Medical Aid in Dying is often criticized as a moral failure, but that view misses what the policy is actually trying to address. At the end of their life, some patients face an irreversible decline and suffering medicine cannot fully relieve. In those cases, the question isn’t whether life has value but whether people should be forced to suffer in their final days.
When Peter Clark ’75, S.J., Ph.D., recently spoke with PBS about MAiD, it hurt. It hurt to see MAiD misconstrued as just another form of suicide. It’s in no way the same thing. That would be the same as accusing a pet owner of murder for putting down their dog because it had cancer. It’s about ending needless suffering.
Wouldn’t God be in favor of ending needless suffering? When Jesus healed a woman who bled for 12 years, was that not ending needless suffering? When Jesus helped cure a woman who suffered from back pain for 18 years, he was focused on ending her suffering. Wouldn’t MAiD be setting free people who’ve suffered long enough? As a Catholic, I’ve been taught to act as Christ-like as possible. Why in the case of MAiD, should we not continue that same train of thought? Ending the suffering of our neighbor is the equivalent of bringing peace, something Church doctrine teaches us.
Another concern of Clark’s was the “slippery slope” of MAiD’s eligibility. The truth is that the states that allow MAiD have very strict rules surrounding it. Oregon has had the Death with Dignity Act as law since 1997, yet the program has not spiraled into a death-for-all law. Since 1997, 12 more states and Washington, D.C., have also adopted their own versions of the law. They, too, haven’t seen the “slippery slope.” Using Canada and the Netherlands as an excuse to say America can’t do it right is just pessimism. We can do it right because we choose to.
Cura personalis calls for us to care for the whole person. Isn’t ending the anguish of living in pain part of that, too? I think so.
Kathleen Lundquist • Apr 29, 2026 at 1:17 am
I find Mr. Lavalle’s effort to “[Reframe] Medical Aid in Dying” using Catholic teaching as 1) an uninformed, oversimplified attempt to solve the problem of suffering at the end of life at best, and 2) a mess of conflation and convolution of Church teaching, applying near-Orwellian twists to the definition of the word compassion -with a goal of ridding the world of uncomfortable human experiences.
I don’t want to write a book here, but let’s take his points one at a time:
– In his second sentence, Mr. Lavalle makes these observations: “At the end of their life, some patients face an irreversible decline and suffering medicine cannot fully relieve.” To the first, I offer: Unless we die violently, every single one of us faces an irreversible decline at the end of our lives. As to “suffering medicine cannot fully relieve”: Human suffering does not subsist solely in physical pain. Caring attention, in the form of palliative care, can be combined with medicine to relieve a great deal of a dying patient’s pain and suffering.
– Mr. Lavalle states “… the question isn’t whether life has value…” From a Catholic philosophical point of view, when dealing with issues of life and death, the question is always about whether life has value, and that answer is always yes. People who stand by and let their loved one kill themselves are not “relieving suffering”; they are allowing the elimination of one who suffers.
– He goes on to compare medically-assisted suicide to euthanizing a pet. This reveals a woeful ignorance of St. Thomas Aquinas’ teaching on the various types of ‘souls’ inherent in living things – specifically, that human beings are the only creatures having a rational soul. This point deserves its own 25-page essay, but suffice it to say here: If the goal is autonomous decision-making at the end of life, consider that the dog does not decide to euthanize itself.
– He characterizes the benefit of assisted suicide abstractly as “healing”, “setting free”, and “bringing peace” to people, conscripting our Lord Jesus and His healing ministry as his example. I have news for Mr. Lavalle: Suffering is a fact of life, a shared human experience, on this planet. It cannot be eliminated by picking and choosing certain “qualifying” sufferers to get rid of.
– Lastly, Mr. Lavalle refers to my home state of Oregon and blithely asserts that “the program [i.e., the so-called Death With Dignity Act] has not spiraled into a death-for-all law.” I have been active in fighting against assisted suicide and euthanasia in Oregon since Derek Humphry (founder of the Hemlock Society) first moved here in the late 1980s and helped write the first referendum, and since the bill passed into law in 1994 and went into effect in 1997, we have in fact experienced a very slippery slope. Residency requirements? Gone. MDs required to do examinations for qualifying conditions in person? Not anymore; seeing a PA or NP via telehealth is good enough. Waiting periods? Shortened or eliminated altogether, depending on the situation. Psychological evaluations? They were only ever recommended – and now occur only rarely. Used only as a last resort? Nope – an insulin-dependent diabetic can qualify if he/she refuses to take insulin anymore. If someone challenges the self-administration provision of the law with a claim of “discrimination”, we would be one court case away from a regime of active euthanasia.
And as for Canada and the Netherlands: Once the principle of allowing death as a solution for suffering is accepted, there is no stopping it. If autonomy is the principle that allows for suffering people to be killed, then people with chronic conditions will qualify; then people with dementia; then drug addicts; then disabled newborns; then the “incurable” mentally ill. See, because it’s a principle that makes the slope slippery, it doesn’t matter where we currently are on it. We will just keep sliding down unless we make a great effort not to (and we have made a great effort, believe me).
I sincerely hope that Fr. Clark and Mr. Lavalle can come together in conversation, so that Mr. Lavalle will gain a more complete understanding of the Church’s theology of suffering. I suggest Pope St. John Paul II’s Salvifici Doloris as a starting place.