Santa Fe, N.M., Jan 8, 2019 / 02:53 am (CNA/EWTN News).- Proposed legislation in New Mexico could legalize assisted suicide in the state, and may even allow for the prescription of deadly drugs outside the state via telemedicine, and by healthcare professionals other than physicians.
Deacon Steve Rangel, associate director for the New Mexico Conference of Catholic Bishops, said the bill was disheartening to read.
“In our Catholic faith, we know the dignity of life from conception to natural death,” he told CNA.
“Here we have an attack on [life]. It’s really disheartening that we even have to be put in this type of position…Our driving force has always been to prevent harm and loss of life.”
Rangel cited several particularly objectionable points in House Bill 90, known as the “Elizabeth Whitefield End of Life Options Act,” including a provision that medical practitioners other than doctors can administer the drugs, without ever having examined the patient in person.
He also pointed out that the bill reduces the waiting period for assisted suicide from 15 days to 48 hours.
“We all get down. We’re human beings,” he said. “But at [a patient’s] most vulnerable point, are we going to let them make a life decision like that?”
Alex Schadenberg, executive director of the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition, an international organization with a headquarters in Ontario, told CNA that this assisted suicide bill jumped out at him as particularly expansive and vague.
“This bill allows nurses and physician assistants to be involved also. So you have this wider group of people who can be involved in the act itself of prescribing,” he told CNA.
The current bill allows for the prescription of assisted suicide drugs after a healthcare professional examines a patient via telemedicine.
“A doctor could assess you, or even a nurse, by telemedicine. So you have a terminal condition, supposedly, and this is going to be approved that you can die by assisted suicide but your interview for this process is done over a screen,” Schadenberg said.
“To me, this is a crazy thing because we’re talking about life and death.”
The bill includes a provision that makes assisted suicide acceptable if it can be determined that a terminal condition will cause a patient’s death “in the foreseeable future.”
“’Foreseeable future’ is not defined,” Schadenberg noted. “So it’s wide open…basically you can have your interview by telemedicine, and die two days later because your terminal condition that you supposedly have might cause your death in the ‘foreseeable future.’”
The bill also removes conscience protections, he said, because although doctors are not required to prescribe the lethal medication, they are mandated to refer the patient to a medical professional who will.
“So if you think it’s wrong to prescribe lethal drugs for a patient, knowing that they’re going to die by assisted suicide, then it must be equally wrong for you to send them to a doctor who’s willing to do that,” Schadenberg said.
In addition, the bill does not clearly define whether residents of states other than New Mexico might be allowed to avail themselves of assisted suicide. It was reported in some publications that the bill lacks a residency requirement completely, meaning patients coming from other states to seek the procedure, so-called “suicide tourism,” could become a reality.
Most assisted suicide laws, such as Oregon’s, Schadenberg clarified, explicitly state that the patient must be a resident of the state in order to qualify for the procedure.
The New Mexico bill, however, only has an indirect residency requirement under the definition of the word “adult,” which is defined as a resident of the state. But the word “adult” is only mentioned once in the bill, under the proposed form that must be signed to be approved for assisted suicide, he said.
“But even under the wording of this bill, it still seems a very weak way of defining a resident. It’s very awkward.”
Schadenberg said some advocates of assisted suicide are calling for a complete elimination of waiting periods for the procedure.
“We’re talking about life and death,” he said. “Obviously you could be depressed today, and the purpose of the waiting period is not to be onerous and force suffering people to have to live 14 more days. It’s that you might be depressed, and the way to ensure [assisted suicide] is your real will is to create a waiting period. You might be feeling better in two weeks.”
Schadenberg said about 20 states introduced assisted suicide bills in 2018, but only one state actually passed the measure.
“This is not what you’d call an inevitability,” he said. “The opposition to assisted suicide has been very successful, but the sad reality is that it only takes one state and things look bad…New Mexico I’m very concerned about. There’s no question about it.”
