The Catholic bishops of Ireland have forcefully criticized the Dying with Dignity Bill, calling assisted suicide “a failure of compassion on the part of society.”
Despite the euphemisms and misleading rhetoric, this bill “provides for the medical endorsement and facilitation of suicide,” the bishops note in their submission Friday to the Irish legislature. “Legislators need to honestly recognise the difference and call things by their proper name.”
“It is therefore appropriate to refer to the Bill as an ‘assisted suicide’ bill,” they insist.
The bill “fails to require care givers to provide adequate palliative care for the terminally ill person,” the bishops note and so “someone might decide to end his or her own life without ever having experienced what palliative care has to offer and, thus, making this decision without being fully aware of the other options available to them.”
Another serious omission of the bill is its failure “to recognise the reality that many patients who request assisted suicide are depressed,” the bishops observe. “When the physical and psychological sources of the desperation that underlies requests for assisted suicide are addressed, the desire for death diminishes and patients are usually grateful for the time remaining to them.”
The bishops also cite the 2017 Charter for Health Care Workers, which declares there is “no right to arbitrarily dispose of one’s life” and therefore “no doctor can be the executive guardian of a non-existent right.”
“The medical practitioner who formally or materially assists a patient in ending his/her own life is engaging in an act of homicide, which is always unlawful,” the charter states.
In their submission, the bishops also note how the acceptance of assisted suicide is a slippery slope, a fact borne out by the experience of the Netherlands, Belgium, and Canada.
“The legal endorsement of assisted suicide would ultimately lead to the acceptance of non-voluntary euthanasia, because the logic of assisted suicide is based on a rejection of the truth that all human lives are fundamentally equal in value and worthy of protection,” the bishops observe.
“Compassion is often presented as a justification for assisted suicide, but having compassion means ‘suffering with’ someone,” the bishops state. “Assisted suicide reflects a failure of compassion on the part of society.”
Those who assist with a suicide, whatever their motives, “co-operate with the self-destruction of another person,” they add. “It is one thing when life is shortened as an unintended side effect of pain relief or the cessation of burdensome treatment. It is something else entirely, when one person actively and deliberately participates in ending the life of another.”
The bishops also underscore another harmful side effect of the proposed legislation, noting that legalizing assisted suicide “would place the terminally ill, the disabled, and other vulnerable patients under emotional and social pressure to end their own lives in order to spare others the burden of caring for them.”
“Legalised assisted suicide is based on the false premise that quality of life confers human dignity, and on a rejection of the truth that all lives are of equal worth,” they assert.
The proposed legislation is not only harmful toward the possible victims of assisted suicide, the bishops observe, since it would also harm healthcare workers who participate in this act.
“The Bill would coerce the consciences of objecting healthcare providers in order to facilitate something they know to be gravely immoral and utterly incompatible with their vocation to heal,” they insist. “This burdening of conscience is unnecessary, disproportionate and seriously unjust.”