Facebook suddenly removed the Prayers for Baby Isaiah James Facebook page yesterday. This was shocking considering that in two weeks the Facebook page had grown to 30,000 fans.
It’s not something we want to have, but chronic illness does not let us pick and choose. Call it the luck of the draw or the roll of the dice, but some of us have to contend and cope with lifelong ill health in the form of chronic disease. While some forms are relatively benign and allow you to lead a nearly normal life, others cause severe pain and are debilitating, leading to the deterioration of the quality of life. If you or a loved one suffers from a chronic illness that is painful, here’s how you can cope (or help them cope):
Sarah Wootten from the group Dying in Dignity, the leading assisted suicide advocacy group in the UK has called for changes to the assisted suicide laws in the UK based on two recent court cases, the Gilderdale case and the Inglis case.As demonstrated here and in the case of Frances Inglis last week, the existing law doesn't work in practice and is not in line with public opinion. Ultimately, we need a full public consultation on whether the law should change, to regulate and legalise assisted dying for terminally ill people and to create a specific or partial defence of "mercy killing" for these offences.
I am convinced that Keir Starmer, the Director of Public Prosecutions, set-up the acquital of Gilderdale by prosecuting her with attempted murder, when in fact her act was really an assisted suicide. 
Ann Widdecombe, a member of parliament in the UK brought a motion to the house yesterday to question the decision by the Director of Public Prosecutions, Keir Starmer, in his decision to prosecute Lynn Gilderdale with attempted murder.Early Day Motion
EDM 723
LAW ON ASSISTED SUICIDE (No. 2) - 26.01.2010
Widdecombe, Ann
That this House notes the tragic case of Lynn Gilderdale and the fact that her mother, Kay, was charged with assisted suicide for helping to end her life; further notes that 110 people from the UK have flown to Switzerland for the purpose of assisted suicide and not one person accompanying them has had to face being charged in court because the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) decided against it on the grounds that it would have been against the public interest; further notes, however, that although the situation of Lynn and Kay Gilderdale was more stressful and tragic than most of the cases where people were flown to Switzerland, the DPP decided to bring charges against Mrs Gilderdale, a decision questioned by the judge and many commentators for her; further notes, however, that the DPP's decision was taken shortly after the publication of his Guidelines of Assisted Suicide which have been heavily criticised by senior members of the legal profession, parliamentarians and public commentators on the grounds that they jeopardise the right to life of the vulnerable sick and disabled; further notes that the case has been used as a showpiece to promote the legalisation of assisted suicide and of the DPP's Assisted Suicide Guidelines; and calls on the Government to require from the DPP the grounds on which he decided to pursue Mrs Gilderdale, whose case accords with all the conditions listed in the Guidelines as justifiable for not bringing a prosecution.
I was reading the articles this morning about the case of Kay Gilderdale who was charged with attempted murder in the death of her daughter Lynn Gilderdale in the UK. Lynn had lived for many years with a significant disability. Kay had already pleaded guilty to assisting the suicide of her daughter, but last November the Director of Public Prosecutions, Keir Starmer decided to prosecute Kay Gilderdale for attempted murder and assisted suicide.He "fully respected" the not guilty verdict. Mrs Gilderdale was a "devoted mother who acted out of love and devotion" for her daughter Lynn.
THE novelist Martin Amis has called for euthanasia booths on street corners, where elderly people can end their lives with “a martini and a medal”.“How is society going to support this silver tsunami?”
“There’ll be a population of demented very old people, like an invasion of terrible immigrants, stinking out the restaurants and cafes and shops. I can imagine a sort of civil war between the old and the young in 10 or 15 years’ time.”
“There should be a booth on every corner where you could get a martini and a medal.”
An article that was published in the Scotsman.com and written by Christopher Mackie indicates that Margo MacDonald is optimistic that she will get her bill through the Scottish parliament that would legalize euthanasia and assisted suicide.
