(OSV News) — Pro-life advocates say a lot of attention will be on physician-assisted suicide proposals at this year’s Illinois Pro-Life March in Springfield, the state capital, on March 25.
Organizers also want to highlight multiple bills that would facilitate free abortions for women who do not have legal authorization to be in the U.S.
The president of the march’s main organizer, Illinois Right to Life, said she expects a larger turnout than in recent years. Mary Kate Zander said approximately 3,000 people have marched in recent years, but she believed interest in the physician-assisted suicide bills could almost double the crowd at the state march this year.
‘Pretty Large Opposition’
“This is one of those unique issues that it’s not specific to abortion, so we see sort of a variance of people coming out to oppose this bill,” Zander told OSV News. “And so I think you could say that there is a pretty large opposition to this legislation more so than your run-of-the-mill abortion bill that we see in Illinois.”
According to the witness slips filed for a then-deferred hearing March 19 on the state House version of the physician-assisted suicide legalization bill, called the End-of-Life Options for Terminally Ill Patients Act, seven people registered support, while 508 opposed it. In previous state Senate hearings, opposition numbers, in the several thousands, were more than double those of proponents.
The legislation, identically worded in both houses of the Illinois Legislature, calls for two doctors to render a diagnosis of six months or less to live due to illness, and to ascertain a patient’s mental capacity to make decisions and self-administer the lethal cocktail of drugs. The legislation notes the cause of death would be listed as the original illness, not suicide. It also specifies any actions carried out under the legislation does not “constitute suicide, assisted suicide, euthanasia, mercy killing, homicide, murder, manslaughter, elder abuse or neglect.”
Catholic Conference of Illinois
Robert Gilligan, executive director of the Catholic Conference of Illinois, told OSV News this spring session that the issue has at times generated unexpected opposition from certain lawmakers.
“There are quite a few that are expressing opposition that take a different position on the right to life, where we believe it should be protected from conception to natural death,” he said. “There are many lawmakers, unfortunately, that don’t believe that. But those very same lawmakers, some of them, are opposed to assisted suicide.”
Still, Gilligan cautioned it is hard to tell how the lawmakers will ultimately vote should the bills in the House and Senate be up for any final decision.
Zander said the annual rally — this year renamed the Illinois Pro-Life March — will also call attention to about half a dozen bills in both houses that seek to offer free abortions to women who are also unauthorized immigrants, and include abortion pills as part of health services offered to public university and college students and other provisions to make abortion in Illinois even more widely available.
Mass for Life
Father Dominic Rankin will serve as master of ceremonies for the Mass for Life that will be celebrated prior to the march by Springfield Bishop Thomas J. Paprocki. Father Rankin told OSV News that this year, close to 2,000 people — with a waiting list of 500 — are expected to fill the auditorium at the University of Illinois Springfield for the Mass.
He said abortion remains a preeminent issue for the church where “life is attacked and pushed aside and rejected.” He said also that “more and more there’s a devaluing” of the lives of the elderly and the sick whose suffering should not be “thrown away, ignored or belittled.”
Father Rankin also raised concerns over in vitro fertilization, or IVF, a practice the Catholic Church warns is enormously destructive to embryonic human life. A form of artificial reproductive technology, IVF unites a woman’s eggs and a man’s sperm outside of their respective bodies in a laboratory setting, with one or more embryonic children selected for implantation in the woman’s uterus, and the remaining embryonic children either destroyed or frozen indefinitely.
‘Culture of Life’ for Illinois
Father Rankin said against the backdrop of legislation that promotes death in a state that welcomes greater access to services that hasten the end of life, marchers will witness “to the joy and hope that is part of the culture of life.”
“If you have a really dark room, how many candles does it take to light it? You still only need one candle. I think that’s just a good reminder to all of us that we shouldn’t become discouraged or despair at the largeness of the issue or the lives that have been lost or the pressure against us,” he said. “All those things are real. But the witness of one life lived for Christ is still a tremendous light to the entire space that surrounds it.”
Simone Orendain writes for OSV News from Chicago.
