How does this story parallel choices facing terminally ill patients 2,500 years later? Socrates exercised his will as a person, thereby actualizing himself through expression of his principles, even in the act of choosing death. It was in every way a principled decision, a matter of personal choice. He foresaw clearly his future quality of life just as patients today make the same evaluation. He concluded that quality of life was inseparable from the existence of life itself, that the importance of upholding the dignity of the person, dignity at all costs, is paramount, when life is foreshortened.
I am using parts of the statements from the USCCB.
To sanction the taking of innocent human life is to contradict a primary purpose of law in an ordered society.
Suicidal wishes among the terminally ill are no less due to treatable depression than the same wishes among the able-bodied. When their pain, depression and other problems are addressed, there is generally no more talk of suicide. If we respond to a death wish in one group of people with counseling and suicide prevention, and respond to the same wish in another group by offering them lethal drugs, we have made our own tragic choice as a society that some people's lives are objectively not worth protecting.
As Acting U.S. Solicitor General Walter Dellinger warned in urging the Supreme Court to uphold laws against assisted suicide: "The least costly treatment for any illness is lethal medication."
Such prejudices could easily lead families, physicians and society to encourage death for people who are depressed and emotionally vulnerable as they adjust to life with a serious illness or disability. To speak here of a "free choice" for suicide is a dangerously misguided abstraction.
Our moral tradition holds that human life is the most basic gift from a loving God -- a gift over which we have stewardship, not absolute dominion. As responsible stewards of life, we must never directly intend to cause our own death or that of anyone else. Euthanasia and assisted suicide are always gravely wrong.
http://www.usccb.org/prolife/issues/euthanas/fact598.htm My oinion is that dignity is living the life that we are given for the glory of God, our own salvation and that of the whole world. And to comtemplate taking our life is the same tragedy as a tragedy of someone loosing their life by accident.
Rose