Rangel echoed Schadenberg’s consternation at the bill’s current language, but reiterated that as Catholics the best approach to terminal illness is compassion.
“We align ourselves with our Lord’s pain and suffering,” Rangel reflected. “I have a priest friend who has [Multiple Sclerosis,] and when he’s feeling the most pain, that’s when he offers it up for other people’s intentions. I thought that was so powerful…We truly are compassionate for those who are suffering.”
He said his own daughter suffered a traumatic brain injury in a car accident, resulting in the loss of part of her brain which has left her cognitively impaired.
“Did she lose some things because of the injury? Absolutely,” he said. “But at the same time, [we gained] so many other blessings. So we look for the blessings in everything in life…she loves people, people respond to her, and so if you’d ask me, ‘Iis that quality of life?’ I would say absolutely.”
Assisted suicide has been illegal in New Mexico since the 1960s, but doctors have been protected from liability for removing life support from terminally ill patients since 1978.
The New Mexico Supreme Court previously ruled in June 2016 that assisted suicide was not a “fundamental or important right” under the state constitution, after a woman with terminal cancer expressed her wish for “a more peaceful death.” At that time the New Mexico Supreme Court suggested a “robust debate in the legislative and the executive branches of government” to determine if the law needed to be changed.
The states of California, Colorado, Hawaii, Montana, Oregon, Vermont, and Washington, plus the District of Columbia, have already legalized assisted suicide.
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While I support background checks and banning felons and the mentally ill from owning guns, Chicago already has very strict gun laws and they have failed miserably in curbing violence.
Did the archbishop even bother to learn this fact?
Cardinal needs to shut his mouth and mind his own business. Take the beam out of your own eye Cardinal before worrying about the mote in your neighbor’s.
I find it dispiriting that you think it’s more appropriate to castigate DiNardo for speaking out against a senseless loss of life… and that he should “mind his own business”? This is a website whose writers and users proffer almost exclusively in minding others’ business. The moment someone speaks out against gun violence, they are getting too uppity?
I urge you to think more with charity and empathy, instead of venting hate and anger as your first recourse. It’s bad for the soul.
What utter nonsense. There is no such thing as “gun violence”. The gun is a tool. Do we characterize the genocide of the 1990s in Rwanda as “machete violence”? no we do not because the tool used to commit the horrendous acts of violence is simply the material at hand. The Cardinal should pull his head out of his fourth point of contact and focus on the underlying hatred, mental distress, and the triggering causes of the act of violence. We don’t focus on the crack pipe when helping addicts heal, we focus on their mental and physical state, and those things that cause the addict to reach out for the crack pipe (or the bong, or the bottle). Its not the presence of the crack pipe that made the addict light-up, it was an mental/emotional disorder. Cardinal DiNardo’s continuance of the myth of “gun violence” is yet another entry on the scroll of reasons the laity do not trust the judgement of the “leaders” of the Catholic Church in America. They continue to prove their judgment clouded by emotion, false reasoning, and lack of focus on authentic Catholic Apostolic Teaching.
Begs the question, when was the last time that the Cardinal purchased a firearm from a federally licensed firearms dealer? Has he ever? My guess is that he has not because anyone who executes a legal purchase from a federally licensed firearm dealer is well aware of the extensive ‘reasonable’ restrictions already in place. And there are many.
Additionally Cardinal DiNardo’s calling into question how someone ‘capable of such violence was able to obtain a firearms to carry out this heinous act’ betrays a stunning naiveté on at least two fronts. First, does the Cardinal really lack imagination to such a degree that he cannot consider any number of ways both legal and illegal that the weapon was acquired? Was his question rhetorical or an irresponsible and ill-informed throw away comment indicting the legal firearms market?
Secondly, does the Cardinal not realize that we are all fallen and capable of committing evil? That someone is capable of acquiring a firearm and committing such a heinous act is a surprise to him? Really? Murders happen everyday in Chicago and only now is he surprised that people commit murder? At risk of putting too fine a point on it, on what planet does he live?