By Hilary White
LONDON, October 21, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Now that a young former rugby player has committed suicide at the Dignitas “clinic” in Zurich, the media is in a furore, defending the role his parents played in the act as a matter of “mercy.” Assisted suicide is illegal in Britain and West Mercia Police have launched an investigation into the incident in which the parents of rugby player and student Daniel James reportedly accompanied their son to Switzerland for the purpose of helping him end his life.
Daniel James was a 23 year-old rising rugby star and engineering student who became suicidal after becoming paralyzed from the chest down from a sports injury in March last year. James committed assisted suicide on September 12 at the infamous Swiss facility after being taken there by his parents.
His mother, Julie James, defended her decision to help her son commit suicide, writing on the Daily Telegraph website, that a “well-meaning person” had reported the incident to police.
She wrote, “I hope that one day I will get the chance to speak to this lady and ask if she had a son, daughter, father, mother, who could not walk, had no hand function, was incontinent, and relied upon 24-hour care for every basic need and they had asked her for support, what would she have done?!”
His parents said that their son, who suffered a collapsed spine during a training session, had tried “several” times to kill himself before he “gained his wish.” Julie James said that the Dignitas suicide facility was her son’s “only option”: “Dan had tried to commit suicide three times but was unsuccessful due to his disability. Other than to starve himself, to travel to Switzerland was his only option.”
Mainstream media stories are largely defending James’ decision to kill himself, and his parents’ decision to assist him. Numerous editorials have appeared, using the language of the euthanasia movement and saying that that Daniel James’ parents should not be prosecuted for having “helped him to die.”
The Guardian carries an editorial by Baroness Warnock, a leading figure in the pro-abortion and pro-euthanasia secular bioethics movement, under the headline “Legalise assisted suicide, for pity’s sake.” Britain’s “philosopher queen,” Baroness Warnock said, “There are many, of whom I am one, who believe that we must try yet again to change the law [criminalising assisting suicide], not by excluding from criminality those who assist death by taking the suicide abroad but by liberalising the laws of our own country.”
Dr. Peter Saunders, campaign director of the Care Not Killing Alliance, said that assisted suicide is a dangerous case of the slippery slope and suggested that what people need is proper, humane care, not suicide. He told the BBC, “First it is people with motor neurone disease who have two or three years to live, then people who conditions such as multiple sclerosis who may have a long life expectancy and then this young man with an injury which has left him profoundly disabled.
“It raises questions about why this young man felt so desperate he needed to take his life.”
Other critics are sounding the alarm over the sympathy being expressed by media and the public, not so much for James as for the act of suicide. Wesley J. Smith, an American lawyer and writer on bioethics, has said the problem is not the suicidal despair of a young man, but “it is how the community reacts to suicidal ideation.”
The media, he wrote, is “using the case like one big Oprah show” to “short circuit” moral criticism of the act.
“Oprahtization is about making people feel good about whatever they do (except smoking tobacco or making moral judgements), and in that unprinciplism (if you will) are sown the seeds of individual and societal destruction,” Smith said.
Smith added, “while we cannot judge” James’ parents, “we cannot condone their actions.”
“And we can certainly push back against the insidious message their actions and current statements are sending to people with disabilities and other despairing Jameses and their families.”
Smith concluded, “James might well have triumphed out of his injury, given time. We will never know. But his death is now being used as a cudgel against human exceptionalism and the equality/sanctity of human life.”