Jimmy Akin lays out the fundamental principles and argument of the Catholic Church’s teaching against physician-assisted suicide.
Transcript:
Host: Let’s see if we can get Kelsey in Colorado in before we go. Kelsey, you are on with Jimmy Akin, what is your…well, let me see…maybe not…oh okay, sorry, go ahead, Kelsey, sorry.
Caller: Hi, I’m doing a research paper on the growing culture of death. I’d like to know what the Catholic position is on physician-assisted suicide?
Jimmy: Okay. The Catholic position is that physician-assisted suicide is intrinsically evil. It is always intrinsically wrong to kill an innocent human being. And to put doctors in the position of killing their patients is something that is evil in and of itself. Doctors should be ministers of healing, not of death; and consequently, rather than killing their patients, they should seek better solutions.
Now there are many situations where people are in great pain, but the solution is not to kill the patient. The solution is to help with the pain, and to give patients the kind of pain relief that they need. This is something that–we’re very fortunate today, we have very excellent and effective ways of relieving pain, and fundamentally we should seek to alleviate the suffering of patients so that they don’t want to kill themselves, because that’s not the solution here. We’re not masters of our own lives, they’re not simply things we can dispose of, and it’s fundamentally inhumane when you say that–and it’s a loss for all of humanity, and it’s not compassionate, to say that the solution to a medical problem is killing the patient. That’s contrary to the medical profession, and the mission of medical professionals.
It’s also contrary to the dignity of the patients themselves, because if a patient has been reduced by suffering to a position where the patient wants to kill himself or herself, then we’ve already passed the point where there’s been a failure, and the solution is to undo that failure by relieving the person’s sufferings so that they no longer have that desire, they no longer feel that desperate that they want to end their life in order to end their suffering.
If you’d like to read more about this, there’s some discussion of it at the website of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops; just go to USCCB.org, that’s for United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, USCCB.org, and type in “physician-assisted suicide.” There will be information there, we also have some at Catholic.com, and there’s a lot of easily accessible information on the web for your research paper, and good luck with it.