THIS WEEK, California Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez and a group of Democratic legislators will reintroduce the California Compassionate Choices Act, which would allow terminally ill patients found to be of sound mind to request medication from doctors "to provide comfort with an assurance of peaceful dying if suffering becomes unbearable."
Like the 1994 Oregon Death with Dignity law it is based on, the California bill nowhere mentions suicide, except to say that "actions taken in accordance with this bill shall not constitute suicide or homicide."
That clause was framed to address concerns about legal liability and life insurance benefits, but the avoidance of "suicide" is also an implicit acknowledgment of the stigma attached to the "S-word." The choice of words makes a big difference in how people come down on laws governing the choice to die. In a 2005 Gallup survey, 75% of adults agreed that doctors should be allowed by law to "end the lives" of patients suffering from incurable diseases if the patient and his or her family requested it. But when the question was worded as permitting doctors to "assist the patient to commit suicide," only 58% of the respondents agreed. That's one reason supporters of the measures have shied away from talking about "assisted suicide" in favor of a battery of gentler phrases, like "aid in dying," "choice in dying" and "end-of-life choices."
Not surprisingly, opponents hear those phrases as Orwellian euphemisms. When Oregon's Department of Human Services announced that it would be dropping the phrase "assisted suicide" from its website, Dr. Charles Bentz, the director of a group opposed to the Oregon law, charged that the department was "trying to take away those stinging, harsh terms that can lead to guilt. They are backing away from calling it what it is -- a suicide and an act of medical killing."
But \o7is\f7 "suicide" really the appropriate label here? To most of us, the word suggests fanaticism, desperation or mental unbalance. Certainly most patients who want a doctor's help to end their lives wouldn't qualify as "suicidal" by the ordinary definition of the term. And like other words ending in the suffix "-cide," "suicide" has overtones of criminality or wrongdoing -- it's an act we speak of people "committing," like grand larceny or adultery. In fact, the Oxford English Dictionary expands its definition of "suicide" as "the act of taking one's own life" with the synonym "self-murder."
