By Maria Parker
In their 1991 Statement on Euthanasia, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops warned: ?To destroy the boundary between healing and killing would mark a radical departure from longstanding legal and medical traditions of our country, posing a threat of unforeseeable magnitude to vulnerable members of society.?
The vast majority of states have rejected proposals to prescribe lethal drugs to their citizens judging such laws as a huge threat to innocent life and to our system of equal protection under the law. But the ?right to die? folks seek to legalize physician assisted suicide in Massachusetts once again. A similar attempt in 1997 failed.
Many of us realize that fears surrounding sickness and death are very real: fear of being in horrible pain, fear of suffering for a long period, and fear of being a burden to the family, among others. Advocates for assisted suicide wage clever media campaigns claiming that their proposal includes ?safeguards? to prevent exploitation.? But their so called? ?safeguards? distort medical facts and do not prevent abuse.
SIX MONTHS TO LIVE
The bill states that only terminally ill competent adults who are expected to live less than six months may request lethal drugs for suicide. But how do doctors know when a patient has six months or less to live? Many studies indicate that accurate diagnosis cannot always be assured, for example: a significant number of patients referred to hospice care have survived longer than six months, some for many years once their pain is managed or a last hope treatment is developed and succeeds. It is common knowledge that physicians cannot forecast the time of death with certainty. After all, doctors are not God. This bill would act to corrupt the medical profession since a patient?s trust in their doctor is based on a code of medical ethics which calls them to heal not to kill. An oath that prescribes physicians: ?First, do no harm.?
MENTAL HEALTH
Another alleged ?safeguard? requires that two physicians deem the patient?s condition appropriate for requesting assisted suicide, but that an evaluation of the patient?s mental health is optional. To claim that a mental health assessment is ?optional? shows a complete disregard for the scientific literature. Sound research demonstrates that 90 percent of people who request assisted suicide have a diagnosable and treatable mental disorder. Furthermore, once their mental illness and physical pain are addressed, their desire for assisted suicide disappears. Not all doctors are trained to assess for the presence of depression and other mental illnesses. To not require a psychiatric evaluation in these cases demonstrates further disregard for the patient?s inherent human dignity and their right to competent and complete healthcare.
?DUTY TO DIE?
After careful examination of ballot question 2, we conclude that it offers no protection for vulnerable, ailing patients who may be temporarily overwhelmed by depression, other forms of mental illness and physical pain. Passage of question 2 will deny the inviolable nature and inherent human dignity of some of our most vulnerable citizens, and expose them to exploitation. Moreover, the ?right to die? very quickly is transformed into the ?duty to die;? it comes to be expected by both family and society.? Individuals in the midst of suffering are hardly capable of a ?free choice? but are rather at the mercy of those who would benefit from their death ? perhaps? financially or as the medically ?easy way out.? After all, it is less expensive for our healthcare system to kill a person than to provide care.
A key question in this debate is ?WHO DECIDES?? Who is qualified to decide who should live and who should die in our supposedly civilized society, and by what criteria? Who has the right to take the life of another human being or even his/her own life? What is so dignified about taking a drug to kill yourself? Who is like God?
Ending a patient?s life is a decision that most health care professionals realize they have no right to make. Doctors should not be forced to participate in physician assisted suicide. We are called to do better for our fellow human beings. How we care for the weak and vulnerable among us points to what is most noble and dignified about our humanity. True mercy allows us to ease suffering, and affirm the dignity of a life at every stage of its development.
RELIEVE SUFFERING
Palliative care, meant to relieve suffering and improve the quality of life, affirms life and regards dying as a normal, natural process. It neither hastens nor postpones death but rather provides relief from pain while integrating psychological and spiritual care for the patient, and a support system for the family of the dying person. No amount of medical intervention can replace the compassion and love that a dying person needs and deserves. This is the true prescription for ?death with dignity.?
We should call Question 2 what it is: the lethal discrimination against the ill and elderly whose lives are judged by some as not worth living. All major medical organizations oppose physician assisted suicide saying it ?is fundamentally incompatible with the physician?s role as healer.? Our faith tells us that the moment of death is not our decision but ultimately that of the one who created us in his image and likeness, our God. Scripture warns us not to call evil good. Do not be fooled. Question 2 is not about ?dignity? ? it is about actively killing the innocent, and there is nothing dignified about that.
