The VE Bulletin Excerpts
'No price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself' Rudyard Kipling
‘Humanitarian approach to Christianity’: Death of committed pastor
The above description was the expressed view of Herald (Washington) newspaper writer Julie Muhlstein of the veteran right-to-die campaigner Rev Bill Wright, when reporting on his death on March 14th aged 81 years. Rev Wright, a pastor of the First Congregational United Church of Christ, and more recently United Church of Christ was deeply involved in his community, ‘serving churches, government and cultural groups’.
Hilde Benson-Wright said her late husband was committed to letting people choose if they wanted to end their lives because of a terminal illness, and was ahead of his time in thinking about this issue, although he often "kept his thoughts to himself." In the 1980s, he was a board member of the Hemlock Society, and following the 1991 defeat of Washington's Initiative 119, which would have allowed patients the right to request medical aid in dying, Wright was one of about a dozen Hemlock Society members who started the organisation Compassion in Dying. (This later combined with the former Hemlock Society to become Compassion and Choices).
Patients in Washington do not have the physician-assistance option that exists in Oregon, allowing prescribed medications to end life.
This distinction is dubious. Patients [in both situations] knowingly choose a course of action that will lead to death, rather than to a longer but burdensome life. By focusing on the intention to refuse burdensome treatment, rather than the broader implications of the choice, the church avoids the inhumane implication that patients must accept life-prolonging treatment, no matter how painful or costly it may be. But it does so at the cost of rendering incoherent its own vigorous opposition to assisted suicide and voluntary euthanasia.
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