Richard Doerflinger, M.A.

The founding intentions of the PAS movement, the grim practical realities of suicide by oral overdose, the legal principles at stake, and the state of public opinion all argue that the move from PAS to euthanasia, once the former is more widely accepted, would be not only a “slippery slope” but a virtual free fall.

On March 11, The Washington Post reported on efforts to expand the “right to die” in Oregon and elsewhere.

Friends in Hawaii have asked me to comment on the pending bill HB 2739, titled the “Our Care, Our Choice Act.”  For three decades I analyzed proposals of this kind for the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops in Washington, D.C. Though retired from that position, I continue to do research and writing on this issue as an Associate Scholar at the Charlotte Lozier Institute and as a Public Policy Fellow at the University of Notre Dame’s Center for Ethics and Culture.

In February 2018 the Oregon Health Authority released its latest annual report on legally authorized physician-assisted suicides, covering deaths that occurred in 2017.[1]  This provides a renewed opportunity to test the constantly repeated claim of the advocacy group “Compassion & Choices” that its flagship assisted suicide law in Oregon, the model for laws in other states, has been working well for 20 years with no “abuses.” Chronically ill seniors, potentially victims of untreated depression and the impression that they have become a “burden” on others, are nudged to a premature death that may be more gruesome than they’ve been led to believe, with no one usually present at the time of death to check whether they are competent, badgered by others, or overtly coerced toward that death.  This is what has become known as “death with dignity” in Oregon, and advocates are working to spread it to far more states.

Assisted suicide is not the compassionate choice.

The leading national organization promoting legalization of physician-assisted suicide, “Compassion & Choices” (formerly known as the Hemlock Society), has distributed a December 2016 “Medical Aid in Dying Fact Sheet” in various state legislatures around the country to persuade them to approve what they call “medical aid in dying.”

Richard Doerflinger, M.A., is a Public Policy Fellow with the University of Notre Dame’s Center for Ethics and Culture and an Adjunct Fellow in Bioethics and Public Policy at the National Catholic Bioethics Center in Philadelphia. He was formerly Associate Director of the Secretariat of Pro-Life Activities for the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, where he worked for 36 years.