Pass the test and live. Fail the test and die.

Alex Schadenberg
Executive Director, Euthanasia Prevention Coalition

An article that was published by Harper's Magazine that was written by Michel Houellebecq and translated by Robyn Creswell and  under the title: The European Way to Die - On Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide has a very philosophical tone but it also touches on some very poignant arguments.

Houellebecq, who is an agnostic who opposes euthanasia and assisted suicide is essentially writing about the experience with assisted suicide. He philosophically examines several issues but then gets to his topic and states:

An assisted suicide—in which a doctor prescribes a lethal cocktail that the patient self-administers under circumstances of his own choosing—is still a suicide... When I hear that someone I know has committed suicide, what I feel isn’t respect—I don’t want to exaggerate—but neither is it disapproval, nor derision.

Houellebecq continues:

Groups that advocate for the legalization of voluntary euthanasia argue that the procedure is the only humane alternative when the final days or weeks or months of a person’s life will otherwise be filled with unbearable pain. This argument is predicated on two lies, all the more effective for being at once terrifying and rarely articulated. The first has to do with suffering—physical suffering. I may be fortunate, but in all the cases of physical agony I’ve experienced, morphine has been enough to relieve my pain. This wonder drug was discovered at the outset of the nineteenth century and since then much progress has been made; opioid derivatives far more powerful than the original morphine molecule have been synthesized. In our own day—this needs to be said clearly and constantly repeated—physical pain can be vanquished.

The second lie is more insidious. It’s only on television (American television in particular) that a doctor is asked, “How much time do I have left, doc?” and will respond with appropriate gravity, “Three weeks at most.” In real life, doctors are more circumspect. They know, because their basic training is scientific, that the time we have left conforms, like so many things in this world, to a bell curve.

Houellebecq then comments on the film Soylent Green and writes:

American science fiction written during the Fifties and Sixties explored with an impressive, visionary power an array of issues that now feature, or have begun to feature, in our daily lives: the internet, transhumanism, the quest for immortality, and the creation of intelligent robots. For such writers, the idea of euthanasia, conceived as a solution to the economic problems posed by an aging population, was an obvious subject—almost too obvious. The best-known work of the sort is undoubtedly Make Room! Make Room!, largely because of the film version Soylent Green, with an extraordinary performance by Edward G. Robinson.

For Houellebecq, Richard Matheson's book "The Test" is his favorite:

Yet my own favorite is “The Test,” a moving short story by Richard Matheson, curiously never adapted into film, as far as I know, though the cinema has been friendly to Matheson and the story would be easy to adapt. In the world of the story, old people are given regular competency tests that they must pass in order to avoid being put out of their misery. Meanwhile, their descendants sit at home, quietly hoping for the result that will free them from the burden of the aging. Once you have read “The Test,” it seems to me, there is nothing more to say against euthanasia; the story says it all.

I sadly agree that Houellebecq's argument, within the context of Canada's euthanasia law, is correct.