The Catholic Bishops’ Conference of Scotland has slammed a proposal to legalize assisted suicide in the country, asserting the bill buys into a “false understanding of compassion.”
A correct understanding of compassion “consists not in causing death, but in embracing the sick, in supporting them in their difficulties, in offering them affection, attention, and the means to alleviate their suffering,” the bishops declare in their statement.
The Assisted Dying for Terminally Ill Adults Bill would have serious consequences for the defense of human dignity, the bishops contend, since it would undermine “trust in doctors” and put “pressure on vulnerable people to end their lives prematurely.”
The Bill, introduced by Liam McArthur MSP, has also received opposition from the Royal College of General Practitioners and the Association of Palliative Medicine in the UK. Its capacious definition of terminal illness, critics say, will likely include diabetes, dementia, and anorexia.
When the elderly and disabled “express concerns about being a burden, the appropriate response is not to suggest that they have a duty to die,” the bishops note in their statement, but rather, “it is to commit to meeting their needs and providing the care and compassion to help them live.”
“The poor and vulnerable are already struggling to live,” the statement says. “Parliamentarians in Scotland ought to offer them care and support to live, not a concoction of drugs to die.”
“Killing is not the solution to ill-health, poverty or any other social challenges,” the prelates add. “The state ought to support the provision of care, not deliberate killing, for those at the end of life.”
If Scotland allows death on demand and this becomes normal practice, the bishops ask, “how will that not become a cultural expectation for the vulnerable, including the elderly, disabled, and lonely?”
Assisted suicide attacks human dignity by devaluing the intrinsic worth of human life, since it implies that life only has value because of its “efficiency and utility,” the bishops argue, adding that, implicit in legal assisted suicide is the notion that an individual can lose his “value and worth.”
The bishops submitted their testimony to the Scottish Parliament Health, Social Care and Sport Committee, referencing the experience of other countries and states where assisted suicide and/or euthanasia is legal, including Canada, the Netherlands, and Oregon.
“No matter how well intentioned safeguards are, it is impossible for any government to draft assisted suicide laws which include legal protection from future expansion of those laws,” they state.