8mm
Posted on 02/26/2007 4:10:34 PM PST by wagglebee
SACRAMENTO, February 26, 2007 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Well known bioethics author, Wesley J. Smith, warns in an article posted to the weblog of First Things magazine, that a pending bill in California could threaten the lives of vulnerable elderly and ill patients in nursing homes and hospice care.
Assembly Bill 374, says Smith, under the rubric of “choice” will force in-patient hospice facilities and even Catholic nursing homes to permit assisted suicide. The proposed legislation, he writes, exempts only acute-care hospitals.
While euthanasia advocates claim the changes to the law are only small matters of “tweaking” existing statutes, Smith warns that the result is a piece of coercive legislation that will threaten the lives of patients, undermine the philosophical foundation of hospice care and threaten the autonomy and even the existence of Catholic care facilities.
“If A.B. 374 becomes law, Catholic and other religiously oriented nursing homes will be forced to choose between shutting down, selling, or cooperating in assisted suicide.”
“A.B. 374,” Smith writes, “is patterned generally after the law in Oregon, though the coercion about which I write is not found in the current Oregon law or a concurrently introduced assisted-suicide legalization bill in Vermont, and is an attempt to force most medical and nursing facilities to cooperate in the assisted-suicide regime.”
Smith points to the sections of the bill, 7198 (b) and (e), to be added to the California Health and Safety Code should the legislation pass.
7198 (b) reads: “No professional organization or association, or heath care provider, may subject a person to censure, discipline, suspension, loss of license, loss of privileges, loss of membership, or other penalty for participating or refusing to participate in good faith compliance with this chapter.”
Subsection (e) reads: “Notwithstanding any other provision of law, a general acute care hospital, as defined in subdivision (a) of Section 1250, may prohibit a licensed physician from carrying out a patient’s request under this chapter on the premises of the hospital if the hospital has notified the licensed physician of its policy regarding this chapter.”
As a lawyer with years of experience deciphering legal loopholes in bills related to bioethics issues, Smith asserts that the specific exemption of acute care hospitals as the only place where assisted suicide may be stopped on site, means that the legislation intends to force other types of facilities to allow the practice.
“The legislation must be construed to require that all other health-care facilities cooperate with assisted suicide ¬whether or not they have religious, moral, or philosophical objections,” he writes.
Read the full text of Assembly Bill 374:
http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/pub/07-08/bill/asm/ab_0351-0400/ab...
Read related LifeSiteNews.com coverage:
Bill Would Authorize Assisted Suicide By Any Other Name in Arizona
http://www.lifesite.net/ldn/2007/jan/07011706.html
New Assisted Suicide Bill Introduced in Hawaii Legislature
http://www.lifesite.net/ldn/2007/jan/07013004.html
I know it's easy for me to say this, since I don't work in a Catholic nursing home, but...It's looking like it's time for some of us Christians to be perp walked. A line needs to be drawn.
If a guy was being whacked by the mafia, a person who knowingly transported him to a certain spot so the actual murderer could shoot him in the head would be accused of conspiracy to murder. So, if the Catholics think that assisted suicide is as bad as murder, how is it consistent with freedom of religion to force them to be co-conspirators?
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I'm wondering if by the time I'm ready to retire a law will be passed "permitting" (i.e. "requiring") unemployed people to be killed.
Indeed they did. In Massachusetts, the Church had to close down its adoption agencies because they would not exempt them from adopting out to homosexuals. The Church could have kept their agencies open if they didn't rely on government funding I believe, but the Church unfortunately did rely on it to stay open. The same thing is also occuring over in the UK. Over there, the Catholic Church accounts for about 30% of adoption agencies. However, they also recieve government funding to stay open. When the law was passed that adoption agencies had to adopt to homosexuals, the Catholic Church asked for an exemption, but it was not granted. I think they have vowed to stay open and simply deny children to homosexual couples. We'll see how long that lasts.
Now, it appears that government is trying to do the same thing with assisted suicide in California. The Church probably will not be exempted due to government funding. What I can't figure out is, if people disagree with the Church's policies regarding adoption or nursing homes, then why don't they go somewhere else as opposed to going to the Church and then complaining?
All in all, assisted suicide is simply sad, and it's all part of the slippery slope of the Culture of Death.
it's better to rule in Heaven than to serve in Hell... with apologies to Dante.
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