LONDON, January 17, 2005 (LifeSiteNews.com) – A representative of the Anglican Church’s Archbishop of Canterbury said that there are “strong compassionate” grounds for allowing euthanasia in some cases.
“There is a very strong compassionate case for voluntary euthanasia,” Robin Gill, a chief adviser to Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, said Saturday, according to a guardian.co.uk report.
“In certain cases, such as that which involved Diane Pretty [the woman who was terminally ill with motor neurone disease and who campaigned for the right to be helped to die], there is an overwhelming case for it,” he said.
Gill represented the Archbishop with his testimony before the committee deliberating the private member’s bill on euthanasia tabled by Lord Joffe.
Britain’s Voluntary Euthanasia Society immediately welcomed Gill’s comments as an endorsement of their efforts to legalize euthanasia: “The archbishop’s choice of Gill represents a willingness to enter into a more constructive dialogue than before about this important issue. We hope it will encourage other members of the clergy to speak out openly in support,” said the Society’s chief executive Deborah Annetts.
Spokesman for the Anglican Church, Arun Kataria, said, however, that Gill’s views were not necessarily those of the Church. “We firmly oppose the legalization of euthanasia,” he said, according to a UPI report.
“Canon Professor Robert Gill, an advisor to the Archbishop of Canterbury, is very wrong to equate compassion with the act of voluntary euthanasia,” stated Alex Schadenberg, executive director of the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition.
Schadenberg said “Compassion is the act of journeying with another’s suffering, not killing the person who suffers. He also is forgetting that murder, whether done for reasons of false compassion or act of violence, is still the taking of the life of another person. The prohibition against killing other people, for any reason is a cornerstone of a society that safeguards the weak the vulnerable and the innocent.”
“Voluntary euthanasia is in fact a misnomer,” Schadenberg continued. “We can never assume, after the fact, that an act was voluntary. Once a person is dead it is difficult to prove, without a doubt that the person was freely deciding or actually wanted to die. When considering the social pressure that is connected to end of life actions we need to recognize that the law is an effective deterent to taking the lives of vulnerable people.”