? Maria C. Parker, MBA served as Associate Director for Public Policy for the Massachusetts Catholic Conference, and in that capacity directed the ?In Support of Life? initiative. She has also served as Respect Life Coordinator for the Diocese of Providence and as United Nations representative for the World Union of Catholic Women?s Organizations. In the recent past she served as an official member of the Holy See Delegation to the UN?s 54th session of the Commission on the Status of Women. She is an alumna of Anna Maria College and the University of Rhode Island.
?To Live Each Day with Dignity ? A Conference on Dignity, Dangers, and Choices at the End of Life?, will be held on Saturday, Oct. 27 from 8:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. at Assumption College.? Speakers include Bishop Robert McManus, Dr. William Toffler, Fr. Tad Pacholczyk, and Richard Doerflinger.
The conference is sponsored by the Respect Life Office and the Worcester Guild of the Catholic Medical Association.? For more information and to register, visit www.worcesterdiocese.org/respectlife or call 508-929-4311.
Bad public policy ? an affront to dignity
By Deacon Pete Gummere
Aside from moral considerations, the measure to legalize physician assisted suicide really is bad public policy!? This is a question I have studied for about 10 years during which time the legislature in my own state (Vermont) has repeatedly considered and rejected a bill similar to Oregon?s assisted suicide law.? I offer the following reflections for your consideration.
Much of the rhetoric promoting assisted suicide is based on a fallacious assumption that people are dying in intractable pain. Highly respected palliative care physicians and nurses assure me when someone is dying in significant pain they are not being properly medicated.? I will leave that question for other, clinically qualified authors in this series to discuss in greater detail.
At its core, assisted suicide is an affront to our inherent human dignity.? Proponents of assisted suicide debase the value of time a terminally ill person has left by suggesting that they are expendable.? In approving of assisted suicide, isn?t the state really sending the message that the life of the terminally ill person is not worthy of protection?? Isn?t the message that their lives are not worth living?? The message conveyed is that the terminally ill should simply get out of the way and allow society to save a few dollars by not caring for them any longer.
Despite the Oregon statute?s prohibition of coercion of others to opt for assisted suicide, there are at least two documented cases of Oregon officials and bureaucrats denying payment for cancer treatment to terminally ill patients and offering them assisted suicide instead. Randy Stroup and Barbara Wagner shared their stories and the letters they received from the state?s Medicaid officials before succumbing to their cancers. (This was reported by national news media ? not by Church related news media.)? You do not coerce a person much more forcefully than by cutting off their hope of a cure and then offering them assisted suicide.
Lest you think that I am just being cynical, I have heard people candidly admit that they think that assisted suicide is part of the answer to control of health care expenditure.? That suggestion actually appeared in an editorial published in a reputable Vermont newspaper in July of 2011.
In the course of ethical consultations, I have dealt with family members attempting to manipulate a patient?s care with the overt intention of hastening the patient?s death and acknowledging their motive: their own financial gain. That was in a state which did not allow assisted suicide.? I can definitely conceive of similar attempts to manipulate a family member into assisted suicide.? Manipulation can be so subtle as to not be recognized by the patient or the even physician.? In reality, isn?t manipulation really just subtle coercion?
Since the measure is on the ballot in Massachusetts, voters supporting the measure will have to accept their own complicity in every single assisted suicide that would follow.
The assisted suicide measure is promoted as a means to give people more control over their own life and death.? Ironically, the measure actually enlists a physician and a second consulting physician, a pharmacist, one or more witnesses, a consulting psychologist (if deemed necessary) and probably a nurse in various clinical and procedural elements leading up to the suicide.? Frequently, the patient also enlists one or more persons to be with them at the end and help them to commit suicide.
Another serious concern with respect to assisted suicide is its effect on vulnerable populations ? viz., teenagers, the elderly, the disabled and other terminally ill persons.? These segments of society are particularly vulnerable to suicide.? There is good evidence that when a teenager knows a person who commits suicide, that teenager is at significantly increased lifetime risk for suicide. These are sometimes ?copycat? suicides shortly after the first suicide.? Other times it is at a point in the future.? Similar relationships have been demonstrated among the elderly.
I will leave you with the story of a friend with whom I have worked quite closely. My friend has a son who has struggled with depression repeatedly ? including several years back at a time when passage of assisted suicide seemed likely.? Without his parents knowing it, the son (then a teenager) went in to see his pediatrician.? He told the doctor that since the state was about to legalize assisted suicide, and since he is suicidal and would take his life anyway, couldn?t the doctor simply prescribe the necessary drugs for him to commit suicide.? The doctor got the young man into appropriate treatment.? The point is that the state sends a strong message by what it legalizes. Do we really want our vulnerable citizens getting the message that legalizing assisted suicide will send?
