Advocates denounce O’Malley op-ed
Cardinal condemns bill to permit physician-assisted suicide
Cardinal Seán P. O’Malley called on the Massachusetts Legislature to reject a bill that would legalize physician-assisted suicide in a Boston Globe opinion column, reaffirming his condemnation of a practice that he said contradicts deeply held religious convictions and violates principles held by many in the health care community.
O’Malley, the head of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston, said society holds a “collective responsibility to address a person’s psychological, physical, and spiritual needs as they face the end of life or debilitating illness.”
“To instead instigate death with physician-assisted suicide presents a moral and ethical threat to society, the medical profession, the disability community, and the common good,” O’Malley wrote in the column, which was published Monday.
“Physician-assisted suicide is just that: suicide. And it is always tragic whether administered under a doctor’s care or self-inflicted,” he added.
But advocates for medical aid in dying said the cardinal is using fearmongering tactics and basing his arguments on policies in other countries that are unlike the End of Life Options Act being considered by state lawmakers.
The bill before state lawmakers would allow a terminally ill patient — someone who suffers from a diagnosed illness or condition “which can reasonably be expected to cause death within six months, whether or not treatment is provided” — to request medical aid in dying.
The bill says the patient must be a mentally capable adult who has been determined by the patient’s attending physician to be terminally ill. The law would allow them to make an oral request for medical aid in dying, followed by a written request submitted no sooner than 15 days later.
In his column, O’Malley took issue with the six-month timeline, saying such a diagnosis is often wrong.
“There are numerous examples of individuals across the country who have outlived that diagnosis and have lived for many years,” O’Malley wrote. “They get to share the comfort, love, and companionship of family and friends, and that wouldn’t have happened if they had opted for physicianassisted suicide.”
One of the bill’s sponsors, state Representative James O’Day, rejected O’Malley’s arguments against the bill.
“Listen, I’m OK with it being opposed,” O’Day, a Worcester Democrat, said in an interview Monday. “But if I’m in excruciating pain, who is he, or anyone else for that matter, to insist that I have to live through that horrible, tragic pain?”
O’Malley, who also spoke out against medically assisted death at a Washington, D.C., conference in January, wrote that allowing the bill to pass could lead to a slippery slope of possibilities. He pointed to a 2017 report by the Bioethics Observatory at the Catholic University of Valencia, which said more than 400 mentally ill people in the Netherlands were euthanized without their consent among more than 7,000 “assisted suicides” from 2010 to 2015.
‘Physician-assisted suicide is just that: suicide. And it is always tragic whether administered under a doctor’s care or selfinflicted.’
CARDINAL SEAN O’MALLEY
‘If I’m in excruciating pain, who is he, or anyone else for that matter, to insist that I have to live through that horrible, tragic pain?’
JAMES O’DAY, one of the bill’s sponsors
He also referenced the debate surrounding medical aid in dying in Canada, where in 2016, the criminal code was amended to allow for assistance in dying in some circumstances. Four years later, the law was again changed to expand access to medically assisted suicide to “persons with disabilities, whose natural death is not reasonably foreseeable,” according to human rights authorities.
O’Day said he has a 40-yearold son with cerebral palsy and found this argument offensive.
“I am not going to be involved in engaging with a piece of legislation that I feel in any way, shape, or form would put that kid at risk,” he said. “That continues to really be their focus on this, focusing on scenarios that have been proven to be unfounded.”
A local disability rights advocacy group, meanwhile, expressed support for the cardinal’s stance.
John B. Kelly, director of Second Thoughts Massachusetts, which opposes physician-assisted suicide, said his group broadly agrees “with the cardinal, but from a secular, progressive social justice perspective.”
”We agree that disabled people are especially vulnerable,” said Kelly, who lives in Boston’s Fenway neighborhood.
In Massachusetts, a doctor who provides life-ending medication to a patient can be prosecuted for manslaughter, the state’s highest court ruled in 2022. In that unanimous decision, the Supreme Judicial Court declared that the state constitution does not protect the right to physician-assisted suicide.
In 2012, Massachusetts voters narrowly rejected a “death with dignity” ballot measure. O’Day said he believes the public’s views have shifted in favor of assisted suicide in the 12 years since. In a Boston Globe/ Suffolk University poll in 2022, 77 percent of respondents said they favored a right-to-die law, up from 70 percent in a 2019 poll.
The cardinal’s column drew criticism from human rights organizations that have supported the bill in Massachusetts and similar legislation in other states.
Dr. Peg Sandeen, chief executive of the Oregon-based group Death with Dignity, criticized O’Malley for citing sources that she said show just one side of the argument. Oregon voters in 1994 narrowly approved a ballot initiative granting eligible patients the authority, under strict conditions, to obtain a lethal prescription.
“It’s notable that the Cardinal built the core of his arguments against the proposed medical aid in dying legislation in Massachusetts on data from Canada and the Netherlands — which have little in common with the experience in the United States,” Sandeen said in a statement. “It’s like comparing apples to oranges, and 30 years of Death with Dignity in Oregon demonstrates there is no slippery slope — no expansion of the law, explicit bans on coercion, and strong protections for vulnerable individuals.”