The first thing is that the media keep on suggesting that the bill legalizes assisted suicide. Anyone who reads the bill will quickly notice that the bill legalizes euthanasia and assisted suicide and it is not limited to people who are terminally ill, but rather it extends to people with disabilities and people living with chronic conditions.
The Catholic Church should oppose euthanasia and assisted suicide because these are acts that threaten the lives of the most vulnerable in society. The way that MacDonald has written the bill specifically focuses on people with disabilities. If I were a Scottish disability advocate I would be asking the question, when did society start promoting that my life is not worth living?
An interview on CNS news with Bobby Schindler, Terri Schiavo's brother, is worth reprinting. He is right to say that many people are still not telling the truth about her death.
Dr. Peter Saunders, the director of the Care Not Killing Alliance in the UK made the following comment to the scotsman.com. Saunders points out that the language is so wide that the bill includes euthanasia and assisted suicide and it can be used on people with disabilities, chronic conditions, or terminally ill.What immediately struck me about the bill is its coyness. It doesn't spell what sort of "end-of-life assistance" a "designated practitioner" may provide. Is it assisted suicide (where the person takes prescribed lethal drugs) or euthanasia (where the doctor gives a lethal injection)? The vague wording actually covers both.
The bill is full of detail about the bureaucracy – who can and cannot be a witness, how many days must elapse between successive requests and what constitutes "a positive report" from a psychiatrist. But on the crucial issue of how the deed is to be done, we are simply told that "the requesting person and the designated practitioner must agree on the means by which assistance is to be provided". Are we to infer that any means at all are acceptable? Surely not. Scotland's Parliament and people are entitled to know exactly what is intended here. This is far too serious a matter for euphemisms.
We have here a bill that is very similar, not to the Oregon assisted suicide law that is so much in favour with the euthanasiasts in England, but to the more virulent Dutch model. Ms MacDonald claims that her bill would lead to no more than 50 deaths a year in Scotland. Dutch experience suggests that the number could be as many as 1,500.The catchment area for Ms MacDonald's bill is very wide, comprising as it does anyone who is not just terminally ill, but "permanently physically incapacitated to such an extent as not to be able to live independently". What sort of message does this send to disabled people and to others dependent on friends or relatives? It says: "If you cannot live without help, you are a candidate for having your life ended." Ms MacDonald may be well-intentioned, but this bill is simply too dangerous.
Margo Macdonald is trying to pull the wool over the eyes of Scottish parliamentarians by introducing a bill to legalize euthanasia and assisted suicide with language that is imprecise and dangerous.
By using the terminology - end of life assistance, she is attempting to create confusion surrounding the fact that this bill would legalizing euthanasia (which is usually done by lethal injection) and assisted suicide (a lethal dose).This bill Section 1 states:
It is not a criminal offence or a delect for a person -
(a) to privide end of life assistance in accordance with this act; or
(b) to privide assistance (assisted suicide), including assistance by participating in any step (euthanasia) required by this Act, to enable another person (possibly not restricted to medical practitioners) to obtain or provide end of life assistance in accordance with this Act.
Section 2 Need for two formal requests.
Section 3, Revocability of request for assistance.
Section 4: Eligibility requirements.
Section 5, Requirements relating to designated practitioners and psychiatrists
Section 6, Requirements relating to first formal request
Section 7, Consideration of first formal request by designated practioner,
Section 8, Requirements relating to second formal request,
Section 9, Consideration of capacity etc. by psychiatrist,
The involvement of the psychiatrist in the process is a potential safeguard, but because the bill has such a wide application - people with disabilities, chronic conditions or "terminally ill", therefore the role of the psychiatrist is really to approve "thumbs up" or to reject "thumbs down".Section 10, Agreement on provision of assistance,
Subsection 1(b) asks - who is to provide the end of life assistance.
Subsection (2) states: The agreement must be in writing, signed by both the requesting person and the designated practioner, and dated.
