselves.

Evidence shows that when governments permit euthanasia, euthanasia cases rise.

“It’s what happens when you tether human dignity and human value to illusions of autonomy,” John Stonestreet said this week. The California bill “further establishes, in law, a vision of meaning and purpose that if one cannot express one’s autonomy … then one ceases to have value and the only way for them to now have dignity is for them to die.”

But dignity can be revealed in suffering, in trials, and in old age, Stonestreet said. Plus, laws allowing euthanasia put pressure on people whose physical health creates burdens for their loved ones to kill themselves.

“To think that financial considerations will never come into play is just foolish. Of course they will,” Stonestreet said. “These are inevitable calculations that are made by societies who do not have any sort of grounding for human dignity based on the inherent value that all people have.”

Listen to “Culture Friday” on The World and Everything in It.