My friend wrote a synopsis of that incident and sent it to every Vermont legislator and senator earlier this year.? The measure failed again this year.
??Deacon Gummere serves the Diocese of Burlington and is adjunct faculty at Pontifical College Josephinum.? He has publishes, teaches and consults on medical morality. He holds a M.S. in biological science and a M.A. in theology.? He is certified in health care ethics by the National Catholic Bioethics Center.
?To Live Each Day with Dignity ? A Conference on Dignity, Dangers, and Choices at the End of Life?, will be held on Saturday, Oct. 27 from 8:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. at Assumption College.? Speakers include Bishop Robert McManus, Dr. William Toffler, Fr. Tad Pacholczyk, and Richard Doerflinger.? The conference is sponsored by the Respect Life Office and the Worcester Guild of the Catholic Medical Association.? For more information and to register, visit www.worcesterdiocese.org/respectlife or call 508-929-4311.
Walker Percy?s final decision: A gift of life
By Janet Benestad
The great novelist, Walker Percy, had several personal experiences with suicide, which experts say increases a person?s likelihood of contemplating suicide when difficult circumstances occur. Percy?s father and grandfather both took their own lives. When Percy himself was diagnosed with terminal cancer, he went to the Mayo clinic for treatment. The treatments were burdensome and difficult. Percy wanted to stop but chose not to forego treatment because of the children with cancer he saw while at the clinic. He hoped that his experimental and painful treatments might one day benefit them.
On Sept. 6, in an interview with Emily Rooney on WGBH, Dr. Marcia Angell, former editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine, said that she could not understand why anyone would not vote in favor of Question 2, the ballot referendum to make assisted suicide legal in Massachusetts.
?It?s all about choice,? Dr. Angell said, ?The patient chooses whether to ask for the drug; the physician chooses whether to comply.?
?It?s not a threat to anyone,? she added.
What is the proposal to legalize physician-assisted suicide in Massachusetts all about?
Question 2 proposes that a Massachusetts resident 18 years of age or older, diagnosed with a disease likely to kill him in six months or less, may request and receive a lethal drug for the sole purpose of ending his life.? Two physicians must concur in the diagnosis.? Two witnesses must attest to the patient?s capacity to make the request.
Question 2 is seriously flawed.? It requires no psychiatric examination of the patient requesting suicide.? Studies show that terminally ill patients are likely to be depressed and that, when the depression is treated, the request for life-ending measures desists.
Doctors tell us that diagnoses may be inaccurate regarding time left to a terminally ill person and are reluctant to make such predictions.? They tell stories about patients who outlive their diagnoses by months, even years.? A diagnosis of six months to live is usually understood to mean that the person will die even with treatment.? Ballot Question 2, however, allows for the lethal prescription with or without treatment.
Finally, certain procedural issues make the bill unacceptable.? Witnesses to the patient?s capacity need not know the patient.? The law allows, in the case of patients who cannot communicate themselves, for a surrogate to testify to a patient?s desire to end his life. The law does not require that family members of the patient requesting suicide be notified. The prescribing physician is not allowed to be present for the death; in fact, the law says that no one need be present.
The Catholic Church teaches that all suicide and assistance with suicide, even when requested to alleviate pain at the end of life, is gravely immoral, and harmful to society.? Life is a gift from God, one that we return to him when he calls us home.? ?We are stewards, not owners, of the life God has entrusted to us.? It is not ours to dispose of,? states the Catechism of the Catholic Church.
Walker Percy?s courage and generous spirit prove the point ? persons who are dying are still capable of great acts of generosity and heroism.? Their humanity requires that doctors, nurses and medical professionals treat them in a human, not just a humane, manner!?? Percy?s decision is to do what he can with the life given to him.
Question 2 offers patients a choice that ends all choices.? Please join me in saying NO to Question 2 on November 6.
? Janet Benestad is Cabinet Secretary for Faith Formation and Evangelization in the Archdiocese of Boston.
