• All human life is a gift by God, our Creator, and is therefore innately sacred. In our lives, we strive to live a life that is worthy of our dignity and that promotes the dignity of others. This respect for life is lifelong – from conception to natural death.
• A dignified natural death occurs without human intervention that would deliberately cause or hasten the patient’s death.  The Texas Bishops believe that in end-of-life decisions, the patient and his or her family should be the first, but not only concern of legislation impacting end-of-life care. Issues related to the death experience are profoundly important not only to patients, families, and communities, but also to the health care professionals who are involved, and who want to provide the most compassionate care possible.
• The instances when the Advance directives law comes into play are under the circumstances of a patient in the active dying process. In these cases, a patient’s cause of death is not euthanasia or the direct action or inaction of the physician, but instead is the patient’s underlying disease or injury.
• When a disagreement between the family and the physician occurs in the situation of a patient who is in the active dying process, a hospital ethics committee will consider whether continued medical intervention will artificially delay death with no real benefit to the patient, or even worse, will cause further and severe physical suffering to the patient.  Indefinite treat-until-transfer overrides the physician’s judgment, renders useless any consideration by the medical ethics committee about inappropriate interventions and treatment, and requires physicians, nurses, and other hospital caregivers to continue to provide unethical and inappropriate treatment.
• Our criteria for a living will or advance directive is that it “must explicitly exclude any form of euthanasia, as well as reject an abusive and irrational extension of the death process (A Will to Live: Clear Answers on End of Life Issues, 55, emphasis is our own).”
• The active Roman Catholic Bishops of Texas oppose any effort to address advance directives issues via a floor amendment of any kind, especially one that requires indefinite treatment pending transfer.

Because of the complexity of this statute, anything short of a thorough and deliberate process of amending the statute is unacceptable.  We urge the leadership to support an interim study on Advance Directives reform in order to have a detailed and comprehensive reform bill offered in 2013.

For questions regarding this issue or any of the issues on the Bishops’ Legislative Agenda, please contact the Texas Catholic Conference at 512-339-9882 or you can email Jennifer Allmon at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it . Visit our Advance Directives resource page at www.TXcatholic.org/ad.asp.