Bern, Switzerland, May 10, 2018 / 05:21 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- Botanist and ecologist David Goodall ended his life May 10 in Switzerland by assisted suicide, a procedure which he had long advocated legalizing in his home country of Australia.
Goodall, 104, told journalists that he “looked forward” to ending his life and regretted not having ended it sooner, though he is not terminally ill. He also said he regretted that he had to travel all the way to Switzerland commit suicide.
Australia’s Victoria state has passed an assisted suicide law that will go into effect in 2019, but it only allows for terminally ill patients to end their lives – Goodall would not have qualified under the law.
Critics have said that Goodall’s death was not simply a personal choice, but a political one that could have devastating consequences on vulnerable populations such as the elderly, the poor, and the disabled.
“It was clear he wanted to go out while getting a lot of attention,” said Stephen Drake, a research analyst with the advocacy group Not Dead Yet, a disability rights group which opposes the legalization of assisted suicide and euthanasia “as deadly forms of discrimination.”
“If someone acts as he does, for people to call it a personal act is a lie; it was a political act,” Drake told CNA.
Only a handful of countries have legalized assisted suicide or euthanasia, including Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands. In Switzerland, while assisted suicide is technically not legal, it is allowed under certain circumstances.
In the United States, assisted suicide is currently legal in Colorado, Vermont, Washington, California, Oregon, Hawaii, and the District of Columbia. The State Supreme Court of Montana decriminalized assisted suicide for physicians in 2009.
Currently, most legislation that allows for assisted suicide or euthanasia does so only in the cases of terminally ill patients.
However, Goodall’s case demonstrates that this is only the beginning for assisted suicide advocates, Drake noted.
Terminal illness is “the wedge issue that most people can agree on, that opens the door,” he said.
“Once you open the door, then the campaign becomes to kick it open as far as you can, and it shows that opponents in Australia who’ve been fighting to prevent the legalization of assisted suicide and euthanasia are right on target when they say that this will begin to expand in very short order,” he added.
“Now the cause will be: why are we preventing poor old people from ending their lives?” he said.
Other vulnerable and undervalued populations, such as the poor and disabled, will be similarly at risk, he noted.
Matt Valliere, executive director of Patients Rights Action Fund, told CNA in e-mail comments that it would “be a mistake” to use Goodall’s death as an example in advocating for legalized assisted suicide.
“We know that legalizing assisted suicide only places the vulnerable at greater risk. Mr. Goodall himself had no terminal illness and yet was given lethal medication,” Valliere said.
“That is why many sick, poor, elderly and persons with disabilities oppose these laws – they will be the first to suffer from them.”
What concerns disability and advocacy groups most about legalizing assisted suicide and euthanasia is the potential for coercion and corruption – that suicide will become a “rational choice” for some undervalued populations, and their deaths seen as a duty rather than an unpreventable tragedy, Drake said.
“They will no longer be viewed as preventable tragedies but rational (ways) to end a life of suffering,” he said.
“But if you talk to people with disabilities, the suffering they will cite is not the disability itself, but the barriers and discrimination and open hostility they encounter in the culture they live in.”
Studies have shown that the majority of patients who request assisted suicide will withdraw that request when they are treated for depression. There have also been several cases of botched deaths in Oregon, in which a patient’s doctor was not present during the assisted suicide. Oregon has seen many abuses since since its legalization of assisted suicide, such as cases of pills changing hands, either intentionally or unknowingly, with lethal results.
Another concern is that suicide for vulnerable populations will be seen as a smart economic choice, Drake said.
Derek Humphry, founder of the Hemlock Society (now two organizations – Compassion and Choices, and Final Exit Network), wrote in 2000 about the “unspoken argument” for assisted suicide – that it would be cheaper to let the elderly and disabled die than to keep them alive.
“As technology advances, as medical costs skyrocket out of control, as chronic diseases predominate, as the projected rate of the eighty-five-and-older population accelerates, as managed care seeks to cut costs and as Medicare is predicted to go bankrupt by 2007, the impetus of cost containment provide impetus, whether openly acknowledged or not, for the practicalities of an assisted death,” Humphry wrote in his book Freedom to Die: people, politics, and the right-to-die movement.
Drake noted: “It’s one thing for me to say that, it’s another thing for Derek Humphry, who embodies the assisted suicide movement, to say it.”
Drake said that advocates for assisted suicide “either discount those concerns or frankly they don’t care, they figure the people who might be hurt by this won’t be them, and I think that’s what it boils down to.”
[…]
The Vatican’s Response: “A day late and a dollar short.”
My advice to the Vatican: Don’t bother; the People of God are already on it.
The dollar short being: this was primarily an offence aimed against God; it was a Luciferian anti-liturgy.
In 2024 and of Paris we read: “…there should not be allusions ridiculing the religious convictions of many people.”