?To Live Each Day with Dignity ? A Conference on Dignity, Dangers, and Choices at the End of Life?, will be held on Saturday, Oct. 27 from 8:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. at Assumption College.? Speakers include Bishop Robert McManus, Dr. William Toffler, Fr. Tad Pacholczyk, and Richard Doerflinger.? The conference is sponsored by the Respect Life Office and the Worcester Guild of the Catholic Medical Association.? For more information and to register, visit www.worcesterdiocese.org/respectlife or call 508-929-4311.
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Question 2: Deeply Troubling
By Dr. John Howland
On the Nov. 6 ballot this fall will appear Question 2, asking if voters will legalize physician-assisted suicide. As a Massachusetts doctor I find the concept of sending a patient to the drug store with a lethal prescription deeply troubling.
As physicians have since the time of Hippocrates, I have sworn primum non nocere, ?first do no harm.?
The Hippocratic Oath specifically prohibits physicians from assisting patients in taking their own lives. Question 2, if passed, would undermine the role of the physician as healer in our society and cross a line that must not be crossed.
Question 2 would place patients with terminal illness in danger. ?? ??? ?Though I certainly can sympathize with patients facing the ravages of cancer, ALS and similar diseases, the vast majority of patients facing terminal diagnoses are relatively healthy through most of their illnesses, are often able to work or, if they choose, to spend time doing the things they most enjoy with the people they most love.? Many outlive the six-month prognosis required under this law. Offering patients the means to commit suicide would tempt them to cut short their lives before natural death.
Suicide is always a tragedy. Suicide should never be promoted as a solution to a problem, even terminal illness. Suicide is never a reasonable choice but the end of all choices.
Question 2 raises a host of troubling questions. Do we really need to pass a law to help people to commit suicide? We all have the right to refuse any and all medical treatment and allow our lives to come to a natural end. No one really needs help to commit suicide; sadly thousands manage to do so without help already.
Is suicide the answer to the problem of suffering at the end of life? As a physician, I have been providing hospice care for over 30 years. Quality hospice care is what our society should be promoting, not suicide.
Question 2 is based on the idea that physicians can predict the future and accurately predict when a person has only six months to live. I can assure you, physicians have no crystal ball.
We should learn from the experience of those in Oregon where physician-assisted suicide is sadly legal.
Let me share with you just two stories. Jeannette Hall was diagnosed with cancer and told she had 6-12 months to live. She asked her doctor for the suicide pills. Instead he gave her hope, she fought the cancer, and she won the battle. More than 10 years later, in an interview, Mrs. Hall warned all of us: ?Assisted suicide should not be legal.?Don?t make Oregon?s mistake.?
We should also remember Barbara Wagner who had advanced cancer that failed to respond to initial treatment. Her doctor recommended additional chemotherapy. The insurance company sent Mrs. Wagner a letter saying that they would not pay for the treatment, but they would provide 100 percent coverage for physician-assisted suicide should she wish to kill herself. Mrs. Wagner was shocked, ?To say to someone, we?ll pay for you to die, but not pay for you to live, it?s cruel.?
Question 2 is troubling because it lacks some essential safeguards. No psychiatric evaluations are required, so patients suffering from a treatable depression might never receive help. Family members don?t even have to be notified that a person is requesting physician-assisted suicide. You might never know that your brother or mother requested the suicide pills until it was too late. No witness is required to be present to help if something were to go wrong.? And no hospital, doctor or public safety official has any idea where the lethal dose goes once it leaves the drug store, making it susceptible to abuse by any number of people acting on suicidal impulses.
There are plenty of reasons Massachusetts?s voters should be troubled about Question 2. Instead of voting for a law that encourages suicide, we should do what?s really needed: provide hope and comfort to patients at the end of life. This is a job for all of us. Please join me in voting ?No? on Question 2.
? Dr. John Howland is a family physician and has been in practice in the Diocese of Worcester for over 30 years. He is regional director of the Catholic Medical Association and founder of Doctors Against Suicide.
?To Live Each Day with Dignity ? A Conference on Dignity, Dangers, and Choices at the End of Life?, will be held on Saturday, Oct. 27 from 8:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. at Assumption College.? Speakers include Bishop Robert McManus, Dr. William Toffler, Fr. Tad Pacholczyk, and Richard Doerflinger.? The conference is sponsored by the Respect Life Office and the Worcester Guild of the Catholic Medical Association.? For more information and to register, visit www.worcesterdiocese.org/respectlife or call 508-929-4311.
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Death with Dignity
By Allison LeDoux
This November, the citizens of Massachusetts will be asked to cast their vote on the so-called ?Death with Dignity Act?.
