Suicide and Euthanasia

6. Suicide and Euthanasia

As evidenced by her death, Gilman was a strong advocate of euthanasia. In her younger days, when her father was put in a sanitorium suffering from mental deterioration, she commented, “It is not right that a brilliant intellect should be allowed to sink to idiocy and die slowly, hideously. Some day when we are more civilized we shall not maintain such a horror.”42 In order to prevent needless suffering, suicide must be seen to be a respectable choice in situations of terminal illness. To show the value of suicide, she reasoned that suicide was granted only to human beings. “So unbearable is the amount of human pain that we alone among all animals manifest the remarkable phenomenon of suicide 

- a deliberate effort of a form of life to stop living because living hurts so much.”43 She believed that suicide was justifiable, however, only when an individual’s usefulness to society was no longer possible. Each of us owes to the other the best service of a lifetime, she claimed, but an ill person ought to be able to request euthanasia should pain be too severe for continuing with life, and then the request should be handled not by a private physician, who might not act in the patient’s best interest, but by the Board of Health. Not only may “natural death” be painful for an individual, but it is ineffective for society, draining health resources. Gilman applied a eugenic perspective to needless suffering of terminal illness claiming that: “the millions spent in restraining and maintaining social detritus should be available for the safe-guarding and improving of better lives.”44 When death comes naturally or is administered appropriately without unnecessary suffering, it is not an evil.

Gilman herself chose suicide after all modern treatments for her breast cancer had failed, and after she was convinced her pain would prevent her usefulness. Upon learning of her breast cancer in 1932, she asked her doctor, “How long shall I be able to type? I must finish my Ethics.”45 He suspected she would last six months. She worked for three more years. Her suicide note stressed the importance of social service for an individual’s life and the right a civilized society should extend to its members: the right to die peacefully and not in unbearable pain:

Human life consists in mutual service. No grief, pain, misfortunate, or “broken heart” is excuse for cutting off one’s life while any power of service remains. But when all usefulness is over, when one is assured of unavoidable and imminent death, it is the simplest of human rights to choose a quick and easy death in place of a slow and horrible one. Public opinion is changing on this subject. The time is approaching when we shall consider it abhorrent to our civilization to allow a human being to die in prolonged agony which we should mercifully end in any other creature. Believing this open choice to be of social service in promoting wiser views on this question, I have preferred chloroform to cancer.46

Gilman’s suicide note was her last philosophical work, a plea for service, a groping for right action in matters human.