'Right to Die' Opponent Is Now Dying

[Jazzy]

A Christian writer who fueled the debate over assisted suicide is now facing her own last days, and still refuses to cut her life short, the Washington Post reports. Kara Tippetts, 38, a pastor's wife and mother of four in Colorado Springs, has been admitted to hospice care with terminal cancer. "I grieve as I watch her fade," writes her husband Jason. "The peace that is in our house is amazing, peace in the midst of tears, peace in the midst of impending loss, but it is peace." Diagnosed with stage four breast cancer two years ago, Tippetts made a stir with her open letter to Brittany Maynard, the 29-year-old who took her own life rather than suffer what she called "a terrible" death by stage four glioblastoma. In her letter, Tippets wrote:

"Dear heart, we simply disagree. Suffering is not the absence of goodness, it is not the absence of beauty, but perhaps it can be the place where true beauty can be known. In your choosing your own death, you are robbing those that love you with the such tenderness, the opportunity of meeting you in your last moments and extending you love in your last breaths."

At the New York Times, Ross Douthat went over the history of assisted suicide in America and used Tippetts' letter to represent the "nay" side. He wrote that assisted suicide's future "may depend" on whether Tippetts' argument for the value of suffering "can be made either without her theological perspective, or by a liberalism more open to metaphysical arguments than the left is today."

Source

Do you agree or disagree with her open letter to Brittany Maynard and why?

 

[mrldii]

I agree with Kara Tippetts' right to have - and voice - her opinion that was in opposition to Maynard's; Maynard's situation was deliberately put out there to spark a dialogue.

Having experience in hospice, I agree that magical and unexplainable things can happen in the last days/hours/minutes of life for both the one dying and the loved ones left behind; however, I understand others may not share that sentiment nor have a desire/need to experience it.

 

[Dee]

No, I don't agree. The difference here is that she made the decision with her family, not necessarily all on her own against the wishes of her parents and her husband. She was told she was going to die a very painful and grim death, and I'm assuming--though I don't know for sure--that her family agreed that it would be better if she went away peacefully and not in the kind of pain she would be in if she "waited it out". You could tell this was a very difficult decision for her too considering how often she was crying during her interviews. She wanted to live and probably would have if she hadn't been dying from a brain tumor, but the horrible thing was going to take her very soon anyway. She just chose to do it a little earlier and in less bad shape.

Anyway, I think it should be a case-by-case basis. Everyone's wish to die is going to be different.