Killing Yourself

Today the state legislature is discussing a bill similar to Oregon's phsyician assisted suicide law. As usual in these culture war days, both sides are mustering their lobbyists to make clear lines and goalposts out of all that fuzziness about right to life vs. quality of life and individual rights vs. state rights. If you care give your legislator a holler.

Terminal illness and that sort of thing feels very removed from my day to day life right now. I'm relatively young and healthy and generally my family is in good condition. Though last year, I finally got around to helping my grandmother prepare a DNR(A Do Not Resuscitate Order) requested years ago. Still, if I am to think about it, right now, I feel like life is short enough as it is. I want to enjoy it for as long as I can. I want to experience everything life has to offer. We're all gone in a millisecond anyway.

But I can understand reaching a point, where my health has deterioriated so far and I am in so much pain and there is no reasonable hope for any recovery where it just might not make sense anymore. And if I can reasonably and rationally discuss the implications with my kin and doctors and choose that course of action, why should the state prevent that? Yeah, there are dangers with this kind of legislation. I'm sure you can all imagine the scenarios of grisly murders by greedy children and so forth, but so far, the law seems to have worked very well in Oregon and several people have "benefited" though not nearly as many as we might expect.

For the record, if I have no chance of reasonable chance of recovery, please let me go and give my organs to whoever might benefit. I say this though I'm too cowardly to give blood on a regular basis.