We suppose to no one’s great surprise, Pope Francis has issued a document condemning euthanasia and assisted suicide as “intrinsically evil.” The only help at end of life the Catholic Church is willing to offer is piles of sympathy and to countenance withholding aggressive and/or futile medical treatment. Any affirmative act to end life is strictly out-of-bounds. “’When death is imminent, and without interruption of the normal care the patient requires in such cases, it is lawful according to science and conscience to renounce treatments that provide only a precarious or painful extension of life,’ the document states.”
Well, the Catholic Church is filled with superstition and hocus-pocus nonsense, like all churches and religions, and this is just one example. Yes, of course, let’s let people suffer and not do anything about it. “Euthanasia is an act of homicide that no end can justify and that does not tolerate any form of complicity or active or passive collaboration. . . . it is gravely unjust to enact laws that legalize euthanasia or justify and support suicide, invoking a false right to choose a death improperly characterized as respectable only because it is chosen,” the document says. According to the Wall Street Journal, “[e]uthanasia is the painless killing of a patient suffering from a physical or mental disease. In assisted suicide, patients administer lethal drugs to themselves under medical supervision. Euthanasia is legal in Colombia, Canada and part of Australia. Assisted suicide is legal in Switzerland, Germany and several U.S. states including California, Washington and New Jersey.”
We believe that humans have the right to end their own life if they cannot take care of themselves, if they so desire and they have the means. These assisted suicide laws, in the US anyway, generally require that the patient have a terminal diagnosis of no more than six months, and they usually have to undergo quizzing by a psychologist or psychiatrist a couple of times, and then endure a waiting period until they can actually do it. And it has to be under medical supervision in some sort of medical facility – you generally can’t just go home with a bottle of pills and do the deed in the privacy and comfort of your own home. Frankly, it is no one’s business but yours and ours, or shouldn’t be.
Where the Nanny State, and the Pope, get off telling people that they cannot self-determine the most elementary fact of their existence – existence itself – is the grossest sort of paternalism and should not be countenanced. Of course we’ll hear all about the slippery slope/thin edge of the wedge/foot in the door arguments, but we aren’t talking about teens depressed because they have acne or got dumped by their girl- or boyfriend, or for any other transient type of reason, and we are not talking about genocide. We’re talking about people who are independent and proud of it, who at some point have permanently lost their ability to attend to their daily and bodily needs without help from aides, LPNs, etc. In that case, self-destruction is one of many rational responses and there should not be any of this bureaucratic or religious foolishness interfering with it. In fact, the State and churches should help, not impede or outlaw. But of course history is littered with examples of reason and rationality not mixing well with church dogma or the bureaucratic State.