http://www.thestranger.com/
With the exception of the use of “assisted suicide,” Cienna Madrid gets it mostly right.
An example of the not quite right: And if living by the church’s ethical directives is hard, dying by them is hell. For example, let’s say that an accident leaves you comatose and brain-dead in the nearest Catholic hospital. You would be faithfully fed and watered so that you may “reasonably be expected to live indefinitely,” regardless of your last wishes, according to the ERDs [Catholic Ethical & Religious Directives – Robb]. If you’re cognizant and dying, your options aren’t much better: “Patients experiencing suffering that cannot be alleviated should be helped to appreciate the Christian understanding of redemptive suffering.”
Despite the ERDs, I’m not aware of any Catholic health care providers in Washington requiring a person to be maintained in a vegetative state. And Catholic hospitals and hospices here routinely provide palliative sedation to patients whose suffering cannot be managed any other way.
For now, there’s still latitude in how the ERDs are interpreted by Washington’s Catholic health care providers. But that could change; Western Washington Archbishop Sartain’s request that PeaceHealth St. Joseph’s in Bellingham stop performing lab work for Planned Parenthood Mt. Baker is an unprecedented intrusion into the practice of medicine here.
Robb Miller, Executive Director