Keeping The Right To Die Alive

Responding to last week's letter from Catholic bishops, Barbara Coombs Lee, president of the nation's largest aid in dying advocacy group, Compassion & Choices, wrote in an e-mail to supporters: "What alarms us is their determination to use their standing to undermine end-of-life choice and chastise everyone — Catholic or otherwise — who believes in or practices it." 

A blogger from The Nation carries on in that vein: "But much more than the legality of aid in dying — commonly known as assisted suicide, which misrepresents the practice, limited as it is to patients with a terminal illness — is at stake. Even if, as Richard Doerflinger, associate director of the USCCB's Secretariat of Pro-Life Activities, contends, Thursday's document is a moral statement and not a kick-off to a political campaign to end legal aid in dying, it will serve as marching orders in the coming years for already-mobilized and funded "prolife "activists — whether Catholic, evangelical, Mormon or unaffiliated — who will use it to determine how they vote and organize. That means, as veterans on the abortion rights front will tell you, a heightened assault on end-of-life rights. They'll also tell you that failing to see the larger implications of the church's domination of life and death discussions leads to an erosion of patients' rights, rights that, when lost, are seldom regained.

"Under pressure from the Catholic Church and its affiliates, rights of patients across the board could be weakened. From efficacy of advanced directives and living wills (documents used to state patients' healthcare wishes), to medical proxy laws (that appoint patient guardians), from hospice and palliative funding and regulation, to drug regulation, to laws that govern hospitals, hospital workers and home healthcare aids. But also at stake are the laws that govern inheritance rights, death certificate parameters and legality regarding suicide (which assisted suicide is often equated with). The list goes on."

Editor: They wholly miss the bishops' call to provide life-affirming alternatives to euthanasia and assisted suicide, and the fact this isn't a "Catholic issue." And the irony of the headline isn't lost on me, either.