by Leela Ramdeen, Chair, CCSJ and Director, CREDI
We are all ‘masterpieces of God’s creation’
“How great a lie…to make people think that lives affected by grave illness are not worth living!” (Pope Francis)
I am involved in London at the moment in encouraging individuals to contact their Member of Parliament to ask them to vote against a Private Member’s Bill – The Assisted Dying (No 2) Bill – introduced by parliamentarian Rob Morris. The Bill, which seeks to legalise assisted suicide, will be debated and voted on Friday, September 11 in the House of Commons.
Cardinal Vincent Nichols and the Bishops of England and Wales are asking Catholics to write to their MP to oppose the Bill which would “enable competent adults who are terminally ill to choose to be provided with medically supervised assistance to end their own life”. This means “it would license doctors to supply lethal drugs to terminally ill patients to enable them to commit suicide”.
In a message addressed to Catholics in Ireland, Scotland, England and Wales, Pope Francis said, “Even the weakest and most vulnerable, the sick, the old, the unborn and the poor are masterpieces of God’s creation, made in his own image, destined to live forever, and deserving of the utmost reverence and respect.”
The following is an extract from a helpful Q&A on this issue at www.catholicnews.org.uk: “The Church teaches that life is a gift from God and supports high quality care for the dying and protection for the weak and vulnerable…Every person’s life is equally worthy of respect and protection.
Even if someone loses sight of the dignity and value of their life (whether through pain, suffering or loneliness) they remain valuable in themselves and a member of the human family. They deserve care, support and sometimes medical treatment for depression, not assistance with suicide. Neither the criminal law nor the DPP guidance distinguishes between suicide of young people who are physically well and of someone who is old, disabled or ill. Indeed, as a society we rightly go to great lengths to prevent each and every suicide. In the words of the World Health Organisation, ‘every single life lost to suicide is one too many’.
“We do have a duty to do something. The United Kingdom was a pioneer in the hospice movement and the development of palliative care but most people do not have access to a hospice. There is need for more resources to support improved palliative and end of life care. Most hospitals focus on curing people and sometimes ‘could do better’ when it comes to care of the dying. Over 95% of pain can be controlled with specialist help and as a last resort a person could at least be comfortably sedated.
“The British Medical Association and the Medical Royal Colleges are strongly opposed to legalising physician–assisted suicide. A key principle of professional medical ethics, reflected in the criminal law, is that doctors should never intentionally shorten life.
This principle, which dates from the ancient, pre-Christian, Hippocratic Oath, can be found today in the General Medical Council’s statement about the duties of a doctor, and in the World Medical Association’s Declaration of Geneva: doctors must show ‘the utmost respect for human life’.
“Doctors may withdraw futile or burdensome treatments, or respect a patient’s refusal of treatment, or give much needed palliative treatment even if they foresee that, as an unintended side-effect, death may come sooner. In fact palliative drugs, properly administered, do not generally hasten death. Palliative care focuses not on cure but on care and ‘intends neither to hasten nor to postpone death’. It is no part of medicine to kill or to assist suicide nor does it require doctors to preserve life at all costs.
“Once you concede a principle and cross a line in ethics and law, it is wishful thinking to imagine that bad consequences can be averted merely by qualifications, conditions, or procedures. In the small number of jurisdictions where assisted suicide has been legalized or where it is not prosecuted under certain conditions (Holland, and a handful of states in the US) there is ample evidence that the safeguards don’t work. For instance, some laws seek to restrict access to assisted suicide to terminally ill people with a specific prognosis. But prognosis of terminal illness is fraught with difficulty: terminally ill people often live for much longer than the predictions they are given when they are diagnosed – occasionally, they even recover. Furthermore doctors often fail to spot clinical depression in people who would meet the legal requirements for assisted suicide. Each year the numbers dying by assisted suicide increase and the ‘safeguards’ are taken less and less seriously.”
