Value of human life

by Editor · June 4, 2014

GUEST EDITORIAL BY MICHAEL SHACKLETON

In October, 2010, a South African doctor, Sean Davison, was arrested in New Zealand on a charge of attempted murder for assisting his mother to die. He was able to return to his home in the Cape when the charge was reduced to one of counselling and procuring attempted suicide.

“Moral theology recognises that each of the Ten Commandments has a corollary. The prohibition of murder carries with it the complementary exhortation to protect and preserve life.” (CNS photo/Dennis Callahan, Catholic San Francisco)

There was sympathy for his action. Many medical professionals hailed his courage in a case in which he and his mother agreed that her quality of life was so irretrievably devastated that she freely chose to die in dignity.

Many would concur with this common-sense approach. Why let someone you love, or anyone for that matter, hopelessly endure excruciating pain and discomfort when mercy killing is the answer?

It is an either/or situation: to suffer unnecessarily or to receive help in ending the suffering once and for all.

The idea that the lack of the quality of life is of more consideration in terminally ill patients than their dignity of life, is something the Church simply cannot countenance.

The Church�s attitude to this is plain. It rests on the divine commandment: You shall not kill.

Moral theology recognises that each of the Ten Commandments has a corollary. The prohibition of murder carries with it the complementary exhortation to protect and preserve life.

Pope St John Paul II led the way in directing the Church to a fresh appreciation of this exhortation. In his 1995 encyclical Evangelii vitae�(the Gospel of Life), he strongly reasserted that the fullness of human life far exceeds the dimensions of earthly existence because it consists in sharing the very life of God.

He went further. In using the term Gospel of Life he intended the Church to appreciate ever more profoundly that it must preach the sacredness of the life and the dignity of every human being, just as insistently as it preaches the very Gospel of Christ to the world.

A terminally ill patient�s life has to be deemed sacred and not open to the option of ending it voluntarily. Research in palliative medicine for terminal illness has improved. Techniques are available to significantly alleviate horrific symptoms. The Church, obviously, supports such techniques. It cannot support solving problems by putting people out of their misery permanently, sooner rather than later.

Legislation passed in the Netherlands and Belgium giving the right to little children to choose voluntary euthanasia, must surely make one think twice. Although it has been said that this right may be exercised only in the rarest of cases, there is the frightening prospect that it is too soon for a mature medical diagnosis concerning infants who are emotionally unable to make a free choice.

It makes one think of Mr Bumble�s remark in Charles Dickens� Oliver Twist: �If the law supposes that, the law is an ass.�

Very often, it is more likely that it is not the ailing and vulnerable person who would prefer a dignified death but others who cannot cope with the situation. Managing a terminally ill person can be exhaustingly debilitating.

The article on page 9 by Sr Margaret Craig in this week�s issue is a powerful exposure of how effective the loving provision of safe, secure and compassionate care for perilously sick children can be as part of a rehabilitation process that will never consider active killing for the sake of death with dignity.

This is a reinforcing lesson of how the virtue of love for one�s neighbour encompasses especially those who have scant hope of a long and meaningful life.

Caring for them at whatever age they may be, is a response to the duty to defend and promote the sacred value of human life from its very beginning until its end.

Sr Margaret sums it up: �The fact that we have the knowledge and capacity to end life artificially, to kill, does not make it right�.