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
