Dutch Euthanasia Society promoting euthanasia for people who are “tired of life”

Eugéne Sutorius, a leader of NVVE, a euthanasia lobby group in the Netherlands, is leading a new group of academics who are demanding the legalization of euthanasia for people who are not suffering or terminally ill but “tired of life.”

The group has launched a petition campaign whereby the hope to gather 40,000 signatures which is enough to have the issue debated in the Dutch parliament based on their citizens initiative legislation.

Euthanasia in the Netherlands is legal when the person is suffering physical or mental pain, is supposed freely consenting and two physicians have agreed.

The petition is asking the Dutch legislature to approve euthanasia for people who are over the age of 70 and “tired of life.”

As reported in DutchNews.nl former minister and feminist Hédy d’Ancona said the right to choose one’s time of death is a natural extension of her lifelong battle for emancipation.

Dick Swaab, a neurologist said death should be straightforward. In the animal kingdom, individuals are simply replaced, not patched up endlessly.

The Euthanasia Prevention Coalition recognizes that the ultimate end for the euthanasia lobby is to give physicians the right to directly and intentional cause a person's death for any reason. Legalizing euthanasia for people who are “tired of living” is also being promoted by Philip Nitschke, the leader of Exit International in Australia.

If Sutorius and his colleagues achieve their goal, euthanasia will clearly become the ultimate form of elder abuse.

Link to the article: http://www.dutchnews.nl/news/archives/2010/02/tired_of_life_group_calls_for.php

Scottish euthanasia bill would encourage suicide tourism to Scotland

A leader of Dignity in Dying, the leading euthanasia lobby group in the UK, has warned that the bill that was introduced by Margo MacDonald to legalise euthanasia and assisted suicide in Scotland would also encourage suicide tourism to Scotland.

Edward Turner, the treasurer for the Dignity in Dying group, was reported in an article written by Charlene Sweeney for The Times in the UK, as saying:

Margo MacDonald's assisted suicide Bill is "morally ambiguous" and would encourage suicide tourism to Scotland if it became law.

Turner also explained his concerns related to the fact that the bill focuses on legalising euthanasia for people with disabilities. He stated:

Ms MacDonald's inclusion of people who had been physically incapacitated raised troubling questions about the value of the lives of the disabled.

"When you talk about that (people with disabilities), it's morally ambiguous. I'm not saying it is immoral, I am not saying it is right or wrong, but people have a range of views. There is an issue about the protection of disabled people's lives. Some disabled people are very threatened the idea that able-bodied society as a whole, which has no experience of disability and no experience of the discrimination which disabled people face, would suddenly say, "Ah, that's the answer to disability - give people the option of assisted death.'"

The article also stated that:

Mr Turner said that he and Ms. MacDonald had spoken about their differences and "agreed to disagree", but he suggested that the inclusion of disabled people would be one of the parts of the "End of Life Assistance (Scotland) Bill" to fall.

Turner suggested that even though the bill states that the person must be registered with a Scottish physician for 18 months that people with "money, wherewithal, nous and forward planning" would find a way to bend the rules. He stated:

"If they get diagnosed with something unpleasant, as a little kind of insurance policy they'd try and register with a Scottish GP, and you might even find people moving there."

Alison Davis, the leader of the disability rights group, no less human, who lives with spina bifida, emphysema and osteoporosis, opposes the Scottish bill based on her experience as a person with disabilities. Seventeen years ago, she decided she too wanted to die. The pain she still suffers is constant. "When the pain is at its worst I cannot think or speak, and this can go on for hours, with no prospect of relief. Taking morphine often makes me feel sick, and severe nausea is an added burden," she declares. She tried cutting her wrists and taking overdoses of painkillers. Had euthanasia or assisted suicide been legal she would now be dead. But then she changed her mind. A visit to a disabled children's project in India, where she saw the suffering of dozens of uncared-for youngsters convinced her to set up a charity helping them.

Allison Davis states that:

"Euthanasia would have robbed me of the last 17 years of my life, and it would have robbed my Indian children of the chance in life they now have,"

As much as I like the honesty of Edward Turner, the fact is that he is only discussing a difference in strategy. Essentially Turner is saying that MacDonald's bill is likely to fail because it is ambiguous and is perceived as a threat to the lives of people with disabilities. Turner supports a "go slow" approach that would, in the end, give us all the same provisions of MacDonald's Bill but do so through time.

