(OSV News) — On May 10, 2022, Jozef Zalot’s father died in the afternoon. That morning, he said, as his father received a morphine drip of 1 mg in a hospital in Springfield, Massachusetts, a floor nurse said to him, “Joe, if you want, I can up the dose to get him over the hump.”
“I turned and I glared at her and I said, ‘What did you just say to me?’ … and she backed up, just like that,” said Zalot. “I experienced this. And this is what people experience. It’s misplaced compassion.”
Zalot, a bioethicist and director of education with the National Catholic Bioethics Center in the Philadelphia suburb of Broomall, pointed out that to this day, Massachusetts has not legalized physician-assisted suicide. Yet, he said, even if so far, just 13 states and the District of Columbia have legalized assisted suicide, the mindset he described is prevalent across the country. CONTINUE