Section 11, Requirements relating to the actual provision of assistance,
This is a reprint of the blog comment made by Peter Saunders, the director of the Care Not Killing Alliance in the UK. He proves that the claims by Ms MacDonald that only 50 Scots a year would die by assisted suicide is false.Margo MacDonald claims that about 50 Scots a year would die if her ‘end of life assistance’ bill were to be enacted.
She makes this remarkable claim on the basis that experience in the few countries where assisted death has been legalised shows that it accounts for only one in every 2,000’ deaths - though, interestingly, she names no specific country or source. The facts tell a very different story.
A select committee of the Westminster Parliament investigated the death rate from euthanasia and assisted suicide in Oregon and The Netherlands as part of its examination of Lord Joffe’s Assisted Dying Bill.
It found that, in the US State of Oregon, where physician assisted-suicide (but not euthanasia) is legal for the terminally ill only, the rate was 1 in 714 deaths. Given that there are some 55,000 deaths a year in Scotland, we might expect therefore about 80 deaths a year with an Oregon-type law. In fact, deaths from assisted suicide have risen steadily in Oregon since the law there was enacted 13 years ago. By 2008, the number of Oregonians who were committing suicide every year with drugs legally supplied by their doctors had risen nearly fourfold!
More important, however, Ms MacDonald’s proposed law, like that in The Netherlands, allows both assisted suicide and euthanasia and it would license the practice not only for the terminally ill but for anyone who is ‘permanently physically incapacitated to such an extent as not to be able to live independently’ and who ‘finds life intolerable’.
In The Netherlands the select committee assessed that one in every 38 deaths was the result of legislation similar to what Ms MacDonald is now proposing. This would translate into nearly 1,500 deaths of Scots every year. All this information is publicly available in the 2005 report of the House of Lords select committee, whose in-depth investigation of 'assisted dying' heard from nearly 150 expert witnesses in four countries.
Ms MacDonald's estimates, which are wide of the mark by a factor of 30 – or 3,000 percent, are seriously misleading. The Scottish public and Parliament would be well advised to approach her bill with great caution and in knowledge of the facts rather than the spin.
CTV news reported that Baby Isaiah will get a one week reprieve while an independent expert examine Baby Isaiah to determine his actual medical condition.A city judge has decided she needs more time to consider the arguments in the case of an Alberta family battling Alberta Health Services (AHS) to keep their son on life support.
This means that baby Isaiah James May will not be disconnected from his ventilator Wednesday afternoon as originally planned by AHS and the Stollery Children's Hospital.
Madame Justice Michelle Crighton ruled Tuesday morning in an Edmonton courtroom she will come back with her decision on Jan. 27 after hearing from an independent expert in the emotionally-charged issue.
The lawyer for the May family wants the hospital and health authority to delay their plans for 90 days. Alberta Health Services told the court they are willing to wait only 30 days.
When Isaiah was born in Oct. 2009, he suffered severe oxygen deprivation. Doctors say they've done everything they can. But the parents believe their son is showing signs of improvement.
The boy was born in the Rocky Mountain House Hospital after a difficult 40-hour delivery. On Oct. 24th, 2009 the boy was airlifted to hospital and admitted for treatment. The boy was then placed on a ventilator in the hospital's neonatal intensive care unit.
A letter sent to the parents by Alberta Health Services on Jan. 13stated that the boy's doctors believed all medical procedures had been exhausted. They informed the parents that the boy will never recover from a severe lack of oxygen at birth.
"The diagnosis is unchanged; your son suffered severe anoxic brain injury at birth and has irreversible brain damage. There is no hope of recovery for Isaiah," the letter stated.
It went on to say, "Accordingly, it is with sadness that we are advising you that your treatment team will discontinue mechanical ventilation support to Isaiah after 2 pm Wednesday, January 20, 2010."
Isaiah's mother Rebecka May stated in court documents that her son has continued to grow since his birth.
