Dec 13, 2014 2 min read

Recently, the Observer-Reporter has published articles, letters and an editorial about Death with Dignity. There are bills in the Pennsylvania Legislature about this subject, and I support their passage.

I am 72. My health is quite good, and I think my mind is intact, too. But neither has a lifetime warranty. There may well come a time when I would rather not continue what could become very burdensome, and I would like to be able to opt out on my own terms, at a time and place of my own choosing. This, to me, is the very essence of dignity: choice regarding one’s decisions.

A letter to the editor published in the Observer-Reporter last Sunday, from Helene E. Paharik, noted that the Catholic Church opposed such a choice as immoral. The Catholic Church is certainly welcome to its opinions, its tenets, and its behavior, and to impose these ideas upon its willing adherents. That matter is between the institution and its followers.

But the Catholic Church is not welcome to impose its opinions on the rest of us.

That said, I wonder whether, when the clerical abuse mess broke, Paharik wrote a similar letter to L’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper, reminding them of the immorality of the practices revealed, and urging the prelates to put a stop to the practices of moving offending clergy to new and unsuspecting parishes?

Far more actual harm came from that than could come from people having the right and the means to end their own lives when they choose. Or is there a sort of selective thinking at work?

Carole McIntyre

Waynesburg