Pastor gives Dr. Kevorkian a Presbyterian pulpitFormer President of Board of Pensions advocates suicideAMA adopts unqualified position of opposition to physician-assisted suicideG.K Chesterton on SuicideThe slippery slope:
Reprinted from
Presbyterians Pro-Life NEWS, Spring-Summer 1994Pastor gives Dr. Kevorkian a Presbyterian pulpit
Former President of Board of Pensions advocates suicide
AMA adopts unqualified position of opposition to physician-assisted suicide
G.K Chesterton on Suicide
Pastor gives Dr. Kevorkian a Presbyterian pulpit
On Sunday, January 20 [1994], retired pathologist Jack Kevorkian addressed an audience of 700 at St. Paul's Presbyterian Church in Livonia, Michigan, at the invitation of PC(USA) pastor Tomas Eggebeen. Kevorkian, who has assisted in twenty deaths since 1990, urged church members to assist in gathering the 250,000 signatures needed for a constitutional amendment in Michigan.
Former President of Board of Pensions advocates suicide
Speaking to the PC(USA) Board of Pensions in February [1994], former board President Arthur M. Ryan, said: "We need to move carefully and thoughtfully…to ways that will permit suffering patients to take their own lives." Ryan argued that "such measures reduce suffering as well as cost. Certainly we do not wish to open the gates to legalized murder," he said. "Nevertheless we need to move beyond the stance that defines all life as sacred and consequently never self-termination."
AMA adopts unqualified position of opposition to physician-assisted suicide
The American Medical Association adopted a five-point policy opposing physician-assisted suicide at their meeting in December 1993. The policy says,
"Physician assisted suicide is fundamentally inconsistent with the physician's role.
"It is critical that the medical profession redouble its efforts to ensure that dying patients are provided optimal treatment for their pain and other discomfort. The use of more aggressive comfort care measures, including great reliance on hospice care, can alleviate the physical and emotional suffering that dying patients experience. Evaluation and treatment by a health professional with expertise in the psychiatric aspects of terminal illness can often alleviate the suffering that leads a patient to desire assisted suicide.
"Physicians must resist the natural tendency to withdraw physically and emotionally from their terminally ill patients. When the treatment goals for a patient in the end stages of terminal illness shift from curative efforts to comfort care, the level of physician involvement in the patient's care should in no way decrease.
"Requests for physician assisted suicide should be a signal to the physician that the patient's need are unmet and further evaluation to identify the elements contributing to the patient's suffering is necessary. Multidisciplinary intervention, including specialty consultation, pastoral care, family counseling and other modalities, should be sought as clinically indicated.
"Further efforts to educate physicians about advanced pain management techniques, both at the undergraduate and graduate levels, are necessary to overcome any shortcomings in this area. Physicians should recognize that courts and regulatory bodies readily distinguish between use of narcotic drugs to relieve pain in dying patients and use in other situations."
"…Not only is suicide a sin, it is the sin. It is the ultimate and absolute evil, the refusal to take an interest in existence; the refusal to take the oath of loyalty to life. The man who kills a man, kills a man. The man who kills himself, kills all men; as far as he is concerned he wipes out the world… spiritually, he destroys the universe.
"…Obviously a suicide is the opposite of a martyr. A martyr is a man who cares so much for something outside him, that he forgets his own personal life. A suicide is a man who cares so little for anything outside him, that he wants to see the last of everything. One wants something to begin; the other wants everything to end.
"The Christian feeling [is] furiously for one and furiously against the other: these two things that looks so much alike [are] at opposite ends of heaven and hell."
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