May said medical staff informed the family that "Isaiah would not grow." But the woman noted that Isaiah has "continued to grow since his birth and now weighs ten pounds eleven ounces."
May also mentioned in documents that her son's pupils dilate, his eyes open daily, and he moves his hands, arms and feet with "increasing frequency."
A "devoted mother" who found her desperately ill daughter trying to kill herself spent 28 hours administering a cocktail of lethal drugs to her after failing to convince her to go on living, a court has heard.
Kay Gilderdale, 55, helped her daughter Lynn, 31, end the pain of an "unimaginably wretched" form of myalgic encephalopathy. She handed her daughter syringes of morphine to administer to herself and when that failed, gave her antidepressants and sleeping pills, injected morphine into her intravenous line and tried to cause a fatal clot on the lung, Lewes Crown Court, south of London, was told.
At one point early the next day, when she saw her daughter was still breathing, Mrs Gilderdale rang an assisted dying charity for advice. Shortly afterwards Lynn Gilderdale, died - 30 hours after she had called her mother to her bedside in the midst of a suicide attempt, pleading: "I want the pain to go. I don't want to go on."
The jury heard that Mrs Gilderdale, a "loving, caring" mother supported "unconditionally" by her family, admitted assisting her daughter's suicide in December 2008.
Sally Howes, QC, prosecuting, said the jury had to judge whether her actions amounted to attempted murder. "Instead of assisting, she then set about performing actions which were designed with one intention only, that of terminating her daughter's life. It was not done to make her better. It was done to make sure that she died."
The charge was attempted murder because nobody could be sure whether Mrs Gilderdale had administered the fatal dose or doses. She denies the charge.
The continuing story about Baby Isaiah May in Edmonton. The Calgary Sun reported on the issue with this article. After speaking to Rebecka May I must say that the Calgary Sun was fair in their presenation of the story. The May family wants more time to give Isaiah a chance to improve enough to go home. What is so wrong about a family wanting to give their child a chance to go home with them. As their baby fights for his life, a Rocky Mountain House couple are about to battle Alberta Health Services and Edmonton’s Stollery Children’s Hospital who want to take their son off the machines helping keep him alive.
Rebecka and Isaac May will be in court in Edmonton Tuesday to try to get a 90-day injunction to keep their three-month-old son, Isaiah, on life support.
After Isaiah was born Oct. 24 with severe oxygen deprivation and had to be airlifted to Stollery hospital for treatment, doctors told his parents he was brain dead.
“They said he would never move, his eyes wouldn’t dilate,” Isaac said.
But as the little boy remained on life support, his parents thought things were looking up as Isaiah began to gain weight and show signs of improvement.
Then last Wednesday they received a letter from Alberta Health Services stating his diagnosis was unchanged and that the hospital would be withdrawing life support on Jan. 20, prompting the couple to take the matter to court to fight for their son’s life.
“He’s doing everything they said he wouldn’t,” Rebecka said.
“We believe he will keep improving and we just want to give him more of a chance.”
“We believe every life is a life worth fighting for.”
Holding her baby in her arms at the hospital, she continues to be optimistic.
“I will fight for him until I can’t fight for him,” she said.
“Because I love him.
“As a parent you always want to hope.”
A story from CTV news in Edmonton has reported about the battle that the parents of Baby Isaiah are willing to fight against the Stollery Childrens Hospital in Edmonton to give their son a chance to survive.A mother and father from Rocky Mountain House are set to fight Alberta Health Services and the Stollery Children's Hospital to keep their infant son on life support.
Isaiah James May was born in October after suffering severe oxygen deprivation. Doctors say they've done everything they can. But the parents believe their son is showing signs of improvement.
The boy was born in the Rocky Mountain House Hospital after a difficult 40-hour delivery. On Oct. 24th, 2009 the boy was airlifted to hospital and admitted for treatment. The boy was then placed on a ventilator in the hospital's neonatal intensive care unit.
