Against legalizing euthanasia

Dear editor,

I wish to express my disappointment with Germany's Federal Court of Justice for bringing back the ghost of Adolf Hitler and legalizing direct euthanasia.

Our present culture tends to consider suffering the epitome of evil. In such a culture there is a great temptation to resolve the problem of suffering by eliminating it at the root, by hastening death so that it occurs at the moment considered most suitable.

In Christian teaching suffering, especially suffering during the last moments of life, has a special place in God's saving plan; it is in fact a sharing in Christ's passion.

Intentionally causing one's own death, or suicide, is murder because it is a rejection of God's sovereignty and loving plan. It is a refusal of love for self, the denial of a natural instinct to live, a flight from the duties of justice and charity owed to one's neighbor, to various communities or to the whole of society.

The pleas of gravely ill people who sometimes ask for death are not to be understood as implying a true desire for euthanasia; in fact, it is almost always a case of an anguished plea for help and love. True compassion leads to sharing another's pain; it does not kill the person whose suffering we cannot bear.

What a sick person needs, besides medical care, is love, the human and supernatural warmth with which the sick person can and ought to be surrounded by all those close to him or her, parents and children, doctors and nurses.

Unfortunately, there exists in contemporary culture a certain Promethean attitude which leads people to think that they can control life and death by taking the decisions about them into their own hands. What really happens in this case is that the individual is overcome and crushed by a death deprived of any prospect of meaning or hope.

Euthanasia is senseless and inhumane and should be opposed in all its forms.

Paul Kokoski Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. pkokoski@mountaincable.net