Dear Sir,
At 44, I learned that I had Parkinson’s disease, an incurable neurodegenerative disease. My reaction was to fight to live with my illness. Today society no longer admires that courage. She admires the choice of death.
I fight to live. Anne Bert (1) fought to die. “If, with regard to the same reality considered under the same relation, there cannot exist two contradictory statements which are true at the same time” (Aristotle), then we have to face the facts: one of us is wrong.
Anne Bert would have made the right choice and I would be wrong to fight to live? Why would it be good for one sick person to choose death and good for another to choose life?
You will say that it depends on the disease, the state of health, the support of relatives and caregivers. Does the value of life depend on these criteria or does all life have infinite value?
You will say that everyone is free to ask for assisted suicide or not, that this freedom of choice takes nothing away from those who want to live?
To give freedom to some to resort to assisted suicide is to admit that their life is worth nothing. You say : “It’s not up to the state to decide whether my life is worth living or not. » Precisely, the Claeys-Leonetti law does not arrogate this right, but the law of tomorrow will distill doubt because the State will propose death for some, through the list of eligible diseases. Isn’t that a way of deciding for us?
To give the freedom to resort to assisted suicide is to authorize society to exert pressure so that some have the elegance to ask for death and not to weigh. Will the sick still be free when the “temporarily” healthy look at them accusingly? The patient receives a double condemnation: that of his illness and that of society.
To give the freedom to resort to assisted suicide is to place people before a strange alternative: to live or to die? Shouldn’t the choice be the “non-choice”, that is to say that the question of choosing death should not arise for anyone. If someone around us commits suicide, do their loved ones say: “What courage! It’s wonderful for him and his family! And if someone comes to talk to us about committing suicide, we say: “Of course, you’re right, your life is not worth living!” » Do we accompany him to the bridge from where we help him jump? Or are we showing him that life needs him, that life is waiting for him? Isn’t there a certain cynicism in taking the person in distress “at their word”? A request for assisted suicide can also be a bottle overboard, a cry for help.
Corinne Vaysse-Van Oost, Belgian physician practicing euthanasia, says: “Every doctor, every caregiver must gradually come to terms with the fact that death is part of life and that, eventually, we would like palliative care to disappear so that all caregivers are trained in end-of-life support. . »
Thus doctors will only be trained to kill and it will once again be necessary to modify the Hippocratic oath. Our country will save palliative care for the unproductive of which I am a part. By removing the sick one removes the suffering. Unstoppable.
Knowing how to hear the words of the sick
In my entourage, most of the people who are in favor of euthanasia are in great shape. But what do they know of my illness and my desire to be sick? Of my joys? Of my sorrows? Who can put themselves in the place of a patient? The same person, when he is in good health, holds a speech, and when he is sick holds another one.
The honor of a society, of a civilization is in the fact that it gives to life, and in particular to the life of the weakest, an infinite value and that it is ready to commit all that it can be done to preserve this life.
I would like to thank you because without knowing it you accompanied me in the acceptance of the disease. Your Stoic Thought: “consent to life”the need to be present in the present to “act and love” helped me a lot to accept this ordeal without sinking into revolt. This is why your position on euthanasia surprises me so much. Is it reconcilable with this sentence of André Gide: “A not constant enough idea of death has not given enough value to the smallest moment of life” ? It’s one thing to want to live with the idea of death, without being afraid of it, it’s another thing to want to die.