Euthanasia & Assisted Suicide

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What does the Church say about euthanasia and assisted suicide?

Intentional euthanasia, sometimes called mercy killing, is murder.  Regardless of the motives or means, euthanasia consists of putting to death those who are sick, are disabled, or are dying.  It is morally unacceptable.  The emergence of physician-assisted suicide, popularized by the right-to-die movement, seeks to legalize what is an immoral act…. Suicide is gravely sinful whether committed alone or aided by a doctor.

The United States Catholic Catechism for Adults, p. 394

Questions and Answers

Q: Why shouldn’t assisted suicide be legalized?
A: To sanction the taking of innocent human life is to contradict a primary purpose of law in an ordered society. A law or court decision allowing assisted suicide would demean the lives of vulnerable patients and expose them to exploitation by those who feel they are better off dead. Such a policy would corrupt the medical profession, whose ethical code calls on physicians to serve life and never to kill. The voiceless or marginalized in our society—the poor, the frail elderly, racial minorities, millions of people who lack health insurance—would be the first to feel pressure to die.
 
Q: What about competent, terminally ill people who say they really want assisted suicide?
A: Suicidal wishes among the terminally ill are no less due to treatable depression than the same wishes among the able-bodied. When their pain, depression and other problems are addressed, there is generally no more talk of suicide. If we respond to a death wish in one group of people with counseling and suicide prevention, and respond to the same wish in another group by offering them lethal drugs, we have made our own tragic choice as a society that some people’s lives are objectively not worth protecting.

U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, 1998

Reflection

The passage of life itself suggests a constantly recurring pattern of movement from order to chaos, from chaos to order, again and again.
Birth, adolescence, and old age are all passages that are filled with anguish. Finally there is the ultimate corruption and disorder that death brings.  Change of one sort or another is the essence of life, so there will always be the loneliness and insecurity that comes with change. When we refuse to accept that loneliness and insecurity are part of life, when we refuse to accept that they are the price of change, we close the door on many possibilities for ourselves; our lives become lessened, we are less than fully human. Life evolves; change is constant. When we try to prevent the forward movement of life, we may succeed for a while but, inevitably, there is an explosion; the groundswell of life’s constant movement, constant change, is too great to resist.

Jean Vanier, Becoming Human

Prayer for the Grace to Age Well

When the signs of age begin to mark my body
(and still more when they touch my mind);
when the illness that is to diminish me or carry me off
strikes from without or is born within me;
when the painful moment comes in which I suddenly awaken to the fact that I am growing ill or growing old; and above all at that last moment
when I feel I am losing hold of myself
and am absolutely passive within the hands
of the great unknown forces that have formed me;
in all these dark moments, O God,
grant that I may understand that it is you
(provided only my faith is strong enough)
who are painfully parting the fibers of my being
in order to penetrate
to the very marrow of my substance
and bear me away within yourself.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin SJ