Link to the article from The Times: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/scotland/article7019800.ece

Madison County mission: Stop elder abuse before it happens

A short article in the Suburban Journals written by Ken West, explains how a Madison County coroner is working to prevent elder abuse. The rate of elder abuse is growing and the number of vulnerable elderly people is also increasing.

The point of my comment is that if assisted suicide were legal it could be the perfect cover-up for elder abuse.

The article states:

As a county Sheriff's Department detective and coroner, Stephen P. Nonn has seen some pretty gruesome crimes over his 30-year career. Now, Nonn is trying to stop crimes before they happen among one especially vulnerable slice of the population: the elderly.

"They're easy targets. Someone has to be there to speak for them. By the time my office gets involved, it's too late," said Nonn, the Madison County coroner since 2000.

Nonn and a group of health care, law enforcement and social service professionals have formed the Elder Abuse-Fatality Review Team, a kind of oversight panel to make sure the county's 26,000 elderly aren't being abused. They met for the first time last month.

The goal is to recognize abuse before someone is killed or injured and, in the event a death happens, to see how it could have been prevented. The effort will train health care workers and others to look for signs of abuse. Additionally, every funeral home in the county has a volunteer deputy coroner trained to spot for problems.

"They are my eyes and ears out there," he said.

Link to the article: http://suburbanjournals.stltoday.com/articles/2010/02/07/madison/news/0207cvj-elderly000.txt

Study shows some people diagnosed as PVS can communicate

A study published in the New England Journal of Medicine entitled: Willful Modulation of Brain Activity in Disorders of Consciousness showed that 5 people who were diagnosed as persistent vegetative state (PVS) after traumatic brain injury, were capable of communicating while being tested with a MRI brain imaging scanner.

The study used brain scanning called functional MRI on 23 people diagnosed as PVS and 31 people diagnosed as minimally conscious.

The people were asked to imagine two situations. The first was standing on a tennis court, hitting a ball to an instructor with second being walking from room to room in their home. Since the two tasks produced different brain responses, the researchers were able to discover whether the person responded to the question and in one case they were able to communicate with the person by telling the person to image one situation if the answer to a question was yes and imagine the other situation if the answer to the question is no.

In reference to the person that the researchers were able to establish a Yes/No communication with, Dr. Martin Monti, one of the researchers, told the Associated Press:

“We were stunned when this happened. I find it literally amazing. This was a patient who was believed to be vegetative for five years.”

“It just says how much we can learn from looking directly at somebody’s brain.”

Dr. Adrian Owen, a co-author of the report told the Telegraph paper in the UK that the findings have enormous philosophical and ethical implications. He said:

“Not only did these scans tell us that the patient was not in a vegetative state but, more importantly, for the first time in five years it provided the patient with a way of communicating his thoughts to the outside world.”

“We can be pretty confident that he is entirely conscious. He had to understand the instructions, comprehend speech, and then make a decision. Obviously this fits into the issue of when patients to be allowed to die.”

The issue of PVS patients being dehydrated to death became a reality in 1993 when the British Courts approved the withholding of fluids and nutrition from Tony Bland, a man who had suffered a traumatic brain injury. Since that time families and medical teams in the UK have been deciding when it is or is not appropriate to dehydrate a PVS person to death.

Nicolas Schiff, a neurologist from Weill Cornell Medical College in New York, was quoted as saying to Reuters that the findings were a: "game changer" that could "have a profound impact across medicine."

If it can be proven that the person was misdiagnosed as being in PVS then it would be less likely that a decision would be made to allow the person to die by dehydration.

Allan Ropper of Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston stated to Reuters that:

brain activation was detected in very few patients and only those with a traumatic injury, not in cases where the whole brain had been damaged by oxygen starvation.

In 2005, Terri Schiavo died by dehydration after her husband Michael petitioned the court to withhold all fluids and nutrition from her. She died in 13 days from dehydration in a case that divided many Americans.

Since Terri Schiavo was not otherwise dying, the act of directly and intentionally dehydrating her to death is considered by many, including myself, to be euthanasia by dehydration.

What this study proves is that we need to learn a lot more about people who are diagnosed with PVS. This study should also confirm that it is not our place to judge the quality of life of others, but rather to accept people with all types of disabilities.

