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Church hails India Supreme Court for reaffirming ban on euthanasia: ‘Extremely happy’

August 22, 2024 Catholic News Agency 3
India’s supreme court building is pictured in New Delhi on July 9, 2018. / Credit: SAJJAD HUSSAIN/AFP via Getty Images

New Delhi, India, Aug 22, 2024 / 16:00 pm (CNA).

Catholic leaders in India have lauded the country’s high court for rejecting a plea for “passive euthanasia” from the parents of a 30-year-old man who has been in a vegetative state for 11 years.

Commenting on the August 20 verdict issued by a three-judge bench led by Chief Justice Dhananjaya Chandrachud, Archbishop Raphy Manjaly of the Archdiocese of Agra, the chairman of the doctrinal commission of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of India, said: “We would like to congratulate the Court for its unambiguous verdict while calling for support for the family facing a serious crisis.” 

“We are extremely happy that the sacredness of life has been upheld by the court,” the prelate told CNA on Aug 22.

In 2021 the Delhi High Court rejected a plea of the parents for euthanasia for their son. “The facts indicate that the petitioner is not being kept alive mechanically and is able to sustain himself without any external aid,” the court said. 

When the lawyer for the distressed parents of the 30-year old man — who fell from a hostel balcony in 2013 while studying for engineering and had been comatose since then — told the Supreme Court that the family had sold their house to pay for their son’s treatment, the chief justice admitted the court was “moved by the plight of the parents.” 

“Can some alternative be introduced?” Chandrachud asked. “Both parents are aging. Is there any facility where [the patient] can be lodged, and the expenses covered? He is suffering from bed sores.”

Yet the court “cannot permit passive euthanasia as he is not on a life support system,” the justice said. The patient is fed through a nasal tube.

In 2018 the Supreme Court said Indian law “prohibits anyone, including a physician, from causing the death of another person by administering any lethal drug, even if the objective is to relieve the patient from pain and suffering.” 

“Passive” euthanasia, meanwhile, is allowed in cases where doctors remove patients from mechanical life support. The removal of nasal feeding tubes is not allowed under that rule.

Archbishop Manjaly noted that “while taking a clear pro-life stance, the judgment acknowledges that there is definitely a crisis.” 

“The suffering family cannot be pushed into a corner. We are happy that the court insists on community support for the distraught family,” he pointed out.

The prelate of the Taj Mahal city of Agra also recounted how Aruna Shanbaug, a nurse brutalized by a janitor while on hospital duty in 1973, remained in vegetative condition for 41 years with the nursing community in the Mumbai hospital taking care of her until her death in 2015.

“Society needs such compassion to care for the needy. The Church stands for that,” Manjaly said.

[…]

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Indiana Catholic couple ‘living every parent’s nightmare’ after transgender custody case

March 4, 2024 Catholic News Agency 1
The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty’s Lori Windham joins Montse Alvarado, president and COO of EWTN News, and Josh Payne, a lawyer with Campbell Miller Payne, on “EWTN News In Depth” on March 1, 2024. / Credit: “EWTN News In Depth”

CNA Staff, Mar 4, 2024 / 17:15 pm (CNA).

An Indiana Catholic couple is in the grips of a “nightmare” after their son was seized from them when they refused to adhere to his chosen transgender identity, an attorney told EWTN News on Friday.

After Mary and Jeremy Cox didn’t use the pronouns requested by their teenage son when he began to identify as a girl, Indiana Child Services removed their son from his home. The parents sought legal action and their case, M.C. and J.C. v. Indiana, is now being appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Despite no evidence of abuse or neglect, the Coxes’ son has not been returned to them. The attorney for the Cox family, Lori Windham, told “EWTN News in Depth” anchor Montse Alvarado the couple is “living every parent’s nightmare.”

Windham, vice president and senior counsel at the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, explained that the Coxes’ son “was removed from their care by state officials even after they investigated for months and found out that these were fit parents.”

“They had not abused or neglected him in any way,” she said of the parents. “[Indiana] still used the disagreement over gender as a reason to keep him out of their home until he turned 18.”

“What’s shocking is the Indiana courts upheld this, and now the Supreme Court is their last stop and their last hope to make sure this doesn’t happen again to others,” she said.

Windham said she hopes the court will “wipe this stain off of Mary and Jeremy’s record.”

“They have other young children at home. They don’t want something like this to happen again,” she said. 

The parents hope the Supreme Court will “send a clear signal to lower courts and to states that you cannot interfere with parental rights, you cannot interfere with religious liberty by removing kids from the home of loving parents just because they disagree over gender,” she said.

Three additional cases related to transgender rights have been appealed to the Supreme Court. In November, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) appealed to the nation’s highest court to block a ban on transgender surgeries for minors in Kentucky. The group also appealed to reverse a similar law in Tennessee. Another appeal asks justices to allow Idaho’s ban on gender transitions for minors to take effect after a lower court judge blocked it earlier this year.

Josh Payne, a lawyer with Campbell Miller Payne, a law firm that helps “detransitioners” sue their doctors for pushing gender transition surgeries, filed a friend-of-the-court amicus brief in the transgender-related Supreme Court case that began in Idaho. 

These detransitioners, who are often minors, believed that gender-affirming care would resolve their gender dysphoria and allow them to live healthy lives but later felt “misled into these procedures,” Payne explained on “EWTN News in Depth.”

Their clients, he said, detransition after they realize “that they were misled into these physical changes to their bodies that did not help their mental health, gender dysphoria problems, but instead simply left them with mental anguish and in many cases, without their natural, healthy bodies and without their body parts.”

They are now “seeking justice,” Payne said, and hoping that others won’t make the same mistakes they did. 

The testimonies, Payne said, “put a face to why these regulations are so necessary and so important in the lower courts.”

Indiana is not the only state where parental rights are under threat, Windham said. 

“California and Washington have both passed laws that authorize state officials to take custody or to refuse to tell a parent where a child is for the purpose of allowing that child to access what they deem ‘gender-affirming care,’” she noted. 

“Other states, like Maine, are considering similar bills,” she added. “What we’ve said all along about the Coxes’ case is that if this can happen in Indiana, this can happen anywhere.” 

[…]