AMA: say ‘no’ to assisted suicide

Richard A. Sokerka

The American Medical Association (AMA) is considering changing its long-time position of opposing allowing physicians to participate in physician-assisted suicide.

With New Jersey’s legislature fast tracking voting on an assisted suicide bill in an attempt to make the Garden State the sixth in the nation to legalize assisted suicide, the AMA’s consideration of changing its position should be troubling to all Catholics, not only in our home state, but across the nation.

In a letter to Dr. Andrew Gurman, president of the AMA, Stephen M. Krason, president of the Society of Catholic Social Scientists, said the AMA changing its position “would have momentous consequences, as have been vividly apparent in the countries and U.S. states that have legalized this (assisted suicide).”

In his letter, Krason writes: “It will transform a healing profession into a killing profession. It will drive a wedge between physicians and their patients, causing people to deeply distrust their physicians who they will not be sure will be faithful to an ethic to help them when they are seriously ill. It will lead to the terminally ill being viewed as expendable. It will reduce medical decision-making to a kind of cost-benefit analysis, instead of it being concerned about upholding the basic dignity of the human person. It will result in those with mental illness, who are suffering depression and the like, to seek to be aided in killing themselves instead of getting the help they need to overcome their problems. It inevitably will spread to more and more categories of people, including those who aren’t even seriously ill and children with serious illnesses and birth defects. Instead of pediatric and neonatal specialists working to save handicapped newborns, they will be increasingly looked to for the purpose of ending their lives.”

Krason ended his letter by stating, “It will lead to a further erosion of respect for innocent human life generally, just as arguably the legalization of abortion did.”

It’s important that Catholics follow Krason’s lead and write to their own doctors and the American Medical Association, Council on Ethical and Judicial Affairs, 330 North Wabash Ave., Ste. 39300. Chicago, IL 60611-5885 or email: [email protected] to tell them of your opposition to legalized assisted suicide. We must tell both the AMA, our doctors and elected officials that killing the patient can never be condoned.