Link to the Globe and Mail article:http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/health/vegetative-brains-show-signs-of-awareness-study/article1455750/

Link to the Telegraph article: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/7150119/Patients-in-vegetative-state-can-think-and-communicate.html

Link to the article in the National Post:
http://www.nationalpost.com/life/health/story.html?id=2522519

‘Stop dehydration deaths,’ says Terri Schiavo’s brother in response to new brain scan

This is a reprint of a CNS article from yesterday that was about the recent research that proved that some unresponsive people have respond to questions.

The article:

Reacting to news of a breakthrough in brain scanning technology, Terri Schiavo's brother Bobby Schindler is calling for a halt to removing hydration from brain-damaged patients who are thought to be in a persistent vegetative state.

An “unscientific, inaccurate” diagnosis of unresponsive patients is being used as “a criterion to kill,” Schindler charged.

Schindler was responding to news that researchers from the Medical Research Council (MRC) and the University of Liège have used a technique called functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to map a patient’s brain activity while he was asked to answer ‘yes’ or ‘no’ questions.

One patient, a 29-year-old man who suffered a severe traumatic brain injury in a traffic accident, was able to communicate by willfully changing his brain activity, a press release from the MRC reports. He correctly answered questions such as “Is your father’s name Alexander?”

Dr. Adrian Owen and his team at the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge, England were the developers of the technique.

“We were astonished when we saw the results of the patient’s scan and that he was able to correctly answer the questions that were asked by simply changing his thoughts,” Dr. Owen commented. “Not only did these scans tell us that the patient was not in a vegetative state but, more importantly, for the first time in five years, it provided the patient with a way of communicating his thoughts to the outside world.”

Dr. Steven Laureys of the University of Liège, a co-author of the study, said the scans were the only viable method for the patient to communicate since his accident.

“It’s early days, but in the future we hope to develop this technique to allow some patients to express their feelings and thoughts, control their environment and increase their quality of life.”

The three-year study conducted fMRI scans on 23 patients diagnosed as being in a vegetative state. The technology detected signs of awareness in four of the cases, 17 percent of the participants.

The fMRI technique can decipher the brain’s answers to questions in healthy participants with 100 percent accuracy but has previously not been used for a patient who cannot move or speak.

Dr. Martin Monti, another MRC co-author of the study, said the advance could help with clinical questions and would allow patients to say if they are feeling any pain.

The new study is published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Dr. Allan Ropper, a neurologist at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, wrote an editorial accompanying the study. According to HealthDay News, he said that people are going to have to “grapple” with the meaning of brain scans that show consciousness or residual consciousness.

“It has to do with what you think life is and what is a meaningful life. Those are social, cultural and theological questions,” he said.

He also cautioned against giving false hope to families, noting the small percentage of the responsive patients. All the study’s patients had suffered traumatic brain injuries, not damage from oxygen deprivation.

Speaking of the 29-year-old patient, Monti said “it is still the case that we managed to give him, to a little extent, a voice. In a sense there was a very positive outcome. We managed to interact. This is an extremely exciting thing."

CNA sought comment on the issue from Bobby Schindler of the Terri Schiavo Foundation.

His sister Terri, who was severely brain damaged from oxygen deprivation, was at the center of a 2005 legal dispute in Florida. She was denied nutrition and hydration by court order in a case between her blood relatives and her husband.

Schindler said the study backs other findings about the “unscientific, inaccurate” diagnosis of a persistent vegetative state (PVS) and shows how it is “often” wrong when diagnosing people with severe injuries.

“As in the case of my sister, they’re using this diagnosis as a criterion to kill.”

Schindler said his family had asked a judge for similar testing for Terri but it was denied.

If the technique was easy to conduct and available, he said, it would have given a better understanding of her condition. “Why not ask, especially when it is going to end someone’s life?”

Asked whether the case offers insight into how unresponsive patients should be treated, he replied:

“Nobody should have to earn the right to hydration. We should do everything we can to care for these people, regardless of how responsive or unresponsive they are.”

Schindler lamented that people are being “indoctrinated” to see killing as “an act of compassion.”

“We are morally obligated to care for these people,” Schindler told CNA.

“They should stop any further dehydration deaths, because we’re learning how inaccurate the PVS diagnosis is.”

Discussing the other patients who could not communicate, he said families of unresponsive patients should continue to treat them with “love and compassion.”

But the patient’s condition should never justify removing food, hydration or “basic care,” he stressed.

Schindler also noted that improvements on science are possible and could improve unresponsive patients’ functioning.

