Cristina Odone’s lifelong fight against assisted suicide and euthanasia is rooted in the story of her half-brother, Lorenzo. Diagnosed with a degenerative brain disorder at the age of seven, Lorenzo was left unable to move enough to swallow food. He could only communicate through blinking. Cristina’s father and step-mother dedicated their lives to caring for their son and finding a cure. Their search for, and eventual discovery of, a treatment for their son’s disorder is an inspiring story that was made into an Oscar-nominated film. It is easy, therefore, to imagine Cristina’s horror when her father, suffering in a hospital ward, asked her to put him “out of [his] misery”.
In an article appropriately titled “I refused to help my father die”, Cristina relates this shocking moment and uses it to engage in a conversation about the rising euthanistic mindset in Britain. She confronts the culture that drives even a noble man like her father, who showed that he was willing to suffer endlessly for his son’s sake, to give up hope in a hospital bed. In a pamphlet that she wrote this week for Britain’s conservative think-tank, The Centre for Policy Studies, she cites a 2009 survey by The Times showing that 74% of the respondents supported the euphemistic “right to die”. The blame for this attitude, in Cristina’s argument, lies with Western culture’s worship of eternal youth. Because so much of advertisers’ time and money is spent emphasizing the “carefully defined template of human perfection”, “the ideal has become the norm” in a way that denigrates the weak, the vulnerable and the old. Cristina agrees with assisted-suicide advocates that “few in Britain today die as they would choose to”, with dignity and surrounded by their loved ones. She admits that protracted hospital stays can be painful and dehumanizing, and blames Britain’s hospital environment for her father’s humiliation and despair. Her solution, however, is not to shorten people’s hospital stay by poisoning them but to implement a progressive, humane system of palliative care centers and support systems that would allow people to truly die with dignity.
Cristina’s main concern in the fight against assisted-suicide is protecting the vulnerable. In her policy pamphlet, she takes a step back from her Catholic faith and starts with the mindset that “If this is to be resolved, it should be on the basis of facts, not faith. Legalizing assisted suicide risks harming the most vulnerable. It should be rejected on grounds of public safety, not personal morality.” Many of the voices pushing for Britain to legalize assisted-suicide belong to what she calls the “chattering classes”, the “articulate, well-educated grown-up, with no money worries” who would know how to defend themselves against cost-conscious doctors or greedy relatives who tried to pressure them into suicide. Cristina’s concern is for those elderly and the disabled who are not wealthy, are not well-educated and might easily be convinced that they are simply a burden on the National Health Service, or on their families.
Our own country, too often, does not do enough to protect the vulnerable from this threat. Oregon, one of two states that have legalized assisted-suicide, has seen their assisted-suicide rates quadruple since legalization in 1997. Cristina cites a 2009 article in the Washington Times that documents two horrific cases where the Oregon Health Plan refused to cover proscribed cancer medications, then offered to pay for an assisted-suicide pill.
While assisted suicide does not have nearly the support here that it does in Britain, we can find many of the same warning signs and cultural factors. We, too, “obsessed with health, youth and success, [...] make assumptions about the poor quality of life that people with disabilities suffer from, and shrink altogether from addressing the issues surrounding death and dying”. Far too easily, assisted suicide could become for us, like for most of Britain, subsumed under the banner of individual choice. Because of this, it is important that we start even now to remind our culture that, in Cristina’s words, “death is not an individual step, carried out in isolation. Rather, it is an act that places us in relationship with others – family, the local community, anyone with whom we must share our limited social and health service resources.”
Cristina responded to her father’s moment of despair by pleading with him to “to focus his extraordinary spirit on life, not death”. She was there for her father in his time of need, and he made a recovery. From her example, like that found in our own Brian Caulfield’s excellent series of columns, we can see that the very best defense against a culture of assisted suicide is a loving family, strengthened by hope.
- Luke Hansen
Great post! I'll have to check out that movie about her brother.
Posted by: Lucia | October 22, 2010 at 12:29 PM