A letter sent to the parents by Alberta Health Services on Jan. 13th stated that the boy's doctors believed all medical procedures had been exhausted. They informed the parents that the boy will never recover from a severe lack of oxygen at birth.
"The diagnosis is unchanged; your son suffered severe anoxic brain injury at birth and has irreversible brain damage. There is no hope of recovery for Isaiah," the letter stated.
It went on to say, "Accordingly, it is with sadness that we are advising you that your treatment team will discontinue mechanical ventilation support to Isaiah after 2 p.m. Wednesday, January 20, 2010."
Isaiah's mother Rebecka May stated in court documents that her son has continued to grow since his birth.
May said medical staff informed the family that "Isaiah would not grow." But the woman noted that Isaiah has "continued to grow since his birth and now weighs ten pounds eleven ounces."
May also mentioned in documents that her son's pupils dilate, his eyes open daily, and he moves his hands, arms and feet with "increasing frequency."
A lawyer representing the family will be in court Tuesday attempting to get a 90-day injunction. Court documents are requesting that the hospital be restrained from removing the boy off life support care, and direct the hospital to provide complete disclosure of Isaiah's medical records.
An article from World Radio Switzerland is suggesting that a referendum on "suicide tourism" may happen in Zurich to resolve the assisted suicide debate that has become an intense in that region.Intense debate continues in Zurich surrounding the issue of so-called “suicide tourism” or “death tourism.”
Right-wing politicians have found support in parliament for their argument that people from outside Zurich shouldn’t be allowed to come to the canton to use the services of assisted suicide groups.
The conservative UDF party in Zurich have called for the people to vote on the matter. They say only people who’ve lived in Zurich for at least a year should be eligible.
The cantonal cabinet said such a vote would go against the federal constitution, which allows assisted suicide as long as there’s no financial motive.
The constitution also guarantees equality of treatment regardless of people’s background.
Despite the cabinet’s concerns, Zurich’s parliament has now voted in favour of holding a referendum.
But it’s by no means certain the issue will go to the ballot—the matter could now be taken to the federal tribunal.
The radical ideology that is promoted by Ludwig Minelli who operates the Dignitas 
suicide clinic is creating a general stir among politicians in Switzerland.
Yesterday I saw the article about Wye Hale-Rowe, a member of the Final Exit Network, who was arrested in connection to a death, who pleaded guilty in Arizona. I was planning to blog it immediately, but due to family commitments I failed to put my thoughts on this blog. Now I notice that Stephen Drake from Not Dead Yet has done a good synopsis of the issue. This is a "reprint" of Stephen Drake's comments:Readers may remember our story on the so-called "assisted case" of Jana Van Voorhis, a 58-year-old Phoenix woman who died mysteriously in her bed in the spring of 2007.
It was a particularly sad and bizarre yarn (even by our standards), and had a slew of dicey legal and ethical issues wrapped inside of it.
One of our key interviews in the piece was with Wye Hale-Rowe, then 79, a retired family therapist and great-grandmother who now lives in Michigan. She was then was a volunteer for the Final Exit Network, an offshoot of the now-defunct Hemlock Society.
Earlier today, Hale-Rowe pleaded guilty in Maricopa County Superior Court to facilitation to commit manslaughter, a felony.
In striking a plea deal with county prosecutors, Hale-Rowe agreed to testify against the three remaining defendants in the case, an aged Scottsdale man who allegedly also assisted Van Voorhis in killing herself, and two senior Final Exit officials from out of state. (emphasis added.)
"The court decision made Montana the third state where it is legal, but the state has no specific laws outlining guidelines for doctors like they do in Oregon and Washington. That will leave Montana doctors on their own to determine how to proceed if they choose to help a dying patient commit suicide.
The Supreme Court said nothing in the law prevents a doctor from prescribing death-inducing drugs to terminally ill, mentally competent patients. And the court said doing so would be a defense against homicide charges.
