By Gerald Winegrad,

In an Oct. 3 column, Armstrong Williams authored an opinion piece against assisted dying: “Pope Leo is right — death is not care.”

Mr. Williams opines that the pope “spoke with moral clarity when he warned that causing death cannot be dressed up as compassion and reminded the world that what is legal is not necessarily moral. His message should be stated without hesitation: No government, legislature, doctor or court has the authority to decide that another person’s life should be ended. That decision belongs to God. This is not a question on which we should equivocate. Human life is sacred …”

This statement of moral certitude triggered my column addressing that same moral certitude. Let’s examine the many cases where this moral axiom is being grossly violated by our government on a daily basis.

Two weeks after the pope’s comments cited in the column, he harshly criticized the death penalty as “an attack” on human dignity following Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s plans, initially supported by President Donald Trump, to conduct a public execution by firing squad. The administration canceled the public showing of the execution only after widespread condemnation.

The pushback included Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican secretary of state, who called it “unacceptable to turn death into a spectacle.” The archbishop heading the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops decried the planned livestream as “a barbaric promotion of a culture of death. The public execution even of one who has done grave harm will only further undermine the moral fabric of our nation and be a blight on the conscience of its people.”

The pope has repeatedly pushed back against the Trump administration’s accelerated expansion of executions.

Pope Leo had challenged those who describe themselves as “pro-life” for opposing abortion while supporting the death penalty. “Someone who says, ‘I am against abortion’ but says ‘I am in favor of the death penalty’ is not really pro-life,” Leo said.

The first Trump administration expedited the execution of 13 federal prisoners between July 2020 and January 2021, ending a 17-year hiatus and carrying out more federal executions in six months than the U.S. government had in the previous 56 years.

President Joe Biden stopped federal executions during his presidency. In December 2024, just before leaving office, he commuted the sentences of 37 out of 40 federal death row inmates to life in prison without parole. He excluded three whose crimes involved terrorism or hate-motivated mass murder.

The extrajudicial killing of 239 supposed drug traffickers under Trump’s Operation Southern Spear is another egregious case of the government’s unlawful and immoral taking of human life. These people were killed by U.S. Navy warships and airstrikes on more than 80 vessels in the Caribbean and Pacific outside of U.S. waters. There were no arrests, charges or trials.

The killings included two survivors alive in the water after a strike, whom U.S. authorities killed in a follow-up strike. The Trump administration proudly films and publicizes each killing. This occurs while major international bodies, human rights organizations and regional governments widely condemn these killings as unlawful extrajudicial executions and violations of international and domestic law. They include the U.N. special rapporteur on human rights and countering terrorism, Ben Saul, who warned that the systematic killings may amount to crimes against humanity.

The unprovoked attack on Iran has led to the death of more than 1,000 Iranian civilians, 15% of whom were children. On Feb. 28, a U.S. Tomahawk missile targeted an elementary school in Minab, killing 156 civilians, including 120 children. That same day, a U.S. missile strike on a sports complex in Lamerd killed 21 people, including four children, while a women’s volleyball team was using the facility. U.N. human rights experts concluded these two strikes could constitute war crimes.

We only hear of the 21 U.S. military service members killed in the Iran bombing as if innocent Iranian children, women and men don’t count. Pope Leo denounced this “delusion of omnipotence,” noting that Trump’s threat to annihilate Iranian civilization was “truly unacceptable.” He called for dialogue to prevail while calling for all people of good will to pray for peace as a way to “break the demonic cycle of evil” and to build instead the Kingdom of God where there is “no sword, no drone, no vengeance, no trivialization of evil, no unjust profit.”

“Even the holy Name of God, the God of life, is being dragged into discourses of death.” This referred to Trump and Hegseth using religion to justify their actions in the war. Hegseth and others invoked their Christian faith to cast the U.S. as a Christian nation trying to vanquish its foes.

U.S. military strikes targeting Yemen’s Houthis in April 2025 killed 153 civilians and wounded another 243. All of these civilian killings occurred as Hegseth reduced employees working on civilian harm mitigation in the Pentagon from 200 to fewer than 40.

Perhaps the most egregious massive deaths caused by the U.S. government recently are from Trump’s shuttering of the U.S. Agency for International Development in July 2025. This was after 94% of its 13,000 dedicated staff were terminated and 84% of its life-saving grants were withdrawn. Public health tracking and independent research have estimated that more than 700,000 people have died as a result of ending AID programs, including 500,000 children. They died from service disruptions, malnutrition and a lack of free medical supplies.

Pope Leo strongly criticized world leaders who spend billions on “killing and devastation” while neglecting vital humanitarian and restorative efforts, pointing out the global suffering tied to U.S. foreign aid cuts. Speaking in Cameroon during his April African trip, the pope lamented that “the world is being ravaged by a handful of tyrants.” He explicitly highlighted the grave consequences of these cuts, noting that hundreds of thousands of people face losing critical food and lifesaving support.

A comprehensive study published in the medical journal The Lancet at the time of USAID’s closure projected that if these funding cuts persisted through 2030, the shortfall could lead to more than 14 million avoidable deaths globally, including 4.5 million children under the age of 5. USAID-supported initiatives had prevented 91 million deaths over 20 years.

Trump is also forcing many older polluting coal-fired power plants to stay open that were scheduled to retire between now and the end of 2029. The number could reach 54. Public health estimates indicate that prolonged exposure to the increased emissions from these plants could result in 2,000 deaths per year. Forcing their continuing operation would cost ratepayers between $3 billion and $6 billion annually.

A study in the prestigious journal Science estimated that a staggering 460,000 deaths among Medicare recipients aged 65 and older were attributable to air pollution from coal plants between 1999 and 2020. Researchers found that inhaling fine particulate matter from coal exhaust was especially deadly. The Trump administration has rolled back and relaxed federal controls on this fine particulate matter and related toxic emissions from coal-fired power plants.

As Mr. Williams, my fellow columnist, wrote, “No government, legislature, doctor or court has the authority to decide that another person’s life should be ended. That decision belongs to God. This is not a question on which we should equivocate. Human life is sacred.”

While this was written concerning voluntary assisted suicide, isn’t it much more of a moral imperative to apply this condemnation to the involuntary taking of human life?

Gerald Winegrad represented the greater Annapolis area as a Democrat in the Maryland House of Delegates and Senate for 16 years. Contact him at gwwabc@comcast.net