“Death with dignity” laws dishonor dignity
In your Nov. 23 editorial calling for physician-assisted suicide in Pennsylvania, you suggested that it was “self-important” of religious leaders to oppose this. To the contrary, opposing assisted suicide is a statement that every person is important, no matter how weak or handicapped, and that we should never grant another human being the power to hasten our demise.
The Catholic Church has been a provider of medical care for nearly 2,000 years, and its leaders know what it means to suffer and die. Nothing in Catholic teaching requires anyone to continue extraordinary medical care when death is imminent. Nothing in church or civil law requires anyone to die in a hospital. The Catholic Church endorses medical efforts to relieve pain. A society that accepts assisted suicide is likely to find that, for economic reasons, it will become preferred over both seeking a cure and keeping the dying person comfortable with palliative care.
The Pennsylvania bills (Senate Bill 1032 and House Bill 2548) would allow physicians to prescribe lethal drugs at their patients’ request. While both claim to have built-in safeguards, the bottom line is horrific: Doctors would be asked for direct involvement in killing their patients, while family and loved ones would be asked to cooperate with such killing.
You don’t have to be religious to see that when societies have tried to solve problems by killing people, horror ensued. We do not have the right to take any life at any stage. By safeguarding the right to life from conception to natural death, we safeguard all weak, vulnerable people. So-called “death with dignity” legislation dishonors dignity by advocating that family, the medical profession and society abandon the terminally ill to a drug-induced death before their time.
Instead of offering drugs to ingest and die, we wish to offer love. Our offering is care that recognizes the sacredness of each and every human life. Our offering is comfort and meaning to those near death, with the promise of eternal life. Certainly every effort can be made to provide relief from pain – but not to hasten death. Not suicide.
Helene E. Paharik
Pittsburgh
Paharik is the associate general secretary of the Diocese of Pittsburgh