By DONALD DeMARCO
The definitive Jack Benny joke is well known. Originally aired in a March 28, 1948 episode, the legendary comedian is accosted by a mugger and given the option, “Your money or your life!” A long pause follows. The gunman reiterates, “Look, bud! I said your money or your life?” Benny replies, “I’m thinking it over.” Being well aware of the skinflint persona Benny portrayed, the audience howls with delight.
Part of the interplay’s humor is logical and rests on the fact that in choosing his life over his money, he would have lost both. There really was not much to think over. Benny was prepared to take his parsimony to a laughable extreme. Only the Benny character would need to hesitate over such an option. The joke was on him.
Money gives a person a certain autonomy. Of course, if one loses his life, his autonomy is lost in the process. How sensibilities have changed! We now know of instances in which, given the option of choosing one’s life or one’s autonomy, certain people have selected autonomy, but, by the same stroke, have surrendered their life.
Wesley J. Smith, in his book, Culture of Death: The Age of “Do Harm” Medicine (2016), recounts the tragic story of Georgette Smith, a 42-year-old woman who was completely dependent on a ventilator in order to breathe. Her situation was much like that of Christopher Reeve, notable for his cinematic portrayal of Superman, after his horseback riding accident.
After three months of being hooked up to the ventilator, Mrs. Smith decided she had had enough and requested that the machine be removed. Her children supported her decision and a court ruling confirmed that she had an autonomous right to refuse unwanted medical treatment. A few days later, she passed away.
In Wesley Smith’s view, Georgette Smith was given a choice between her life and her autonomy. She chose autonomy, and in so choosing, lost her life. One may well ask what autonomy means if it leads to oblivion. Can autonomy in this sense be more important than life? Or is the word “autonomy” brought into the picture merely to give suicide a certain respectability?
Reflecting on the incident, Dr. Juan P. Suarez, chief of staff at the hospital where Mrs. Smith died, stated that “Georgette Smith did not commit suicide. A person can only commit suicide if he or she is alive.” Dr. Suarez is equivocating. “Alive” cannot mean both being alive and not being alive. The contradiction is apparent. In trying to give respectability to suicide, he changes the ordinary meaning of being alive to being lively, or vibrant, or vivacious. By using language in such a deceptive manner, he is making life look like death.
The use of the word “autonomy” also comes into question. No one is truly autonomous. If a person were autonomous, he would not get sick or injured in the first place. A person who is dependent on a ventilator remains decisive, which means capable of making a decision. But in choosing death, which is the inevitable result of choosing to remove the ventilator, one is choosing death, not autonomy.
Why is there a need to misuse language? The reason is that if we were entirely honest about our use of words, we might make different decisions, such as choosing life rather than death. But our present Culture of Death does not want people to look at death straight in the eye. Therefore, Georgette did not commit suicide (apparently an objectionable act), but retained her autonomy (but lost her life). Mrs. Smith entered the category of the “living dead,” one that is dooming others to a fate that may be other than what they really want.
Such patients should not be seduced into dying prematurely, but should be given hope and opportunities to live out a meaningful existence.
Diane Coleman is a disability rights activist and the founder of Not Dead Yet, an organization that that opposes medical discrimination against disabled people, champions their rights, and resists physician-assisted suicide.
“The disability culture is rich and diverse and welcoming,” she states. “We have a lot to offer and people who are newly disabled . . . often come to see that we have a lot to live for.”
She finds that our present priorities are grossly inverted: “When we demand services that would help us to live in liberty we are resisted at almost every turn. But if we ask to die, lawyers, doctors, bioethicists, and everyone else comes out of the woodwork and are more than happy to help.”
Such is the spirit of the present Culture of Death that is sweeping over the medical profession. Coleman, it should be pointed out, is a person with neuromuscular disabilities who has used a motorized wheelchair since the age of 11.
Money is not more important than life, nor is the myth of autonomy more desirable than continued existence. We are all human, mortal, fallible, and vulnerable. We are personally and socially interdependent beings. We feast on hope and thrive on love. Dividing human beings into the “abled” and the “disabled” has utility only because it means that the former class should give the latter class their assistance. But it also creates the infelicitous temptation to misidentify them as living and non-living.
At that point the joke is on us, as we are cajoled into thinking that by choosing autonomy, we have made the better choice.
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(Dr. Donald DeMarco is a senior fellow of Human Life International. He is professor emeritus at St. Jerome’s University in Waterloo, Ontario, an adjunct professor at Holy Apostles College in Cromwell, Conn., and a regular columnist for St. Austin Review. His latest works, How to Remain Sane in a World That Is Going Mad; Poetry That Enters the Mind and Warms the Heart; and How to Flourish in a Fallen World are available through Amazon.com.
(Some of his recent writings may be found at Human Life International’s Truth and Charity Forum. He is the 2015 Catholic Civil Rights League recipient of the prestigious Exner Award for “Catholic excellence in social service.”)
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