In 1938 and in Munich Chamberlain said it was ‘Peace for our time’ and Hitler said he had ‘No more territorial demands to make in Europe.”
At all levels civilization is up for grabs, and we delineate the limits to “freedom of expression.”
Yes, and “many” people is actually several billion people, which is not a small thing.
Kudos to Bishop Barron for getting on this without waiting for everybody else to go first.
True that!
I’m not sure how this letter can be characterized as coming “from the Vatican” — i.e., from the pope’s administration.
The story says that the signatories were “led by Cardinal Raymond Leo Burke,” who was expelled from his Vatican apartment and denied his Vatican paycheck by Bergoglio just this past November.
If the letter originated from the Vatican hierarchy, I hardly think that Cardinal Burke, who is viewed with such contempt by Bergoglio, would be among the signers.
brineyman, please take note that this piece emanated from CNA. For me, that explains all. If you peruse so many of the “news stories” of CNA, they pretty much all make reference in one fashion or another to “the Vatican” – as if the Catholic Church was synonymous with the Vatican.
Not the same letter, but TWO totally different letters (the first was an “open letter” on July 30, and the more recent was an email(!) from “the Holy See” as the home base of the Church but also a sovereign state like the nation-states participating in the Olympics.
About the possibility of the second communication from, say, the pope, yours truly made this earlier comment:
“Or, maybe NOT a direct response from Pope Francis or from any pope? Would such an action be twisted to confer a kind of equivalence and legitimacy to a tribe of lunatics floating through Paris or wherever?
“Another proposition is that the Holy Spirit already works in subtle but concrete ways…
“The demand for an apology [the first letter] comes from bishops from around the world (just as the Olympic Games include nations from around the world). And the demand was possibly fostered by Cardinal Burke who, by incoherent circumstance, no longer lives in the Vatican. And, therefore, now is more free to say what must be said without engaging in an historic pissing contest between the perennial Catholic Church and moral mutants feeding on what’s left of the West.
“The brief letter also evangelizes clearly and concisely, in only a few sentences, rather than in thousands of unread words on Vatican letterhead. The only fly in the ointment (fly, so to speak), is the earlier Vatican blessing of irregular “couples” under Fiducia Supplicans… butt surely pairs of drag queens are not to be excluded.
“Better that oblique harmonizers of “polarities” stay out of this.”
Paolo below references a release from the Vatican Press Office. NO ONE apparently signed the release. No office of the Vatican is identified. Not only that. It does not mention Francis. NO names are mentioned. In its entirety (Italian followed by English translation)
olympiques de Paris 2024
Created: 03 August 2024
Hits: 19
Holy See Press Office Bulletin
Le Saint-Siège a été attristé par certaines scènes de la cérémonie d’ouverture des Jeux Olympiques de Paris et ne peut que se joindre aux voix qui se sont élevées ces derniers jours pour déplorer l’offense faite à de nombreux chrétiens et croyants d’autres religions.
Dans un événement prestigieux où le monde entier se réunit autour de valeurs communes ne devraient pas se trouver des allusions ridiculisant les convictions religieuses de nombreuses personnes.
La liberté d’expression, qui, évidemment, n’est pas remise en cause, trouve sa limite dans le respect des autres.
© http://press.vatican.va/content/salastampa/it/bollettino.html – August 3, 2024
The Holy See was saddened by some scenes of the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games in Paris and can only join the voices that have been raised in recent days to deplore the offense caused to many Christians and believers of other religions.
At a prestigious event where the whole world unites around common values, there should be no allusions that ridicule the religious beliefs of many people.
Freedom of expression, which is obviously not in question, finds its limit in respect for others.
This CNA piece is confounding as it appears to be reporting on more the press release. This CNA news piece appears to conflate the earlier open letter with Burke, Barron, etc.
I would like to see the whole document. If anyone has a link to it share it please.
https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/Gioacchino-Genovese.pdf
I apologize, the provided web address is not relevant. Here is the correct one I could access:(https://www.ilcattolico.it/catechesi/documenti-catechesi/communique-du-saint-siege-pour-les-jeux-olympiques-de-paris-2024.html)
Thank you!
A perfectly secular statement which could be done by any bureaucrat. (The objective reality i.e. blasphemy is swapped with “hurt feelings” which “nice people” should not cause.)
“Saddened”? Why not outraged? Among the episcopal signatories, I trust that the name Jorge Mario Bergoglio stood out as prominently as John Hancock’s on the Declaration of Independence. Then again . . .
Yes. If Francis put his John Hancock there, it’s in invisible ink. Perhaps the magician will come out from under the white cloak and call the ‘nothingness’ into objectively sensible, visible being. We dream.
It took 10 days, this statement is really nothing, and we still have yet to hear from the Pope himself.