But doctors, just because they could have a defense to charges of murder, aren't likely to rush into the process. They are hoping the Legislature until now hesitant to wade into the debate will craft a legal framework for assisted suicide."
The court did not suggest a regulatory regime. Even in Oregon where assisted suicide is defined within the law abuses occur, such as when Barbara Wagner was denied medical treatment but offered assisted suicide or palliative care."Frequently we give medications that provide comfort with the possibility of hastening death, but that's not the point to hasten death, the point is to provide comfort," she said. "Feeding tubes and machinery are not a very good idea at that point. There are situations where enough is enough."
By Alex Schadenberg
The Newsweek story reports:It was a fantastic story that ruled the headlines for a few days, but unfortunately, it was only partly true, and the resulting media circus distorted the work of Houben's doctor, Steven Laureys. In reality, Laureys didn't need advanced technology to diagnose Houben, who doesn't meet the definition of a locked-in patient. Laureys actually can't verify that the patient was fully conscious for all those 23 years. Nor did Laureys acquaint Houben with "facilitated communication," a controversial aided-speech method that has Houben reliant on the hand of a therapist to peck out letters on a keyboard. (This method has been debunked time and again, including in a famous series of child-abuse trials involving severely autistic children.) But as the story gained more and more media attention, the narrative changed, and Laureys's work was increasingly misinterpreted. The doctor now sees his name linked to facilitated communication and seems driven to defend the method, even though the case is more accurately seen as a vindication for a simple but elegant observational test that can be used to determine a patient's level of consciousness.In other words, Laurey's research was falsely attacked as being connected to a questionable communications technique rather than examining his research for what it actually means. The article went on to state:
Laureys, who directs the Coma Science Group at the University of Liege, Belgium, is well regarded for his research on consciousness in brain-injury patients, especially for devising new ways to distinguish patients in a vegetative state from a minimally conscious one (the latter sees waxing and waning of awareness). It's an important distinction: minimally conscious patients have a better chance of recovery than vegetative ones. Laureys's research may give doctors better tools to diagnose these patients. His work using fMRIs and digitally processed EEGs to determine brain activity is world-reknown. This summer, his team published work illustrating how a paper-and-pencil observational test, the Coma Recovery Scale (CRS), first developed by neuropsychologist Joseph Giacino in 1991, is far superior to a subjective analysis—in other words, the collective opinion of entire teams of physicians and therapists, many of whom still misdiagnosed patients after weeks of treatment.The article then explains how the story of Rom Houben actually came to be:
According to Laureys's research, the CRS, a standardized exam where responses to sensory stimuli are repeatedly tabulated, provides a more detailed picture than a routine bedside neurological examination, which might only involve a few minutes of reflex testing of unresponsive patients. It allows doctors to pick up on a variety of low-level patient behaviors that might not otherwise be noticed. In the published study, his team used the CRS to find that 18 of 44 of "vegetative" patients had been misdiagnosed.
After the study was published, Laureys got a call from Manfred Dworschak, a reporter interested in profiling the doctor and his work. He asked Laureys to help provide a human dimension for the article—a misdiagnosed patient who was willing to go public. Laureys recommended Rom Houben, a car-accident victim whose mother had pressed him for a consultation in 2006, convinced that her son had been misdiagnosed for two decades. Though Houben had not been one of the patients evaluated in the study, the technique was the same: Laureys used the CRS to determine that Houben was, in fact, conscious. Laureys thought Houben would also make a good source in part because he appeared to be able to describe the horror of his misdiagnosis, thanks to the facilitated-communication therapist hired by his family soon after Laureys's initial evaluation.The article then explains how the Associated Press created a confusion surrounding the story. The article continues:
The German magazine Der Spiegel published the piece about Houben and Laureys online on Nov. 23, which Laureys hoped would call attention to the effectiveness of the underused CRS. (The English translation appeared online two days later.) But when U.S. outlets reported on Houben, key facts were bungled. For instance, The Associated Press mistakenly claimed that Laureys taught Houben how to communicate and later noted that Laureys used sophisticated brain-activity scans to diagnose Houben (he hadn't—though experimental scans were later made, the CRS was all it took for an accurate diagnosis). None of its coverage mentioned the Coma Recovery Scale. Even worse, the presence of the much-debated facilitated-communication technique took the story in a different direction.
