CV NEWS FEED // The U.S. needs a second St. Frances Cabrini to help address the dementia and physician-assisted suicide crisis currently facing the country, according to a Catholic ethicist.
Charles Camosy, professor of Medical Humanities at the Creighton University School of Medicine and author of several books on ethics, wrote for Angelus News that California’s recently withdrawn proposal to include dementia as a reason to legally commit physician-assisted suicide was too close of a call.
He pointed out that after physician-assisted suicide was legalized in California in 2016, newspapers began calling for it to be made available for people suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. He added that the same thing is being pushed for in Canada, where anyone with a “grievous and irremediable medical condition” can commit physician-assisted suicide.
“In the world of academic bioethics, calls to use PAK [physician-assisted killing] have become more pronounced and urgent in recent years,” Camosy wrote. “Part of that urgency has to do with the ongoing dementia crisis.”
He continued:
We already refuse to care for this vulnerable population adequately, often putting them in terrible conditions in understaffed nursing homes — which very often put residents in “chemical straitjackets” just to manage an otherwise unmanageable situation.
And if you think the problem is bad now (and it is really bad), the population of people with dementia is set to double in 20 years and triple in 30, given that we are living longer and our diets and environment continue to deteriorate.
Camosy warned that the solution will likely be to begin offering patients with dementia the option to commit physician-assisted suicide, if not begin the practice of euthanasia entirely.
“In thinking about what to do, I cannot help but think of Mother Cabrini,” Camosy wrote, pointing out that the Italian-American sister founded almost 70 institutions during her ministry in the late 1800s and early 1900s to care for the immigrants and the impoverished.
“These populations were degraded and discarded by society because those who had power over them found them inconvenient,” he wrote. “Something very similar is happening right now with dementia populations and it will only get worse. We need an all-hands on deck approach to address this problem.”
Camosy called for dioceses and religious orders, as well as social justice institutions and pro-life groups, to begin caring for dementia patients as “fully dignified individuals, made in the image and likeness of God in the precisely the same way as able-bodied populations.”
“Even beyond these substantial responses, we will likely need another Mother Cabrini. We will need someone to create a new religious order out of nothing to address this problem with the kind of tenacity, holiness, and love she did,” he added, continuing:
Perhaps the person being called to do this is reading these words right now. If so, please heed God’s call. We need you now. Those bearing the Holy Face of Christ as the least among us, as those despised by our culture, need you now.