…who is he to judge?
Curious….first al Azhar university in Cairo condemns then President Erdoğan of Turkey and finally The Holy See….curiouser and curiouser Your Holiness.
Or maybe not in the Vatican Wonderland.
The plot thickens…
About Al-Azhar, it was the grand imam Sheikh Ahmed el-Tayeb of Al-Azhar who co-signed with Pope Francis the Abu Dhabi Declaration (2019), which affirmed: “The pluralism and the diversity of religions, colour, sex, race and language are willed by God in His wisdom, through which He created human beings.”
Two points:
FIRST, the Sheikh was reported in 2019 as having a following of 150 million Muslims, but not the full 1.5 billion members of sectarian Islam as reported or implied now (but only ten percent).
SECOND, while the Declaration has been questioned on its ambiguity about a “pluralism” of (equivalent?) religions as “willed” rather than only permitted by God, it could also be questioned what, exactly, is meant by a pluralism of sexes? Only a ghostwriter editing oversight, or more like a “wardrobe malfunction” at an infamous Superbowl halftime?
About this fluidly inclusive term (plurality of sexes, as in gender theory?), was it this insane sin seen sailing the Seine scene?
Glad the Vatican was so prompt in responding to the Parisian disgrace. Guess they had to fit in the “Querido Jimmy” letter from “Francesco” first.
I don’t know and have no time to investigate. It seems, in this article, CNA confuses two different things. Imagine a cross of MSNBC with Fox, reporting truth.
CNA website seems to suggest that EWTN sponsors, operates or supports CNA in some manner. Can we trust CNA as a reliable news source? I wonder. Do they receive any funds from the Vatican? What editorial process is used to verify stories which writers at CNA put forth? Anyone?
Meiron, I do not understand the assumptions behind the questions. Catholic News Agency is owned by EWTN; the home page identifies them as a “service of EWTN News.” So that relationship has always been clear to me but maybe not to others? As far as I know, EWTN does not get funding from the Vatican, although they do seem to have a broadcasting agreement regarding Vatican events.
I have not seen a serious reason to doubt the basic integrity of CNA’s reporting. Some stories are better than others, and they may occasionally get something wrong but not at an especially high rate. Have you seen something suggesting that EWTN or CNA has an agends in the way they are reporting Vatican-related news? It is possible that I am misunderstanding your post so I wanted to ask.
Having read this 3x, I conclude:
The beginning of the article says “the Vatican… issued a statement.” The second paragraph states the statement was “e-mailed. Many folks may reasonably consider a statement transmitted by e-mail to equivocally refer to an “e-mail letter,’ an “e-mail,” or a “letter”. In fact, the Vatican Press Office released its statement and classified it as a Press Office Release.
The final three paragraphs refer to the distinct letter signed by Burke and other bishops. The ‘signatories’ to that letter are not signatories to the Press Release. NO signatories whatsoever occur on the Press Release.
The name of Francis? Notable by absence…like Biden at the debate….
I would boycott this olympics. But if you need an olympics “fix” watch the movie “The Boys in the Boat”. Based on a true story about a US Olympic Crew team from the 1930’s. Excellent and worth the time.
“Vatican deplores Olympic offense”. Could that mean the costuming and choreography weren’t done well?
Perhaps it’s time for Rome to reaffirm the complementary roles of apologetics and dialogue in spreading the Gospel.
Meiron above – That’s French, not Italian.
Just sayin’.
Thanks, Cleo. Next time, can you help spot my error before I make it? Très reconnaissant!
As a side note, I went looking for the entire text of the press release Sunday morning after catching up with the news because the reports seemed too fragmentary to understand. “Surely there must be more to it, at least more context,” I thought. (I was wrong.). Reuters reported that a statement in French (which is an unusual choice) had been emailed on Saturday night. That made me chuckle because it reminded me of the infamous Friday afternoon information dump practiced by many presidential administrations when they had to deliver bad news and wanted to attract as little attention as possible.
The statement was hard to find, perhaps because it was only in French at that point and I wasn’t looking on French-language sites. A quich search of the Vatican site came up empty. I finally found it later that day on the Italian site Messainlatino. Any confusion caused by this Vatican statement seems (to me) to come from the Vatican itself, not the news agencies reporting on it. There just isn’t much substance there.
John Allen credits the President of Turkey for the Vatican statement, as their prez announced ahead of time, publically to his cabinet, that he was calling Francis, and then did a release confirming the call and its contents, leaving the Vatican on hook to not leave the prez in the public breeze as a possible liar if him ignored, and the Vatican wanting good diplomatic relations with real a real power in the Muslim world…so, we get a note from the diplomats, Francis saying,”handleithandleithandleit.” And a note bemoaning only our poor precious widdle hurt feelings.