While New York legislators argue that assisted suicide legislation would allow terminally ill patients to die with dignity, the state’s Catholic bishops on March 5 countered that it would put the state on a “dangerous path that contaminates medicine and turns the notion of compassion on its head.”
Nineteen states this year are considering legislation to allow doctors to prescribe end-of-life drugs to terminally ill patients.
Preventing suicides among former service members is a top priority of the chaplains working with the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. Sharing that mission are Father Ivan Tyhovych (left) and Father Andrew Sioleti, chief of chaplains, at the VA’s New York Harbor Health System in Manhattan.
As of August 1, a New Jersey law has gone into effect allowing residents over 18 to request medical assistance in dying by receiving a prescription for lethal medication, if they have a terminal diagnosis of six months or less to live.
Recently the issue of suicide has been brought to our attention and its rise in America has become troublesome. Anthony Bourdain, the famous travel chef and author, and Kate Spade, a well-known fashion designer, both committed suicide during the same week. These high-profile people brought attention to the rising suicide rate in the United States.
This past week, we read the reports of the deaths by suicide of fashion designer Kate Spade and celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain.
Jay Asher’s 2007 novel, “13 Reasons Why,” details the story of a young girl, Hannah Baker, who – after suffering much abuse, both physically and online, and after the tragedy of sexual assault – takes her own life.
TEN YEARS AGO, after my meditation on Europe, “The Cube and the Cathedral,” had appeared in several languages, I was invited to speak to the European Parliament in Brussels, Belgium. There, I tried to make what seemed three rather obvious points:
The suicide of someone you love is shattering. You think that you have lost your mind, that you are crazy, that you won’t be able to live through the next hour, let alone the rest of your life. You are convinced that you’re the only person who has ever felt this way, that no one in the world could ever experience such devastation and be able to survive
