HARTFORD—Politicians in Hartford are again considering assisted suicide legislation. The Public Health Committee of the Connecticut General Assembly is considering legalizing a form of suicide in our state commonly referred to as “aid-in-dying” or “physician-assisted suicide”. The Committee has raised House Bill 6425 “An Act Concerning Aid in Dying for Terminally Ill Patients”.
Modern hospice care and the proper use of pain medications render suicide unnecessary, and we need to be mindful of the threat that a suicide mentality poses to vulnerable people and to people with disabilities
Many people believe that a physician is deeply involved in this process. This not true. The physician orders the mixture of medications, the patient must then consume the deadly cocktail of drugs without assistance. Many times without even a physician or nurse present.
We should never allow legislators to establish suicide as a solution to medical issues. Don’t let the state persuade us that it’s dignified for an ill person to sign their own execution order. Don’t let the state create an environment where ill people will feel they have a “responsibility to die”.
Catholic teaching condemns physician-assisted suicide because it, like murder, involves taking an innocent human life:
Suicide is always as morally objectionable as murder. The Church’s tradition has always rejected it as a gravely evil choice: To concur with the intention of another person to commit suicide and to help in carrying it out through so-called “assisted suicide” means to cooperate in, and at times to be the actual perpetrator of, an injustice which can never be excused, even if it is requested. Saint Augustine writes that “it is never licit to kill another: even if he should wish it.” True “compassion” leads to sharing another’s pain; it does not kill the person whose suffering we cannot bear. (John Paul II, The Gospel of Life, no. 66).
TAKE ACTION:
Go to the website below, read more on the issue and then sign the petition to stop the legalization of assisted suicide in Connecticut:
www.ctstopsuicide.org
Watch the video
Connecticut Catholic Public Affairs Conference
