Two weeks ago, I addressed the Supreme Court decision declaring, "Americans suffering from painful or mortal illnesses do not have a constitutional right to take their own lives with a doctor's help."
In reviewing the Court decision, I said that you should be aware that "End-of-life" care fuels a nascent discussion. "The effort to overhaul the American way of dying is just beginning, believe me!"
If anyone has any doubts, I call your attention to the July 1997 issue of "COLUMBIA" the Knights of Columbus monthly magazine. In this issue is an excellent article written by Attorney Daniel Avila, who is with the National Legal Center for the Mentally Dependent and Disabled, Inc. (Click here to see the article).
Attorney Avila writes, "The notion that assisted suicide provides 'freedom' is self defeating. At the root of the political and social drive to legalize assisted suicide is what Pope John Paul II describes in his encyclical, 'the Gospel of Life' as an 'attitude of excessive preoccupation with efficiency ... which sees the growing number of elderly and disabled people as intolerable and too burdensome.'"
Of interest to a good many of you is the fact that especially at risk in Florida, for example, are those members of the largest community of older persons in the United States.
Attorney Avila continues, "Where is the freedom in a view that isolates the vulnerable, denies them the solidarity and mutual support demanded by their dignity as human persons, and coldly offers them a right to be killed to the efficient advantage of the more powerful? "As John Paul II concluded in the Gospel of Life, a 'freedom' to be killed that is purportedly based on the victims individual desires 'ends up by becoming the freedom of the strong against the weak who have no choice but to submit."
The assisted suicide advocates target Florida's high court for a precedent-setting decision. Stop and think, if you will, sunshine, beaches and a legal drug overdose? Is assisted suicide protected by the "privacy" guarantee in Florida's Constitution? Krischer vs McIver, the Florida Supreme Court will decide the matter. The Knights of Columbus has urged the court to uphold the ban in a friend-of-the-court brief joined by the Natinal Catholic Office for Persons with Disabilities. The National Legal Center for the Medically Dependent and Disabled drafted the brief with the help of funding from the Knights.
I urge you to read this article in COLUMBIA. It will give you a good idea of how strongly the assisted suicide group is working to legalize euthanasia in our United States. Believe me, it is frightening! God bless you!
Father William A. Bray - July 20, 1997 - Saint Clare's Parish Bulletin