“Choice” rings hollow when pressures come from family members who increasingly see their financial resources being drained and their loved ones as burdens; when health insurance companies will pay for a lethal dose of drugs, but deny a claim for expensive chemotherapy treatments; when health providers subtly make judgment calls about whose lives are worth living and whose are not; and when the mechanisms of our very government sanction and assist in death-making.
Dear Editor: Thank you for reporting on “A Catholic Look at End of Life Issues,” (Nov. 12). It is a very important and all too avoided subject. Compassion and Choices (the agency directing the physician-assisted suicide movement) has run a tremendously successful campaign to devalue human life when its truly vulnerable – that is sinful.
Having a conversation about end-of-life care is awkward and difficult, but it can help in making decisions about what matters most when the time comes. That was the focus of “Journey to Healing: End of Life Conversations and the Catholic Perspective,” a free conference hosted by Catholic Charities Bereavement Services.
The role of religion in society or the issue of Church and State are well controverted these days. Perhaps the example of the issue of assisted suicide may help us to clarify our thinking on this and other important matters.
Dear Editor: The recent vote by a plurality of over 100 votes in the British House of Commons against the legal authorization of assisted suicide in the United Kingdom is perhaps one of the few votes on a bill which would have opened the floodgates to greater evil procedures. The elected members of that body […]
As Catholics we believe that respect for life is rooted in human dignity. But lately I’ve noticed that the definition of dignity is often turned upside-down, especially in our conversations about end-of-life issues…
Catholic bishops of New Mexico welcomed a ruling by the state’s Court of Appeals that reversed a lower court’s approval of physician-assisted suicide.
MORE THAN 20 years ago, Dr. David Eddy, writing in the Journal of the American Medical Association, described how his mother, though not suffering from a terminal illness, chose to end her life through voluntarily stopping eating and drinking (VSED).
Dear Editor: As Catholics we are reminded that we should respect and protect life from conception to natural death. Currently three states, Washington, Oregon, and Vermont have so-called ”Death With Dignity” (doctor-assisted suicide) laws. Vermont passed its statute in 2013. The New Jersey Assembly passed a resolution on Nov. 12, 2014 to pass a similar […]
