Suicide and Assited Suicide

 

The Committee on Jewish Law and Standards, the official halakhic body of Conservative Judaism, has published a teshuva on suicide and assisted suicide in the summer 1998 issue of "Conservative Judaism" Vol. L, No.4.

The teshuva notes that suicide is forbidden by Jewish law, except for three classic cases. That is, if you are being forced by someone to (a) murder someone, (b) commit idolatry, or (c) commit adultery or incest, in those three cases alone would suicide be permissible. In fact, in those cases, suicide is said to be preferable. However, outside those cases, suicide is forbidden - and this includes both parts of assisted suicide. One may not ask someone to assist in killing themselves, because (a) killing oneself is forbidden, and (b) one is then making someone else accomplice to a sin.

However, after outlawing suicide, the teshuva goes on to its real purpose - to counter the growing trend of Americans and Europeans who are asking their friends and family to help kill themselves. As the Conservative teshuva points out, many people get sick, often with terminal illnesses, but most people don't try and committ suicide. So we are obligated to try and find out why some people _do_ ask for suicide, and we are then obligated to remove these reasons so that people don't want to kill themselves in the first place.

The author of the teshuva, Elliot Dorff, and other members of the CJLS's committee on bioethics, have had extensive experience researching this issue. They demonstrate that "those who committ suicide and those who aid others in doing so act out of a plethora of motives. Some of these reasons are less than noble, involving, for example, children's desires to see Mom or Dad die with dispatch so as not to squander their inheritance on "futile" health care, or the desire of insurance companies to spend as little money as possible on the terminally ill."

The teshuva also discusses the fact that some patients want to die because they are pain, but they point out that the proper response to this is not suicide, but simply better pain control and more pain medication. It is not well known, but the CJLS is trying to make people aware of a genuine crisis in medical care of elderly and terminally ill patients: Many doctors are deliberately keeping such patients in perpetual, constant pain by refusing to grant them adequete amounts of pain killers. Some do this out of complete ignorance, others do it because they claim they want to avoid any possibility of the patient becoming a "drug addict". Others claims that a good patient will grin and bear it with the least amount of pain medication possible. The CJLS teshuva points out that such reasoning is "bizarre", and in fact is cruel. With today's medications, there is no reason for people to be in this kind of perpetual torture. While some doctors are waking up to this and acting appropriately, most still need to be educated.

The teshuva outlines and discusses several theological reasons why Judaism is opposed to suicide. Another section discusses the social and economic forces that conspire to drive many people to this decision. Most importantly, the teshuva investigates the psychological reasons for the hopelessness felt by some patients.

It points out that "Physicians or others asked to assist in dying should recognize that people contemplating suicide are often alone, without anyone taking an interest in their continued living. Rather than assist the patient in dying, the proper response to such circumstances is to provide the patient with a group of people who clearly and repeatedly reaffirm their interest in the pateint's continued life."

The teshuva goes on to recite a heartbreaking story of how some people are abaondoned in nursing homes with absolutely no one to visit them, telephone them, or write letters. Under such conditions of absolute abandonment, it is understandable why some peope lose all hope and wish to die. However, the Jewish response isn't to kill, it is to give these people a better life. "Requests to die, then, must be evaluated in the terms of degree of social support the patient has, for such requests are often withdrawn as soon as someone shows an interest in the patient staying alive. In this age of individualism and broken and scattered families, and in the antiseptic environment of hospitals where dying people usually find themselves, the mitzvah of visting the sick (bikkur Holim) becomes all the more crucial in sustaining the will to live."