But the term ?death with dignity? brings with it a dark deception.? We are, in fact, being asked to vote for or against the legalization of physician-assisted suicide in our state.? If passed, a person with a prognosis of six months or less to live would be permitted by law to request from their physician, a prescription for lethal drugs for the purpose of helping them to end their life ?in a humane and dignified manner.?
Oregon and Washington are the only states who have legalized physician-assisted suicide to date.? They did so by ballot referendum, the same form of enacting the law being attempted in Massachusetts. A ballot referendum essentially by-passes the state legislature and brings the question directly to the ballot for a vote through the gathering of signatures.? Legalizing physician-assisted suicide has been attempted in other states too, but interestingly, wherever it has gone through the legislature it has been defeated.
You may recall hearing over the years of a group called the ?Hemlock Society? (whose very name connotes death by poison).? They are the proponents of physician-assisted suicide or ?aid in dying.?? But they have changed their name.? Now they call themselves ?Compassion and Choices,? and they are targeting the northeast.? The effort to legalize doctor-prescribed suicide in Massachusetts goes by the name ?Dignity 2012.?? Regrettably, if our state falls, so goes the rest of the nation.
There are many flaws in the legislation.? Predictions of life expectancy can be wrong ? people often outlive their prognosis by months or even years.? Appropriate safeguards are absent.? Many suicides are caused by untreated depression which could be alleviated with the right therapeutic intervention, yet there are no requirements in the law saying doctors must provide this kind of evaluation.? The law also does not require that the actual ingestion of the drug be witnessed, nor is there any requirement to record any witnesses who may be present at the death.? Moreover, when the patient dies, the death certificate must list the cause of death as the underlying illness, not the effect of the lethal drugs; this provision requires a public record to be falsified.
While most readers of this paper are probably at least somewhat aware of this November ballot question, it appears that many more of our fellow citizens have heard little, if anything, about it.? Sadly, the culture in which we live has all too often dulled people?s consciences to the reality of the true dignity and sacredness of each human life.? This secularized outlook misleads and confuses.? When the value of a human life is measured by its level of productivity, we have truly lost our way.
It?s up to us to make sure our family and friends know the dangers of physician-assisted suicide, which violates the dignity of the dying person and eliminates the opportunity for the many graces that can come from a ?good death? where love abounds and peace and reconciliation can flourish.? We must work to uphold the integrity of the medical profession whose ability and willingness to provide palliative care and effective pain management can be undermined by authorizing assisted suicide.
In the coming months, the elections will be a hot-topic of conversation.? We are called to courageously defend the truth and to proclaim the Good News.? Catholic teaching on the dignity of every human person, no matter how compromised their life may appear, is a beautiful teaching indeed.? There is nothing good about doctor-prescribed death.? We hope that the series of articles on this topic which will appear in this column each week from now through November 2, will serve not only to educate our readers but to help equip them to spread the word as well.
So let?s get started!? Whether you?re talking with parents in the schoolyard or the soccer field, conversing with an acquaintance in the checkout line, or chatting with your co-worker at the water cooler or the neighbor across the backyard fence, why not strike up a conversation about the dangers of physician-assisted suicide?
Remember, a society will be judged by how it treats its weakest members, and among its most vulnerable are surely the unborn and the dying.? The law is supposed to protect true human dignity and authentic freedom, not deny it. We thank God for our doctors and nurses who strive always to care, even when medicine cannot cure, and we are called to join them by serving those we love in their last days by offering them true compassion, upholding their God-given dignity, and walking with them in their suffering.
For more information on physician-assisted suicide, including articles, links, parish resources, and upcoming events in the Diocese of Worcester, visit www.worcesterdiocese.org/respectlife.
?? Mrs.? LeDoux is the director of the Respect Life Office for the Diocese of Worcester.? She holds a certification in Catholic Health Care Ethics from The National Catholic Bioethics Center.
?To Live Each Day with Dignity ? A Conference on Dignity, Dangers, and Choices at the End of Life?, will be held on Saturday, October 27 from 8:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. at Assumption College.? Speakers include Bishop Robert McManus, Dr. William Toffler, Fr. Tad Pacholczyk, and Richard Doerflinger.? The conference is sponsored by the Respect Life Office and the Worcester Guild of the Catholic Medical Association.? For more information and to register, visit www.worcesterdiocese.org/respectlife or call 508-929-4311.
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Caring for dying brother was a gift?
