It figures. Just when I start warming up to the Pope a little, he has to go and remind me that he still belongs to an institution that just doesn’t get it and that he’s more than happy to keep going along with some of its ass backward crap.
Pope Francis denounced the right to die movement Saturday, saying it’s a “false sense of compassion” to consider euthanasia as an act of dignity when in fact it’s a sin against God and creation.
While denouncing euthanasia in general, he also condemned abortion, in vitro fertilization (or “the scientific production of a child”) and embryonic stem cell research (or “using human beings as laboratory experiments to presumably save others.”)
I’m with him on IVF, but not for the same reason. If I had my way about it, everyone spending a fortune on that gamble would adopt a child that needs a family and help do some good in the world instead, the same thing I’d like to see as a requirement before you’re allowed to protest abortions. But until it’s time for me to be part of a very personal decision like that, I don’t have my way about it. It’s as much my place to tell someone she can’t have a baby she wants as it is to tell that person she has to keep one she doesn’t.
And this stem cell stuff, that’s just ridiculous. If we’re not supposed to use that sort of life to save the lives of others, should we outlaw clinical trials while we’re at it? The definition there sounds an awful lot like we’re “using human beings as laboratory experiments to presumably save others” to me.
Francis has spoken out frequently about euthanasia. He considers the assisted suicide movement as a symptom of today’s “throw-away culture” that views the sick and elderly as useless drains on society.
A perfectly reasonable opinion, other than the part where that’s totally not how it works at all.
We’re not running around murdering sick old people because they’re old and sick and we don’t want them anymore. It’s another one of those very personal decisions that can only be made by the people most effected under the worst of circumstances. It’s not “get in the car Grandpa, we’re going to the vet!” It’s “I’m being wasted by this awful disease that nobody can fix, every inch of me hurts and it’s only going to get worse. I want to leave this world now while I can still hold my head up, rather than continue to suffer until my inevitable, horrible end.”
As sad as it is when someone dies, watching that person slowly suffer to death is even sadder. And as hard as it is on us, it’s harder on him than any of us will ever understand until the day we find ourselves in his shoes. When the best medical science can offer these people is to drug them up until they can’t take it anymore, why should they be forced to stick around and slowly degenerate before our eyes and their own? I may think differently should the time ever come for me, but for now I fall squarely on the side of if you can’t fix my pain, please end it. Anything else is inhumane, and not what we should expect a loving god or Pope to want.