Testimony of the Massachusetts Catholic Conference Before The Joint Legislative Committee On Health Care on Hospice, Pediatric Palliative Care and Pain Relief Standards

March 28, 2001

My name is Maria Parker. I am the Associate Director of Public Policy for the Massachusetts Catholic Conference, the public policy office of the four Roman Catholic Dioceses in the Commonwealth. I am also the project director for In Support of Life, a statewide initiative of the Catholic Church in Massachusetts. In Support of Life seeks to educate Catholics and others about assisted suicide, hospice and other end-of-life issues, to improve services within the Catholic community for meeting the needs of the dying, and to promote life-affirming policies in the public arena.

I am speaking on behalf of the Conference today in support of two pieces of legislation designed to improve care for persons living with terminal conditions, including children. The Massachusetts Catholic Conference urges the Committee to report favorably "An Act Relative to Hospice Programs, Licensure and Definition" (S. 565/H. 1759) and "An Act to Provide Pediatric Palliative Care to Children with Life Threatening Illness in the Commonwealth" (S. 546/H. 1756).

These bills, if enacted, would increase public access to the life-affirming services of hospice and effective palliative care, which unfortunately remain as secrets, if you will, that all too many people know nothing about. While I’ll leave to the bills’ sponsors the technical explanations as to why these bills are needed, I would like to provide this committee with three reasons why hospice and palliative care must be at the forefront of our Commonwealth’s health care policy agenda.

First, hospice and palliative care respond effectively and compassionately to the very real needs of the seriously ill. They do so in a manner that affirms the value of the lives at stake, unlike proposals to legalize assisted suicide, which treat the dying as burdensome candidates for killing rather than as fellow human beings deserving of our care.

Second, hospice and palliative care are the preferred means for addressing the needs of persons living with terminal conditions and of their caregivers. Opinion surveys show that when asked, members of the public agree that hospice and palliative care should take priority as the best approaches to accomplishing good end of life care.

Third, improving access to hospice and palliative care has become a goal around which substantial organizational consensus is forming, especially here in the Commonwealth. In September of last year, a broad-based coalition of groups, 25 in all, including the Massachusetts Medical Society, Massachusetts Nurses Association, the Hospice Federation, Home & Health Association, numerous religious organizations of different faiths, and pro-life organizations, issued a consensus statement that: 1) opposed the legalization of assisted suicide as called for by the World Federation of Right to Die Societies meeting in Boston, and 2) supported greater access to affirmative care at the end of life. According to the consensus statement:

Life-affirming alternatives are available in our society to comfort those diagnosed with severe conditions. The challenge before us is to educate one another about these alternatives, to improve our ability to deliver good care to those who need it, and to strengthen our financial commitment to serving the vulnerable. We must continue to build linkages between our healthcare, social, and faith-based institutions, and thereby treat with full and abiding respect those disabled more by our societal indifference than by the severity of their prognosis.

Moreover, just recently, the Massachusetts Council of Churches announced the historic decision of its member denominations to oppose assisted suicide and to support instead the following: "Additional medical research and training needs to focus on optimum palliative, i.e. comfort care. Furthermore, the hospice movement, which enables compassionate residential or home care for the dying, and ancillary services, deserve maximum private and public support." Finally, voters in the State of Maine defeated a referendum proposal to legalize assisted suicide last November because, among other factors, the voters felt far more can and should be done to improve access to hospice and palliative care.

We have a unique opportunity to move ahead in our quest for better care at the end of life. The aforementioned bills will help this endeavor and therefore deserve your support.

Let me finish with a note about another bill before this Committee, "An Act to Improve End of Life Care" (H. 2218). The bill implements a process by which legal standards governing end of life care are to be established by the board of registration and creates an ombudsman office to oversee end of life care in compliance with whatever standards are set. The bill neither describes the content of the standards nor indicates any limits by which such standards must abide, thus empowering the board of registration, should it so decide, to abolish current policies such as the Massachusetts common law prohibiting assisted suicide. For this reason, the Conference cannot support H. 2218.