Recently, the American Medical Association’s (AMA) House of Delegates voted by a 2 to 1 margin to affirm its longstanding opposition to physician-assisted suicide. 

Chairman of the USCCB Committees comment on Federal Study on danger of assisted suicide laws to persons with disabilities. Click here.

For the fifth time in six years, proponents of physician-assisted suicide (PAS) have again introduced a bill (HB 643 / SB 701) to legalize the dangerous practice in Maryland.

Last year, the PAS bill was narrowly defeated when it died in the Maryland Senate by way of a tie vote. Before defeating the bill on the floor, members of the Senate Judicial Proceedings Committee amended the bill, attempting to fix many of its serious flaws.

Marylanders, click here for more on the issue from the Maryland Catholic Conference. Or, click  here to send an a message to your Maryland lawmaker about physician-assisted suicide.

Marchers in Annapolis protest bill that would legalize physician-assisted suicide in Maryland.

Efforts on the part of the Catholic community, other faith groups, the Medical Society of Delaware, the Delaware Health Care Association, Saint Francis Healthcare, and advocates for persons with disabilities, kept physician-assisted suicide legislation from becoming law in 2017, 2018 and 2019. Yet, some lawmakers in Delaware still think that they know better than the medical community and will continue to bow to outside special-interest groups and promote physician-assisted suicide.

Here are some details about the bill:

• The bill would legalize and normalize participation in the intentional taking of human life by members of the medical profession.
• This bill lacks adequate safeguards to protect persons with disabilities, the elderly, and those suffering from mental illness. Once lethal drugs have been prescribed, this law has no requirements for assessing the patient’s consent, competency, or voluntariness. Who would know if the drugs are freely taken since there is no supervision or tracking of the drugs once they leave the pharmacy and since no witnesses are required at the time of death?
• The drugs prescribed under the law are so highly addictive and easily misused that they are put into the same drug category by the Federal Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) as cocaine, OxyContin, and fentanyl, to name a few. Each prescription would contain ONE HUNDRED of these pills, exposing our communities to a new source of addiction and lives lost too soon to drug misuse.
• The law appears to limit eligibility to terminally ill patients who are expected to die within six months but doesn’t distinguish between persons who will die within six months with treatment and those who will die within six months without treatment. This means patients with treatable diseases like diabetes and disabilities requiring ventilator support are eligible for lethal drugs since they would die within six months without treatment. Furthermore, diagnoses of terminal illness and predictions of life expectancy are notoriously inaccurate.
• Despite medical literature showing that nearly 95 percent of those who commit suicide had a diagnosable psychiatric illness (usually treatable depression) in the months preceding suicide, HB 140 does not require a psychological evaluation unless the prescribing doctor or the doctor selected to give a second opinion request it.
• The bill would require physicians and others to make misstatements on official records.  The bill states that the underlying terminal illness must be listed as the cause of death on the death certificate, when in fact the cause was suicide.
  These are just a sampling of the numerous concerns regarding Delaware’s HB-140.  This legislation would set Delaware on a slippery slope and further degrade the value of human life before the law.

These are just a sampling of the numerous concerns regarding Delaware’s HB-140. This Legislation would set Delaware on a slippery slope and further degrade the value of the human life before law.

On this issue, Pope Francis has cautioned that the dignity of both human life and the medical profession are at stake: “We must not give in to the functionalist temptation to apply rapid and drastic solutions, moved by false compassion or by mere criteria of efficiency or cost-effectiveness.”   The sanctity of life and the dignity of the person are objective truths and nonnegotiable principles of our faith.

Contact your legislator and urge them to vote “NO” on House Bill 140!

Click the link below to log in and send your message:
https://www.votervoice.net/CDOW/Campaigns/67231/Respond