By Archbishop Thomas Wenski - The Archdiocese of Miami

Archbishop Thomas Wenski published the following opinion piece in the Orlando Sentinel’s “Front Burner” section Nov. 15.

Brittany Maynard’s own death by drug overdose should elicit sympathy and regret, as well as prayers for her soul and for the loved ones she left behind.

The same cannot be said of the public campaign by which “Compassion and Choices,” the former Hemlock Society, is trying, with Ms. Maynard’s consent, to make her decision into a model for others. For no matter however they might want to frame it, assisted suicide is the intentional killing of a vulnerable person. 

Ms. Maynard complained about the inconvenience of having to move to Oregon to get a doctor to prescribe a drug overdose for her. But people fighting serious illness or who are elderly often find that their most serious fight is against the dismissive attitudes towards them that would characterize them as "burdens" or reduce them to being just "problems."

The very sad reality is that, about 40,000 times a year or over 100 times a day, someone takes his or her own life in our country. Almost every one of these tragedies leaves behind family and friends who wonder if they could have done something more to prevent it. Public health authorities tell us that publicity about these deaths can also make other depressed and impressionable people consider suicide, especially if the reporting tends to glorify the person’s death or implies that suicide has solved someone’s problems. In that respect, C&C and some secular news media have much to answer for.

Beyond that fact, C&C’s campaign is not about compassion for individuals tempted to kill themselves. C&C doesn't exist to improve care for these people; rather, by encouraging people to kill themselves, it abets the denial of care to those some would deem in some way "substandard." Disability rights organizations, such as Not Dead Yet, fear with some justification that in legalizing "assisted suicide" the so-called "right to die" will quickly morph into a "duty to die."

Assisted suicide is about the state excluding some people from equal protection of the law because it has decided their suicides are “good” suicides. If doctors say a person may have less than six months to live, he or she will fall into that class. And that person’s will to live will officially become nothing more than a personal whim, with no special claim on society’s support.

Approving “physician-assisted” suicide carries still more baggage. Each such suicide involves at least two people, the person who took his or her own life and the doctor who was willing to prescribe the lethal overdose. At the end of the process, one of those people is dead, while the other lives on with the conviction that he can solve people’s problems by helping to end their lives – and he may be the physician who comes to your bedside next.

For both these reasons – the threat of “suicide contagion,” and the corruption of a healing profession that all of us need to be able to trust with our lives – it was far too facile for Ms. Maynard to say during her campaign that people who don’t want assisted suicide can simply decide not to have one. What is at stake is what kind of society and what kind of medical profession we will have for ourselves and for our children and grandchildren

Ms. Maynard complained about the inconvenience of having to move to Oregon to get a doctor to prescribe a drug overdose for her. But people fighting serious illness or who are elderly often find that their most serious fight is against the dismissive attitudes towards them that would characterize them as "burdens" or reduce them to being just "problems."

No human being is a problem; nor is assisted killing a "solution." The idea of a society where the state and your doctor – not to mention your health insurance company – in the name of a "false" compassion and a "misleading" choice are eager to make suicide “convenient,” specifically for people just like you, should indeed fill us all with alarm.