The late Father Leonard R. Klein was director of Pro Life Activities for the Catholic Diocese of Wilmington, rector of the Cathedral of St. Peter and pastor at St. Patrick and St. Mary of the Immaculate Conception churches in Wilmington. He died in 2019. He wrote this opinion piece in 2015.
The Catholic church considers every life sacred from conception to natural death. Therefore, the church opposes efforts to legalize physician-assisted suicide. It is morally acceptable to reject treatments that are burdensome or futile or to administer drugs that relieve pain but might also hasten death. Assisting people to kill themselves is another matter.
While the preceding paragraph defines the evil of assisted suicide in religious language, there are many reasons that all people of good will and clear mind should be concerned about this latest incarnation of “progress.”
Understandably, people are disturbed by the weakness, helplessness, humiliation and pain that sometimes characterize the end of life. We do not wish to contribute to it, and, truth to tell, we do not like to behold it. We also empathize and want to help.
And it has never been more possible to help than it is today. Palliative care has vastly improved. In 40 years of ministry as a Lutheran pastor and then a Catholic priest I have seen only one person die in great pain, and that was two decades ago. Some physicians tell similar stories. Not long ago many people died in agony. So it is a great irony that the push for euthanasia should come when that is no longer the case.
If, however, we look carefully, we can see that the movement for euthanasia is driven by troubling tendencies in our culture beyond the concern to end suffering. I will mention three.
First, we have been slowly overtaken by a utilitarian view that life is valuable only so long as it is enjoyable and productive. When the capacity to enjoy life subsides, many assume that its value likewise subsides, as does our obligation to care.
This is a dangerous notion. If we do not have intrinsic value as human beings and as citizens, then our value will be established by some other measuring stick. We can see this in arguments for rationing medical care. Ezekiel Emanuel, an important advisor in the creation of the Affordable Health Care Act, has said that he wants to die at age 75 and presumably thinks the rest of should also. He advocates concentrating medical resources on the young and productive. Back in 1984 Gov. Richard Lamm of Colorado said that the sick elderly had a duty to die and get out of the way. Surveys of Dutch doctors have shown that a significant percentage of them have administered lethal doses of drugs without having been requested to do so.
In the calculus of utilitarianism you are valuable only insofar as you are useful cog in a machine and are enjoying a reasonably pleasant life. It is unlikely that a humane society can endure with such a fragile foundation for human rights. Utilitarianism is a steep descent from Mr. Jefferson’s belief that all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.
Second, the push for legalized euthanasia assumes that life is good only insofar as the individual can control it. Extreme individualism and the myth of control overlook our common humanity and the obligation to accompany one another throughout the course of our lives up to and including the ultimate indignity which is death. The late pope whom we Catholics now call St. John Paul showed us a better way to die and a better way to live, and his very public decline reminded us that our humanity endures in the midst of suffering. Catholics do not expect others to understand, let alone embrace, our belief in redemptive suffering, but everyone can see the humanity of the sufferer and turn away from the notion that we should hasten the sufferer to death.
A third dangerous tendency behind the movement is the undue reliance on the state to define the route for us in such questions. We should always be wary of the state’s intervention in matters of life and death, for the law is a teacher. The step from legalization to endorsement is a short one. When states legalize euthanasia, the law teaches that some lives do not merit the protection of law. And if the state teaches that physician-assisted suicide is acceptable, it effectively gives approval to suicide more generally. Not surprisingly, the overall suicide rate in Oregon has risen in the wake of physician assisted suicide.
The emotional appeal of helping people end their suffering is understandable. But medicine has better tools, and doctors rightly resist the idea of killing their patients. The long lists of people with depression being euthanized, the legalization in Belgium of the euthanizing of children, the low percentages of euthanized people who are even screened for depression, the stories of people employing PAS long before they are terribly sick as in the case of Brittany Maynard, the anonymous suicide clinics of Switzerland – all of these testify to the hazards, indeed the folly, of this movement.
The pro-euthanasia movement portrays itself as progress. It is not. It is hazardous to our individual and communal well-being, and the unintended consequences are no longer unforeseen. They are glaringly obvious.