“We should never come to the conclusion that someone is better off starving to death,” he told CNA.

He was critical of news reports that claimed the new technology would not have helped Terri Schiavo, saying some stories were written “as if these doctors want to go out of their way to justify Terri’s death.”

“If you read these articles, it seems they always have this caveat: ‘let’s not jump to conclusions with Terri Schiavo and say these tests would have proven she wasn’t in the conditions the doctors said she was in.’”

Schindler told CNA that more doctors were on record saying that Terri could have been helped with some of the technology available. They believed that she wasn’t in a vegetative state.

He also advocated the elimination of the term “vegetative state” from common use, saying it is “dehumanizing” and devalues the person and his or her “inherent moral worth.” In his view, PVS diagnosis should also not be used as a criterion for ending someone’s life because of how often it is wrong.

Schindler said he describes unresponsive patients as “persons with brain injuries.”

“I don’t know why I have to label them as being a vegetable. I think it leads to an existing prejudice against these types of people,” he told CNA.

Link to the article: http://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/stop_dehydration_deaths_says_terri_schiavos_brother_in_response_to_new_brain_scan/

Woman charged with possession of euthanasia drug

An article in today's Australia Herald Sun newspaper indicated that a woman was arrested for attempting to illegally import two bottles of Nembutal, a drug that is used to euthanize animals.

The article stated:

A 61-year-old Melbourne woman has been charged with importing a euthanasia drug from Mexico into Australia.

Two bottles of the border-controlled drug Nembutal were intercepted at Melbourne Airport last March.

Australian Federal Police officers executed a search warrant on an address in the eastern suburb of Canterbury on April 15, 2009 but the woman was not charged on summons until last week.

The Canterbury woman is due to appear in the Melbourne Magistrates' Court today.

The maximum penalty for this offence is 25 years' jail or a $550,000fine.

Philip Nitschke, the founder of Exit International, has been encouraging people to go to Mexico and obtain Nembutal from veterinary clinics in that country. Nitschke is promoting a dangerous and irresponsible action by encouraging his supporters to illegally obtain Nembutal.

Link to the article in the Herald Sun: http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/breaking-news/woman-charged-over-euthanasia-drug/story-e6frf7jx-1225826714430

German doctor's fatal drug overdose killed British patient

The euthanasia lobby wants to assure the public that if euthanasia or assisted suicide is legalized that there won't be any deaths without consent or any abuse. They say this while they ignore the fact that the Netherlands government study in 2005 showed that 550 deaths without explicit consent occurred that year, which was down from 950 deaths without explicit consent in 2000.

Meanwhile, the story of David Gray, 70 from Cambridgeshire, who died in February 2008 of a lethal overdose of the painkiller diamorphine allegedly by a German doctor, Dr Daniel Ubani isn't raising eyebrows amongst the euthanasia lobby crowd.

The question of how the UK uses outside physicians is a concern, but the greater concern should be around the reality that a doctor directly and intentionally caused the death of David Gray and he was only given a nine month suspended sentence for causing a death by negligence.

The article stated:

Ubani, who has blamed exhaustion for his error and acknowledged he was unfamiliar with the drug, was given a nine-month suspended sentence for causing death by negligence by a German court but cannot face prosecution in Britain.

If euthanasia or assisted suicide were legal, they would not have even given Dr. Ubani a suspended sentence because the question would have been: Did Gray request this type of death or not?

David Gray's son, Stuart was quoted as saying:
"This inquest has allowed us the opportunity to have the circumstances surrounding my father's death to be examined in some detail and thus afforded us some consolation, in particular because Dr Ubani has escaped U.K. justice,"
I wonder how the euthanasia lobby has the gall to suggest that if euthanasia or assisted suicide were legal that no-one will be killed by accident or against their consent. The fact is that people already die by accident and if you give them the defense that a euthanasia or assisted suicide law would provide them, then you will never get a conviction.

Just consider the facts related the American physician Dr Michael Swango who killed and then killed again while the medical establishment covered it up to protect themselves from lawsuit or embarassment.

At least in this case the coroner was willing to have an inquest.

Link to the article: http://www.vancouversun.com/health/German+doctor+fatal+drug+overdose+killed+British+patient+Inquest/2522026/story.html

Link to information about Michael Swango: http://www.trutv.com/library/crime/serial_killers/weird/swango/index_1.html

http://karisable.com/skazswangp.htm