Virginia Ironside is ghoulish in her thoughts regarding the smothering of a "deeply suffering child" to death as an act of love that any good mother would do. How far down that slippery slope in embracing a culture of death have we come? I am heartened to see the other guest and the host of the show to be incredulous at the matter-of-factness of this very ill woman.
Showing posts with label Euthanasia. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Euthanasia. Show all posts
Tuesday, October 5, 2010
Wednesday, September 15, 2010
The Five Non-Negotiable Issues for Catholic Voters
These issues are abortion, euthanasia, fetal stem cell research, human cloning, and homosexual marriage.
The Catholic voter's guide on this states that, "These five issues are called non-negotiable because they concern actions that are always morally wrong and must never be promoted by the law. It is a serious sin to endorse or promote any of these actions, and no candidate who really wants to advance the common good will support any of the five non-negotiables."
THE FIVE NON-NEGOTIABLE ISSUES
1. Abortion
The Church teaches that, regarding a law permitting abortions, it is "never licit to obey it, or to take part in a propaganda campaign in favor of such a law, or to vote for it" (EV 73). Abortion is the intentional and direct killing of an innocent human being, and therefore it is a form of homicide.
The child is always an innocent party, and no law may permit the taking of his life. Even when a child is conceived through rape or incest, the fault is not the child's, who should not suffer death for others' sins.
2. Euthanasia
Often disguised by the name "mercy killing," euthanasia also is a form of homicide. No one has a right to take his own life (suicide), and no one has the right to take the life of any innocent person.
In euthanasia, the ill or elderly are killed out of a misplaced sense of compassion, but true compassion cannot include doing something intrinsically evil to another person (cf. EV 73).
3. Fetal Stem Cell Research
Human embryos are human beings. "Respect for the dignity of the human being excludes all experimental manipulation or exploitation of the human embryo" (CRF 4b).
Recent scientific advances show that any medical cure that might arise from experimentation on fetal stem cells can be developed by using adult stem cells instead. Adult stem cells can be obtained without doing harm to the adults from whom they come. Thus there no longer is a medical argument in favor of using fetal stem cells.
4. Human Cloning
"Attempts . . . for obtaining a human being without any connection with sexuality through 'twin fission,' cloning, or parthenogenesis are to be considered contrary to the moral law, since they are in opposition to the dignity both of human procreation and of the conjugal union" (RHL I:6).
Human cloning also ends up being a form of homicide because the "rejected" or "unsuccessful" clones are destroyed, yet each clone is a human being.
5. Homosexual "Marriage"
True marriage is the union of one man and one woman. Legal recognition of any other form of "marriage" undermines true marriage, and legal recognition of homosexual unions actually does homosexual persons a disfavor by encouraging them to persist in what is an objectively immoral arrangement.
"When legislation in favor of the recognition of homosexual unions is proposed for the first time in a legislative assembly, the Catholic lawmaker has a moral duty to express his opposition clearly and publicly and to vote against it. To vote in favor of a law so harmful to the common good is gravely immoral" (UHP 10).
For me, these five non-negotiable issues are something with which I am in complete agreement with my church and will not have a problem supporting and voting according to church doctrine. It is my fervent prayer that all Catholics, and indeed all Christians and good people of all or no faiths also see the moral good in opposing these five non-negotiable issues. Supporting the dignity of life is always the right choice!
Wednesday, August 11, 2010
The Culture of Death and Its Tenet of Euthanasia
“In modern society, in which even the fundamental values of human life are often called into question, cultural change exercises an influence upon the way of looking at suffering and death; moreover, medicine has increased its capacity to cure and to prolong life in particular circumstances, which sometimes give rise to moral problems. Thus people living in this situation experience no little anxiety about the meaning of advanced old age and death. They also begin to wonder whether they have the right to obtain for themselves or their fellowmen an ‘easy death,’ which would shorten suffering and which seems to them more in harmony with human dignity.” - Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Declaration on Euthanasia, Vatican, May 5, 1980
And so erodes further our western culture’s respect for life. Euthanasia is a topic of great complexity, as it is indeed nearly unbearably difficult to watch someone that you love suffer in pain or to be subjected to the ravages of a terminal illness. Indeed I have gone back and forth on the subject over the years myself. After much reflection and study though, I am now convinced that while God does not want us to suffer, nor does He wish for us to extinguish the divinely-bestowed spark of our own life or that of a loved one.
Regardless, it would seem that society today is slouching ever more towards supporting euthanasia or “mercy killing” as it is sometimes euphemistically called. Indeed, my own home state of Oregon has even gone so far as to codify into law and thus “legalizing” euthanasia when it passed its “Death with Dignity Act” in October of 1997. I was still a resident at the time and voted against this initiative, but evidently a majority of my fellow Oregonians did not share my views on the matter. This law “allows terminally-ill Oregonians to end their lives through the voluntary self-administration of lethal medications, expressly prescribed by a physician for that purpose.”
The arguments at the time of the debate against this legislation were that it would create that slippery slope where eventually those folks that were in chronic pain and not terminally ill would also be allowed to have a doctor kill them too, or perhaps come the time when someone that was in a “vegetative state” that was a burden on their family or resources could be euthanized. While these things have not come to fruition yet, with the changing attitudes of our society towards death, one has to wonder how long it will be before Oregon or other states have amended laws that also allow such a person who is in chronic pain but not terminal to also take part of this “death with dignity act”. After all, many would argue, that this would indeed be the compassionate thing to do, right?
