By DEXTER DUGGAN
PHOENIX – A prominent pro-life attorney told members of a Catholic medical group here that he learned not to be surprised if a majority of people in an audience at a Catholic parish raises their hands when he asks who favors “assisted suicide.”
They don’t actually favor such direct killing, attorney Nikolas T. Nikas told a lunch meeting of the Catholic Medical Association of Phoenix, but they don’t understand the lexicon. What they actually don’t want is “to endure disproportionate or extraordinary means” of life support, he said.
Nikas, president and general counsel of the internationally active Bioethics Defense Fund (bdfund.org), said he has spoken at Catholic parishes all over the United States as part of BDF’s outreach. BDF’s motto is “Law in the Service of Life.”
“When you have Catholics who want to do the right thing but don’t understand the terminology, that’s a problem,” Nikas told the January 5 lunch at the Diocese of Phoenix’s headquarters. “. . . Refusal of disproportionate or extraordinary care is not assisted suicide.”
Factors such as age and health enter into the evaluation of whether a person is receiving ordinary or extraordinary care.
“It’s totally moral to remove the (medical) intervention” in one patient’s room of a hospital but not in another room, Nikas said.
He added later, “Intent to alleviate pain is licit. . . . The Church’s teaching on this is clear.”
Nikas told The Wanderer after his talk that if people want to decline extraordinary medical care, “You already have that right. You have it as a matter of Church teaching. You have it as a matter of law.”
Although people primarily may think of pro-lifers as taking on the topic of abortion, “assisted suicide” is another important concern, he told the lunch.
“You have to think like a lawyer” when sizing up some frequent terminology in the secular world, Nikas said.
“Death with dignity” sounds good, he said, but simply dying in a dignified way is “not what the other side means” by using it.
“Eliminate all suffering” also sounds appealing, Nikas said. However, “The only way to eliminate all suffering is to kill everyone. . . .
“Almost 46 years of abortion on demand has distorted everything,” he said, pointing to how every vacancy to be filled on the U.S. Supreme Court occasions a battle whose underlying focus is permissive abortion.
Before the Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade in 1973, Nikas asked, “who cared who was on the court?”
Nikas’ question reflected pro-lifers’ long recognition that if only justices who correctly follow the law are on the court, national permissive abortion has to be reversed. That’s because it was created from nowhere in 1973 by ideologically activist judges inadmissibly imposing their own political preferences.
Twenty-four years later, in 1997, Nikas said, “everyone was shocked” when the High Court declined to declare a national right to “assisted suicide” based on a case from Washington state, Washington v. Glucksberg, which asserted a liberty interest in committing suicide through the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
The parallel seemed ominous with the court earlier having asserted a national constitutional liberty to abortion.
However, Nikas said, in 1997 the Supreme Court did on “assisted suicide” what it should have done earlier regarding abortion — leave the issue to the states. “This was a huge, unexpected victory,” he said later in his talk.
In 1997, various observers thought the court’s declining to impose a new mandate for death showed that the justices at least had learned a lesson from having brought on decades of social and legal turmoil by imposing a national mandate for permissive abortion in 1973.
An Existential Problem
Four fears drive people to think they want assisted suicide, Nikas said — fear of dying in pain, for which there is palliative care; fear of dying alone, loneliness being “a huge existential problem,” although there is hospice care; fear of dying broke, which should be addressed by policies to protect the elderly; and fear of losing control, although people never were in complete control.
Pressuring the ill to choose death can occur on various fronts, Nikas said, from those with a goal of “medicalizing death” to law schools that are overwhelmingly secularistic. There are dangers of coercion, he said, from interested parties including heirs and physicians.
Nikas recalled that President Trump’s first nominee to the Supreme Court, Neil Gorsuch, published a book when he was a circuit court judge in Colorado titled The Future of Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia (Princeton University Press: 2006).
Under the headline “Trump Picks a Bioethicist for the Supreme Court,” Emma Green, a staff writer for The Atlantic, posted an article on February 1, 2017, about Gorsuch and his book.
Green wrote: “The most remarkable thing about the book is its measuredness. Gorsuch is a Jesuit-educated Episcopalian, but he does not rely on theology to make his argument. In fact, he takes pains to ground his work in ‘secular moral theory,’ laying out a careful case based on the writings of thinkers from Aquinas and Epicurus to contemporary scholars Peter Singer and Ronald Dworkin.
“His work reads more like a philosophy paper than a legal brief, which is appropriate given his background: He holds a doctorate in philosophy from Oxford,” Green wrote.
After Nikas concluded his talk, The Wanderer asked him to comment on the fact that when people are materially better off in the current day than in the past, there’s more talk now about having a “right to die.”
“Every advance is a two-edged sword,” Nikas replied. “. . . In the old days, you just died,” but current medical technology raises difficult questions, such as brain death.
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