I am Cardinal Bernard Law, Archbishop of Boston. I want to thank this committee for giving me an opportunity to testify against House Bill 1543, a proposal to legalize physician-assisted suicide. My opposition is not simply to this bill, either in its parts or its whole. My opposition is to the proposition that the Great and General Court of Massachusetts should give any consideration at all to the legalization of what is called physician-assisted suicide.

When I came to Boston 13 years ago, I suggested that it was necessary to name the darkness. The darkness that is shrouded by this euphemism physician-assisted suicide is murder. We would be much better off as a society if we would stop playing semantic games and call things what they are. To help someone kill himself or herself is as wrong as murder. Even the president of the Nebraska Hemlock Society has said: When you strip away all the euphemisms, were talking about doctors killing patients. (Carl Schmitthausler, as quoted in the Lincoln Journal Star, Dec. 30, 1995)

That the healing art of the physician should be perverted in such a way as to make the physician an agent of death is nothing short of monstrous. The physicians vocation is to heal, to comfort not to kill! However compelling the reasons advanced for this action may appear, the knowing and willing participation in the death of another human being is nothing short of murder. Any society which condones such killing is writing its own death warrant.

What are the circumstances which have brought us to this point? How could such a law be taken seriously? I am not going to attempt to analyze the ideological antecedents to the politically correct cultural script which is encoded in this proposed law. I am more concerned with why you, your colleagues and constituents may be swayed by the arguments of this laws proponents.

The chilling decisions of the Second and Ninth Circuit Courts of Appeal give us a clue to how it is that such a proposed law has come before you. Others will speak with greater legal precision. What I see these decisions attempting to do is impose a revolutionary change in this nations moral and legal judgment on the taking of human life. This is done by appealing to sympathy, to compassion, and to fear. Death from a terminal illness is presented as inevitably excruciatingly painful, degrading and humiliating. The valid distinction between killing and allowing the natural dying process to continue is dismissed out of hand. The principle of double effect is rejected.

Let me be clear about death. It is inevitable for each of us, and while it is not to be hurried, it should not be feared. It is not necessary to do all that is technologically possible to prolong human life if the process of death has clearly begun and there is no reasonable hope of reversing that process. A patient who is terminally ill need not avail himself or herself of all that can be done medically to prolong life. To say this, however, is not the same as saying that it is morally acceptable to administer a lethal drug or to otherwise kill another or oneself.

Pain control is morally acceptable. It is tragic that the availability of pain control is not universally recognized by doctors and their patients. Medical experts tell us it is possible to control most pain. Research should be funded to insure the possibility of pain control in all cases. The dissemination of knowledge about pain control to doctors and patients should be facilitated; state and federal lawmakers as well as medical organizations have begun to recognize the need for this.

It is not only pain control that is needed for the terminally ill, however. What is needed is loving acceptance and support for a human being facing the awesome mystery of death. What the terminally ill person needs more than anything else is compassion. In a usurpation of the term which is nothing short of obscene, one of the plaintiffs in the Ninth Circuit Court was a group calling itself Compassion in Dying. In reality, however, the rich and hallowed virtue of compassion is drained of meaning when it is invoked as a basis of destroying human life. As Pope John Paul II has said: True compassion leads to sharing anothers pain; it does not kill the person whose suffering we cannot bear.

Ideas have consequences. An idea, however monstrous, which finds itself institutionalized in law, spins out its inexorable logic in the most horrible of ways. If we want to see where physician-assisted suicide leads, all we need to do is study the Netherlands. I base these observations on the study by Herbert Hendin, M.D., titled Seduced by Death. In a country of about 5.5 million people, the acceptance of physician-assisted suicide has led to 700 to 1,000 deaths annually of terminally ill, mentally competent adults who did not consent to the lethal action of their physicians. They were killed against their will. To appreciate better their numbers, given the population of this country, these involuntary deaths of terminally ill, mentally competent patients at the hands of physicians, would number between 12,067 and 17,239 annually.

The social experiment with death in the Netherlands has other sobering lessons. A documented case of a woman suffering from severe depression at the death of her sons is most revealing. She requested and received help from her psychiatrist to kill herself, although she had no physical illness. He and she were successful and the physician went unpunished by the Dutch court.

Let me cite one other example from the Netherlands. This is a case which was chronicled, from start to finish, by a television crew. A man with a neurological disorder, confined to a wheelchair, yet able to talk, was alleged to desire suicide. The doctor called to assist dealt principally with the mans wife. There was little interaction with the patient to assess his desires. At one point, as the physician was engaged in conversation with the wife, the patient, at the other end of the room, began to weep softly. Instinctively, the physician went to the wheelchair to reassure the patient. The wife interrupted him, saying that it was better to let her husband cry alone. Later the television camera recorded the husband on his death bed, surrounded by his wife and physician. After the lethal injection took its effect, the wife said, over the corpse of her husband, what a beautiful way to die. That, I submit, is about as low as a society can sink.

This proposed law has absolutely no redeeming features. It is the first step in a perilous journey that will mire us even more deeply in a culture of death. Two final points: I do not come to this topic without the deeply personal experience of the death of someone I loved dearly. None of us comes to this topic without profound memories.

On November 24, 1991 I sat at the bedside of my mother as she slipped peacefully from this world. For years she has suffered from terminal illness - emphysema and congestive heart failure. The extraordinary care she received at St. Elizabeths Medical Center allowed her to live far beyond the years predicted for her. She died without pain. Almost to the end she was able to converse. Those of us closest to her had the consolation of expressing our love to her as she expressed her love for us. We prayed with confidence in the God who is love. What I wish for the terminally ill patient is that kind of death.

Compassion is a beautiful word, meaning: to suffer with another. That is what the terminally ill patient needs more than anything else those who will share, in love, whatever suffering that impending death may bring.

Finally, I urge you to reflect on the heartbreaking tragedy that has touched the lives of teenagers in this city young people who have ended their lives by suicide. What kind of message does this proposed law give to a depressed adolescent?

I repeat, ideas have consequences. God help us if we do not reject the deadly idea reflected in this proposed legislation.