And with the recent passage of Obamacare this year, and the inarguable rationing of services that will eventually occur under the plan, if it is not repealed, at what point do those “death panels” actually become reality? When a chronically ill elderly patient is a burden on the health care system with its then limited resources, why wouldn’t the health care system cease expending most resources in helping that patient when they could be used to treat someone younger that might be more productive towards society if healed? This is the slippery slope that our nonchalant attitude towards life is creating in our society.
Further, in the case of a hypothetical Oregon doctor who is responsible for writing the prescription for that lethal dose of medication for a patient to kill himself, is the doctor not violating his Hippocratic oath to “first, do no harm”? Indeed, does this not go completely against the moral code of the healing arts? Unfortunately not in today’s society, it would seem.
I have actually had the great sorrow of having lived through the prolonged and painful death of a loved one. My father was diagnosed with lymphoma when I was a boy. He was not given long to live by the doctors, and yet managed to continue living for years past their projected date of the end of his life. I watched with my brother and mother as my father slowly died. Towards the end of his life, in the final weeks, he was at home with us and seldom lucid. But it was in the moments where he was that I was able to spend some of those last days talking with him and letting him know how much he was loved and he let me know how much he loved us. I was twelve when he passed away nearly 32 years ago this month.
While I never would wish for my father to have suffered as he did, those last weeks and indeed years were invaluably precious to me, and I suspect also to him. Had that “Death with Dignity Act” already have been established law in the 1970’s and my father had chosen to end his life when the doctors gave him six months to live (such is the requirement for physicians to write a lethal prescription under that law) then all of the other time we shared together in celebration of LIFE would not have been possible.
As for Dad, he never spoke of being sorry for himself or wishing to end his life to me or anyone else of which I am aware. That was not his way. He showed us how to live with dignity; not die with it.
And so erodes further our western culture’s respect for life. Euthanasia is a topic of great complexity, as it is indeed nearly unbearably difficult to watch someone that you love suffer in pain or to be subjected to the ravages of a terminal illness. Indeed I have gone back and forth on the subject over the years myself. After much reflection and study though, I am now convinced that while God does not want us to suffer, nor does He wish for us to extinguish the divinely-bestowed spark of our own life or that of a loved one.
Regardless, it would seem that society today is slouching ever more towards supporting euthanasia or “mercy killing” as it is sometimes euphemistically called. Indeed, my own home state of Oregon has even gone so far as to codify into law and thus “legalizing” euthanasia when it passed its “Death with Dignity Act” in October of 1997. I was still a resident at the time and voted against this initiative, but evidently a majority of my fellow Oregonians did not share my views on the matter. This law “allows terminally-ill Oregonians to end their lives through the voluntary self-administration of lethal medications, expressly prescribed by a physician for that purpose.”
The arguments at the time of the debate against this legislation were that it would create that slippery slope where eventually those folks that were in chronic pain and not terminally ill would also be allowed to have a doctor kill them too, or perhaps come the time when someone that was in a “vegetative state” that was a burden on their family or resources could be euthanized. While these things have not come to fruition yet, with the changing attitudes of our society towards death, one has to wonder how long it will be before Oregon or other states have amended laws that also allow such a person who is in chronic pain but not terminal to also take part of this “death with dignity act”. After all, many would argue, that this would indeed be the compassionate thing to do, right?
And with the recent passage of Obamacare this year, and the inarguable rationing of services that will eventually occur under the plan, if it is not repealed, at what point do those “death panels” actually become reality? When a chronically ill elderly patient is a burden on the health care system with its then limited resources, why wouldn’t the health care system cease expending most resources in helping that patient when they could be used to treat someone younger that might be more productive towards society if healed? This is the slippery slope that our nonchalant attitude towards life is creating in our society.
Further, in the case of a hypothetical Oregon doctor who is responsible for writing the prescription for that lethal dose of medication for a patient to kill himself, is the doctor not violating his Hippocratic oath to “first, do no harm”? Indeed, does this not go completely against the moral code of the healing arts? Unfortunately not in today’s society, it would seem.
I have actually had the great sorrow of having lived through the prolonged and painful death of a loved one. My father was diagnosed with lymphoma when I was a boy. He was not given long to live by the doctors, and yet managed to continue living for years past their projected date of the end of his life. I watched with my brother and mother as my father slowly died. Towards the end of his life, in the final weeks, he was at home with us and seldom lucid. But it was in the moments where he was that I was able to spend some of those last days talking with him and letting him know how much he was loved and he let me know how much he loved us. I was twelve when he passed away nearly 32 years ago this month.
While I never would wish for my father to have suffered as he did, those last weeks and indeed years were invaluably precious to me, and I suspect also to him. Had that “Death with Dignity Act” already have been established law in the 1970’s and my father had chosen to end his life when the doctors gave him six months to live (such is the requirement for physicians to write a lethal prescription under that law) then all of the other time we shared together in celebration of LIFE would not have been possible.
As for Dad, he never spoke of being sorry for himself or wishing to end his life to me or anyone else of which I am aware. That was not his way. He showed us how to live with dignity; not die with it.
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