Two more states have recently fallen into the death trap. Delaware recently became the 12th state and New York may be the 13th state to legalize what used to be called physician-assisted suicide but is increasingly called medical aid in dying. New York’s legislature has passed their legislation, so at this time, the bill only needs the governor’s signature.
According to Compassion and Choices, a death-supporting advocacy organization, there are now 16 other states that have active legislation to help people kill themselves. If
those are successful, a majority of states in our country will have made it legal for a person to request drugs from their physician to end their life.
The arguments developed to defend legal killing of children through abortion have now been adopted and modified to support the offer of death to the elderly, infirm or disabled. Self-murder is defended as an inviolate and sacred right to be protected as one’s personal choice – absent interference from loved ones or doctors. Passive euthanasia, the kind of “mercy killing” they have in the Netherlands and Canada where an individual gives their consent for their doctor to kill them, isn’t legal in any U.S. state.
At least, not yet.
Some physicians advocate for death
No one is being compelled anywhere by law to kill themselves. So far, that is something that only happens in dystopian books and movies, but there is a fine line between compulsion and coercion.
That line is often blurred by the compelling influence of shifting cultural mores and by health care professionals who tend to patients in medical or existential crisis, including some who advocate strongly for death.
After the New York legislature passed its medical aid in dying (MAID) bill in June, the Journal of Medical Ethics published a piece called “Physicians’ preferences for their own end of life: a comparison across North America, Europe, and Australia.” The report showed that “about half of the physicians who responded considered euthanasia a (very) good option.”
The good news, I guess, is that only 37.4 percent in Georgia considered it a good option.
The question asked, in the situation of a terminal cancer diagnosis, about euthanasia, not physician-assisted suicide – i.e., they asked about doctors killing patients rather than doctors giving drugs to patients so they could kill themselves. Those numbers change when the question of physician-assisted suicide (PAS) is presented: 43.9 percent of doctors in Georgia approve and 71.2 percent of physicians had a personal preference for PAS in Oregon, the first state to pass legislation allowing it.
How to derail the death train
Physician-assisted suicide has become socially acceptable – even desirable – in the U.S. The death train is long out of the station and making its grand tour into each of our states with foul, black smoke belching out from its stack. How do we stop it?
Death is winning by shifting cultural mores and by a medical profession that largely favors it. I will make two broad suggestions.
First, we need to reclaim our educational institutions, including medical schools. Happily, Benedictine College in Atchison, Kansas, has announced its intent to establish a faithfully Catholic medical school that would “enshrine Catholic moral teaching on the infinite dignity of the human person as created by God.” Pray for its success.
Second, we need to broaden the pro-life lens to include the entire span of life by accepting our Catholic social teaching in stressing the importance of promoting integral human development: the protection and support of life throughout the lifespan.
Focusing on the beginning and end isn’t sufficient for a culture that has lost its basic understanding of human dignity and the immeasurable value of all human life.
Of course, there is no substitute for prayer and fasting. Each of us can take up that discipline as a strong weapon to defeat the enemies of life. We have to change the culture of death closing in on us just as the first disciples of Jesus did – by the power of their prayers and the witness of their lives.
Mark Bradford is Fellow for Persons with Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities at Word on Fire Institute and an advocate for those born with intellectual and developmental disabilities and their families. This is excerpted from an essay at www.wordonfire.org.