Professor Milton Friedman and Mrs Friedman have just published their latest book entitled Freedom To Choose. The question arises whether the freedom to choose one’s job, one’s home, one’s wife and the number of one’s children is to be accompanied by the freedom, in certain circumstances, to choose between life and death.
On 8th December, 1980, a well known citizen of Poona, Mr. Gopal Mandlik, ended his life at the age of eighty-five, since he wished to die with dignity and decency. For the past two years he had corresponded with the Prime Minister arguing that an individual has the right to terminate his life when it is no longer worth living and requesting the Prime Minister to introduce a Bill in Parliament to permit people of his age and condition to terminate their lives in a legal manner.
After waiting for a couple of years for a response from Government, Mr. Mandlik decided to break the law and ended his life after saying that he knew it was illegal but that it was the right thing to do. He was a ‘Satyagrahi’ acting on Gandhiji’s principle that any individual citizen who thinks a law to be immoral should break it and take the consequences.
By an interesting coincidence, on the same day a well-known neurologist, Dr. Ritchie Russel, electrocuted himself at the age of seventy-seven in his Oxford home in England for the same reason, that he did not think life was worth living anymore.
These are not isolated cases. In our own experience, we know of many unfortunate people among our relations and friends who have led a most miserable existence for years, either as paralysed people or those who have become vegetables, or who have become a burden to themselves and their families.
One of the saddest cases was that of Norman Thomas, the great American socialist, whom I had the privilege of knowing and who had a whole lifetime of service to his people behind him. At a very advanced age, he was struck down by a stroke which paralysed him from the neck downwards. Only his mind and his speech remained. He lay in bed for a whole decade pleading with his doctors to let him go. Unfortunately, in that particular State of the United States, voluntary euthanasia was not legal and he was tormented in this cruel manner for a whole decade.
The legal position varies from country to country. In Scotland, committing suicide and abetting suicide are both legal. In England committing suicide is legal but abetting suicide is illegal. In India both attempting suicide and abetting suicide are illegal. In some States of the United States terminating one’s life is illegal, in others it is not. Can it be that an act of this nature is moral on one side of a boundary and immoral on the other side? Can it be right to do in Scotland what one cannot do in England and right to do in England what one cannot do in India? Or is the taboo purely a conventional one?
This is not only an off-beat subject but a very controversial one, and so far it has hardly been mentioned or discussed publicly in India. I remember reading only one brave article by the late Dr. Rusi Vakil, the well-known cardiologist, supporting voluntary euthanasia. In the rest of the world, however, it is a matter of live controversy, and in many countries there are organisations formed for the purpose of upholding the concept of a man having the right to choose to live or to die with dignity.
Every right involves its opposite
There is an international organisation in California called “Hemlock”, the poison that Socrates took in ancient Greece. There are branches of this organisation in England, Scotland, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, France, Germany, Holland, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, South Africa and Japan.
In Britain there is a Society called EXIT which has been the subject of considerable controversy in the press. Last year they decided to publish a book which has a preface by my good friend, Arthur Koestler, the eminent writer, in the course of which he observes:
“We need midwives to aid us to be unborn – or at least the assurance that such aid is available. Euthanasia, like obstetrics, is the natural corrective to a biological handicap . . . As the progress towards legalisation will be slow, a matter of years or even decades, the publication of a practical guide to “auto-euthanasia” will, we hope, bring peace of mind to many who would otherwise despair. There is only one prospect worse than being chained to an intolerable existence: the nightmare of a botched attempt to end it. I know that I am speaking in the name of many (some of them personal friends) who tried and failed – or who don’t dare to try for fear of failure.”
The text of the proposed book makes it very clear that there is no desire to encourage people to commit suicide. On the contrary, there is a chapter entitled “Why You Should Think Again” before taking such a step. As it happens, however, the book has an appendix which guides a man or woman on how to die in peace and without pain. EXIT have been threatened with the risk of prosecution but they have decided to face the danger rather than abandon their right to educate their members on the subject.
I personally believe that the right to die is a fundamental human right alongside of the right to live. If, as the poet wrote, Man is indeed “the Master of his Fate and the Captain of his Soul”, it cannot be that the freedom to choose how and when to depart can be denied to him.
Lawyers sometimes argue that every right involves the right to its opposite – that the right to associate involves the right not to do so and the right to speak involves the right to silence. By that logic, the right to live should involve the right to die.
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The philosophical root of the conflict
There is at present a Private Member’s Bill before the Lok Sabha on “Mercy Killing” proposed by Mr. Mulchand Daga, Congress (I) M.P. from Rajasthan, but there is no public opinion or awareness on the issue to support it.
The subject is a very complicated one and there is no point in over-simplifying it. For instance, there is the desire of a man having a sound mind to put an end to his own life. There is the desire of relations who love someone else in pain and agony to respond to the beloved one’s plea to be allowed to go. There is, finally, the case of someone who is not in his right mind, who is in a coma or who has become a vegetable, like the girl in the Quinlan Case in the United States. Finally there is the problem of the doctor.
A most eminent medical man, Dr. Christian Bernard, has recently written a book entitled “A Good Life, A Good Death” in which he says that he has practiced passive euthanasia all his life. He has withdrawn treatment in appropriate cases but he has not practiced active euthanasia or put anyone to sleep, because that is illegal. He suggests that the law should be changed. He goes on to say that he and his brother have entered into a death pact under which each brother will relieve the other from his agony, when called on to do so.
There are obvious dangers of euthanasia being misused by unscrupulous relations to get rid of somebody for their own benefit. That is why limitations have to be imposed on the right to die, as there are limitations on all other fundamental rights in our Constitution. This may involve the participation of doctors and judges. We are not at this moment concerned with specific changes in the law, but the time has come to deal with this matter and to discuss it freely and frankly.
At the root of this controversy lies a philosophical issue. Is all life sacred? Or is it only the good life, as the ancient Greeks called it, which is sacrosanct? There are those who believe that all life is sacred and that no one has the right to take his own or anyone else’s life in any circumstances. Such people of course should be like the Jains. They should logically abstain from killing cockroaches, bugs and poisonous snakes, or a man who is raping a woman.
The right of self-defence which is now open to an Indian citizen who himself or herself is being murdered should also be withdrawn. Finally, such people should be prepared to see their country overrun by outside aggressors without armed resistance.
It is significant that Mahatma Gandhi, the apostle of non-violence, did not take such a position. There is the well-known instance where he put a calf in his ashram to sleep rather than let it endure endless pain and suffering.
It is also on record, that when Hitler and Stalin combined to attack little Poland, gallant then as now, in 1939, and the Polish army and people resisted with arms, Mahatma Gandhi described their armed resistance against heavy odds to be non-violent and therefore meritorious.
An article I recently wrote for the Statesman on this subject on 5th April has resulted in my receiving more than a hundred letters from readers of that paper, mostly in and around Calcutta, lending their support and offering to join in establishing in India a Society for the Right to Die with Dignity.
This essay is part of a series from the Indian Liberals archive, a project of the Centre for Civil Society. It is excerpted from the booklet Freedom First with the title “LIFE OR DEATH: The Freedom to Choose”, which was published in May 1981. The original version can be accessed at this link.