Doctors will face mounting pressure to ignore consciences, warns Bishop Vasa
CWN – October 03, 2012
Speaking to the Catholic Medical Association, Bishop Robert Vasa of Santa Rosa, California, has warned that many doctors in the US are “going to be forced to do something they may not want to do.”
The medical profession is under steadily mounting pressure to discard traditional moral standards, Bishop Vasa said. “American Catholics, and in particular American Catholic physicians, have to wake up to the fact that they can no longer presume that their individual choices about how they practice medicine in this country will be respected.”
Additional sources for this story: Catholic Doctors Tackle How to Survive in an ‘Increasingly Toxic Culture’ (National Catholic Register) www.ncregister.com/daily-news/catholic-medical-association-attendees-tackle-how-to-survive-in-an-increasi
I just had a heart attack and subsequent open-heart surgery and had to face some end-of-life issues, and I would like to share what I learned in the experience. I had prepared an ‘advance directive’ as they are called, from the Right to Life website; fortunately it did not come into play because I had given it to my primary care doc and she did not figure into my cardiac event at all and so did not inform the hospital that I had an Advance Directive, but my home visiting nurse, who is not Catholic, told me forcefully to get rid of it, get it out of my files, and a Catholic euthanasia ‘expert’ had previously told me the same thing, but without the more detailed explanation given by the nurse. She said that hospitals don’t read them! They are in legalese, and hospitals simply interpret every single one of them as a Do Not Resuscitate order, which in fact mine was not (as a Catholic, I don’t have the right to renounce *all* life-saving procedures, only certain ones, even though some of my peers at my church say they themselves do not want even to be taken to a hospital, in case of an ‘event’ such as the heart attack I had on the way to mass, no less). It is better, both the nurse and the expert said, to educate the family member to whom you have given the Power of Attorney to make your decisions on the Catholic teaching in this regard. I obtained a booklet from the Maryland bishops conference called Comfort and Consolation which is pretty clear and seems to want to give the traditional teaching on the matter. They have a web site. I have just written that site asking for more of these booklets. Please obtain *something* and take it to your traditional pastor for his doctrinal expertise. And may I say, if any SSPX pastor is reading this: please obtain clear Catholic directives on this issue and share them with your parish, because hospitals have ceased to be places of refuge and are now driven by profits and by liberal ideology, and one of the present agendas is to solve the pension crisis brought on by abortion by getting rid of us as quickly as possible, after wringing out the requisite profit. (I do not know how either the Romney nor the Obamacare initiatives address the problem of health care cost, seeming to limit the discussion only to the price of the insurance, when the real problem is the cost to the public [as I am on Medicare] of the care itself–my hospitalization cost, don’t faint, a hyper-inflated quarter of a million dollars.) In Britain there was a recent article circulating on the internet that seemed to have credible sources that indicated that over 60% of patients in their state-run hospitals had DNR orders in their files without the authorization of the individual or their families. It’s a real, living issue right now–or dying issue–and our pastors had better get busier and educate us because all the information available once you are hospitalized is tipped toward euthanasia, even in Catholic hospitals.
A second thing I’d like to mention is to demand *adequate* pain control early on. Apparently there is a new and horrifying trick, to withhold pain medication in trade for what they refer to as ‘THE morphine drip,’ by which they politely mean enough morphine to kill you–and ignorant and suffering families are buying it!!! The UN uses a similar trick, and perhaps this is where hospitals learned it: the UN regularly trades food and shelter for a woman’s existing kids for the abortion of any fetus she is carrying, or for her sterilization. In this case they try to trade pain control for death.
This is a huge issue for the (aging) population reading Angelqueen, and I beg those in charge to identify Catholic teaching for us and help us prepare to add a little more struggle to the struggles already facing us in dying. It sucks to have to fight the power even on your death bed. The real solution is the restoration of the social reign of Christ the King and the return of health care to the non-profit pervenue of religious orders. There is no good solution under our secular government–but at least we can protect ourselves a little better.