A firm No to ‘imperfect’ proposals for euthanasia

By Phil Lawler ( bio - articles - email ) | Sep 09, 2026

The president of the Pontifical Academy for Life is in the headlines for his suggestion that under some circumstances it might be morally justifiable to support a limited proposal for assisted suicide “given that parliament could instead promptly pass more permission and libertarian laws…” At first glance the statement from Archbishop Renzo Pegoraro looks like an extension of an argument that American pro-life activists have been pondering for years: Is it OK to vote for a law that bans abortions in some cases, but otherwise allows the killing to continue.

But look more carefully. The situations are different.

Since Roe, the pro-life movement in the US has sought legislation to protect the lives of unborn children. Obviously the ideal legislation would protect all unborn children. But a halfway measure protecting some—provided that it did not explicitly condone the killing of others—could be a step in the right direction, since otherwise the unborn would have no protection at all.

The drive for acceptance of euthanasia works from opposite direction (in more ways than one). Proposals for acceptance of assisted suicide aim to eliminate the laws that make deliberate killing a crime. Those laws—the laws against murder, I mean—afford protection to everyone. So the legal situation, before the introduction of pro-euthanasia law, is the opposite of the post-Roe situation in the US, where the unborn had no legal protection.

To support any assisted-suicide proposal, then, entails affirming that some innocent people should be killed. That they might wish to die, and that the killing would be done by medical professionals, do not alter the fact that their lives would be taken deliberately, in violation of God’s law, which is written both in the Decalogue and on man’s heart.

The archbishop’s political analysis—that if a “moderate” euthanasia proposal is rejected, a more extreme version might be approved—is spotty at best. But what if he is right? If you judge the morality of public policies by the body count, the “imperfect” legislation might be preferable. But if you judge the morality of a vote by what it does to you, the voter, or to the society that adopts the proposal, then you cannot justify taking the (literally) fatal step to declare that some murders are not murders, that polite and sterile murders are acceptable.

There was a time, before Roe, when American laws against abortion were similar to the laws that have, until recently, prohibited assisted-suicide in most Western countries. In those days, acceptance of a law that allowed some abortions would have involved violation of the same key principle: Thou shalt not kill. But now the challenge for pro-lifers is to restore some legal protections.

Perhaps in the future, if the trend toward acceptance of euthanasia continues, pro-lifers will face the same battle on this new front. The time may come (and it may come all too soon, as the sponsors of death continues their relentless offensive) when some valiant lawmakers propose measures to protect some of the elderly and infirm from the compassionate killers, from the mounting pressure to accept mercy killing. Then we might revisit Archbishop Pegoraro’s argument. I hope I don’t live to see that day. If Catholic legislators accept the archbishop’s guidance, and in their haste to compromise make a deal with death, I probably won’t.