Thread by me.
Good medical care to ease the suffering of terminally ill patients makes assisted suicide unnecessary, experts said at a European conference in Vienna.
Physicians at the meeting of the European Association for Palliative Care (EAPC) also called for improved services across Europe, as the infrastructure varies widely across the continent.
Patients asking for assisted suicide should be taken seriously, said professor Franco De Conno of Italy's National Cancer Institute in Milan.
'But we have to keep in mind that requests for euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide are often altered by the provision of sufficient and comprehensive palliative care,' he said. Such patients should therefore get access to such treatment.
Palliative medicine tries to help the terminally ill or dying by providing pain treatment and other therapies, including psychological help.
In a study carried out in Vienna among 778 patients receiving such treatments, only 2 asked for assisted death, according to the Vienna physicist Hans-Georg Kress, who also took part in the meeting of some 3,000 experts. . .
Thread by kellynla.
Archbishop Raymond Burke, the prefect of the Supreme Tribunal of the Apostolic Signatura, the highest court in the Roman Catholic Church, told a crowd at the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast in Washington, D.C., on Friday that no matter what good positions a politician may hold on other issues it is never justified to vote for him if he supports abortion, euthanasia or same-sex marriage.
“In a nation set so firmly on a path of violation of the most fundamental moral norms, Catholics and others who adhere to the natural moral law are pressured to think that their religious commitment to the moral law as the way of seeking the good of all is a merely confessional matter which cannot have any application in public life,” Burke told a crowd gathered at the Hilton Washington.
“Apparently, a number of Catholics in public life have been so convinced,” he continued.
“How often do we hear Catholic legislators who vote in favor of anti-life and anti-family legislation claim that they are personally opposed to what the legislation protects and fosters, but that they as public officials may not allow religious beliefs to affect their support of such legislation?” he asked.
“How often do we hear fellow Catholics supporting candidates for office, who are anti-life and anti-family, because of political-party loyalties or for reasons of other policies and programs supported by the candidate, which they deem to be good?” he continued. . .