Then bioethicist Art Caplan joined the game. His intention was to debunk Laureys criticism of misdiagnosis by attacking the communications method. The article states:Art Caplan, a University of Pennsylvania bioethicist, knows stories like these can make families afraid to withdraw care and donate organs even when doctors reliably predict a poor outcome for a patient. The moment he saw tape of Houben's aide moving his fingers across a computer keyboard, he sensed trouble, Caplan says. "That's Ouija board stuff," he told the AP. There was a brief moment when the story first broke stateside during which CRS was discussed—Joe Giacino, the American neuropsychologist who developed the test, appeared on Campbell Brown's show on CNN and explained the benefits of the scale, which many centers still don't use. But only 48 hours later, Giacino was back on CNN arguing that the questions about facilitated communication that had become the media's focus were legitimate.The article concludes by assuring us that in spite of the false furor, Laureys will be back with further research.
Unfortunately, the furor over this odd "therapy" has further confused what the public understands about coma recovery. In fact, facilitated communication is so rare that it's a nonissue for most brain-injury patients. Neither Laureys nor Giacino has ever seen another brain-injured patient use it. Nonetheless, Laureys is planning a thorough investigation and asks the public and the scientific community "to be patient" until he can get "facilitated communication through [a] peer-reviewed journal."Link to the original article: http://www.newsweek.com/id/229784
As Laureys heads back into his lab, leaving behind a mess he wants to clear up one day with published science, he admits to some naiveté and says he feels a little "paranoid." "Don't I regret, or should I have foreseen, that this would have happened? Well, I didn't," Laureys says with a sigh. "In retrospect, of course, it's always easy."
Stephen Drake from Not Dead Yet has commented on the Montana assisted suicide decision from a non-lawyer perspective.Thus noted, the Patients and the class of individuals they represent are persons who suffer from an illness or disease, who cannot be cured of their illness or disease by and reasonably available medical treatment, who therefore expect death within a relatively short period of time, and who demand the right to preserve their personal autonomy and their individual dignity in facing this destiny..
In choosing this language, I purposely eschew bright-line tests or rigid timeframes
Alex Schadenberg from the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition blogged about the rise in deaths from euthanasia and physician assisted suicide in the Netherlands. He questions the lack of information about babies who die under the Gruningen protocol or the prevalence of disabilities or dementia in those who die from euthanasia or physician-assisted suicide. Obviously you can tell by the name of his group where he stands, but I think these questions are important regardless of where you stand on this issue and as a matter of public policy in balancing the protection of some with the freedoms of others.
"regardless of where you stand on this issue and as a matter of public policy in balancing the protection of some with the freedoms of others."
Since euthanasia is giving the physician the right to directly and intentionally take the life of their patient, therefore it really isn't an issue of freedom, but rather an issue of when physicians believe it is OK to kill and when they don't believe it is OK to kill.
A media release that was issued yesterday by Jerry Dincin, the president of the Final Exit Network, expresses their support for the court decision in Montana that legalized assisted suicide in that State, while the group expresses concern that these laws will not allow enough people to die by assisted suicide.... despite the victories in Oregon, Washington, and Montana and the good works of organizations like Compassion and Choices and Hospice, the needs of mentally competent, suffering patients who have not been declared 'terminal' (having fewer than six months to live) have not been addressed.
Ted Goodwin, the past president of the Final Exit Network, is also the Vice President of the World Federation of Right to Die Societies. Compassion and Choices is a member group of the World Federation of Right to Die Societies.
