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Review of Book: Euthanasia and Physician-Assisted Suicide

This is another useful monograph from a publishing house which is doing great service to the Church by producing a stream of highquality books on current ethical problems written by well-qualified authors. The writer of this book is a Roman Catholic parish priest who is also a Fellow of the American College of Physicians and a practising doctor. The book owes its origins to the writer's appalled fascination on discovering the full extent of Nazi medical research in the extermination camps. That research began with euthanasia of those born with congenital anomalies. Once that avenue had been opened, the Nazi doctors went on rapidly to practise euthanasia on the insane, the elderly, and on a massive scale the 'undesirables'. The same pattern is all too evident today in the Netherlands, where doctors will readily terminate the lives of patients without their specific consent, or even without the knowledge of their families. This book provides a thoughtful and comprehensive analysis of the current debate on euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide. The Roman Catholic position is stated with clarity and sophistication and alternative viewpoints are considered sympathetically and dispassionately. The book sets out the current state of the debate up to the time of writing in mid-1998. Today, moral and pastoral theology are often done 'on the hoof, and the literature in the learned periodicals is so extensive that much gets overlooked even by specialists. Father Manning has read all of the literature produced in the United States up to the middle of 1998. His bibliography is exhaustive and covers thirteen pages a valuable research tool in its own right. The book is divided into nine chapters. After an Introduction and an overview of the history of the subject, the author considers the issues of Self-Determination (have I a right to die?); Compassion and Mercy towards the Dying; Killing v. Allowing To Die; The Principle of the Common Good; The Slippery Slope Argument; Medical Professionalism; and a Conclusion. An English reviewer finds this book interesting because of its American provenance. The debate on euthanasia in the United States is complicated both by the fact that individual states have the right to legislate on this topic and that the Supreme Court is, inevitably, becoming increasingly interested in what the individual states are doing. Add to this the increasing momentum of Covenant Health Care in America, whereby the ethical, not to say theological,