By William T. Clew
Tom Massarelli was 39 years old when he died.
His lymphoma progressed despite two bone marrow transplants and everything else that medical science could do.
His sister, Jo Massarelli, wrote in an article in the September issue of ?Catholic Radical,? the local Catholic Worker newsletter, that after the second transplant his doctor predicted that he had eight weeks to live.
His athletic body was emaciated, she wrote. His muscles were wasted and his hands and feet were bloated.
?Simply chewing food was exhausting,? she wrote. ?He compared crossing the room with accomplishing his trophy-winning triple jump. Worse was the rejection from those who stayed away, too pained to face the clear departure taking place. His loneliness came to me at night when, sleeping on the floor next to his bed, I would hear him whisper ?Jo?? for no reason except to know that someone was there.?
And, she said, someone always was there. He spent his remaining days in his parents home. His four brothers, Jo, her husband, Tom?s new bride and his friends were with him.
?Here he lived for five months more ? dying and living, living and dying ? so intertwined that his leave-taking could not dampen the rejoicing when he married his Barb in the living room just weeks before we gathered again for his funeral,? she wrote.
It was a good death, she said in a recent interview. He was confessed, she said. He was at home, attended by a prayerful community of people who loved him. He grew in his faith and that buoyed up those who were around him. He died peacefully.
?We as Catholic Christians must put forth this model of a good death,? she said. ?People are less afraid of dying, but are more afraid of dying alone in strange circumstances, uncared for.?
In the months before he died, her brother? ?allowed no denial of what was happening,? she wrote in the ?Catholic Radical? article. ?We came to speak of death as a rude guest, always interrupting and not knowing when to leave. Yet my brother was not a particularly courageous person. What he did have was the confidence of knowing that whatever he faced he did so with others who loved him, who loved life and who knew that, in the end none of us gets to stay.?
?I am most grateful that my brother gave me the opportunity to take care of him at the end of his life,? she wrote. ?I am certainly not alone in my gratitude. Having cared well for a dying person is a great gift for the caregiver, one that comes with peace of mind when the last breath? is drawn. The certain knowledge that everything that could be done was done, imperfectly for sure, but in love nonetheless, is precious. ? We should be prepared to defend human life on principle, as well as in practice with our presence.?
She said in the interview that when people learn of others who are sick and dying, many tend to want to stay away, feeling that there is not much they can do. As Catholics we can pray for and with them. Our? presence is doing something.
Voters who go to the polls Nov. 6 will find on the ballot Question 2, the so-called ?Death with Dignity Initiative,? which would allow a terminally-ill patient given six months or less to live and judged mentally capable, to ask to be given lethal drugs.
In her article, Ms. Massarelli writes that life has a natural end and that ?God gives us our last breath as well as our first (and that both and all in between are of equal worth). ??
These are basic tenets of our Catholic faith. Christ?s death on the cross reminds us that suffering and death comes to all of us. ?We can truly trust him not only with our life, but with our death and dying as well,? she wrote.
God, who is the author of life made us in his image. ?That alone is the source of human dignity. Therefore it is not in the domain of the human to end a life, not even one that belongs to him/her.?
She wrote that the so-called ?Death with Dignity Initiative? has the potential to change the social contract ?to care for one another when we are the most vulnerable.?
She said supporters of the initiative ?reject the notion of human dignity as a gift from God. Rather they describe it in terms of personal autonomy, freedom and self-determination. All important concerns certainly, just not as important as the gift of life itself.?
?It is said that ?thoughts are giants? and ?ideas have consequences.? One of the consequences of physician-assisted suicide is the notion that we can reduce or eliminate suffering by eliminating the sufferer, so long as it is a free choice and in the last six months of life. Set aside for a moment that both factors are difficult to determine with certainty. Additionally it will have the effect of rendering us unwilling and/or incompetent to truly care for one another when suffering is intractable but not terminal, or when the sufferer lives until they die a natural death,? she wrote.
Ms. Massarelli, who teaches a workshop on the vulnerability of impaired people in today?s society and consults with families who seek her help, spoke on? the subject of death and dying and the potential impact of ballot Question 2 recently at the Novena to St. Joseph at Christ the King Parish, 1052 Pleasant St. She is scheduled to speak again on Oct. 29 on the topic of suffering. Her husband, Marc Tumeinski, a professor at Anna Maria College and campus minister at Worcester State University, is scheduled to speak Oct. 15. The novena begins at 7:15 p.m.
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