Bioethicist calls California suicide bill 'implicitly anti-Catholic'

Published: 2007-05-09

SAN FRANCISCO (CNS) -- Calling proposed California physician-assisted suicide legislation "strongly and implicitly anti-Catholic" and accusing its advocates of "trying to bend the Catholic Church's moral teaching to the will of the culture of death agenda," an international expert on bioethics urged listeners at a May 7 lecture to do everything in their power to help defeat the controversial bill. Titled the California Compassionate Choices Act, Assembly Bill 374 would allow physicians to prescribe a lethal dose of medication to people diagnosed with a terminal illness, given less than six months to live and declared mentally competent. Wesley J. Smith, keynote speaker at the annual public policy breakfast sponsored by the San Francisco Archdiocese's Office of Public Policy and Social Concerns and held at St. Mary's Cathedral, said the measure seeks to establish "ending life as an appropriate way to relieve suffering." Once that premise has been established, he said, it becomes logical to extend what would be seen "as a legitimate medical treatment" to the chronically ill, the terminally ill at any stage, individuals in intractable pain and even those who are depressed.

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