Jewish Care Home accuses euthanasia doctor of sneaking in and killing a resident.

Alex Schadenberg
Executive Director - Euthanasia Prevention Coalition

Louis Brier Care Home

An Orthodox Jewish Care Home filed a complaint against euthanasia doctor, Ellen Wiebe for sneaking into the Home and killing a resident, which is against the policy of the Louis Brier Home in Vancouver.

According to Susan Lazaruk, of the Vancouver Sun, the Jewish Home stated in its complaint that Wiebe's actions were “borderline unethical.” David Kesselman, CEO of the Louis Brier Home stated:

“It was hidden,” 

“There’s no documentation. She came in and I don’t know who you are. You can tell me you’re a physician, you could tell me you’re an astronaut, how do I know?

Kesselman continued:

“Imagine the implications for our staff and our residents and their families,” 

“We have a lot of Holocaust survivors. To have a doctor sneak in and kill someone without telling anyone. They’re going to feel like they’re at risk when you learn someone was sneaking in and killing someone.”

Kesselman explained that Wiebe was well aware of ethics policy of the home:

He said the home has a defined policy devised by an ethics committee that includes allowing its residents to have a MAiD assessment done at the home. But residents are transferred to a health-care facility for the procedure.

• Dr Will Johnston: New assisted dying laws claims unintended victims.

Wiebe admitted to sneaking into institutions to do lethally injection. Susan Lazaruk reported:

The narcissism of assisted suicide

This article was published on August 11, 2015 by Spiked.

A shocking case that shows that assisted suicide is about more than alleviating suffering.

Dr Kevin Yuill

By Kevin Yuill, an academic and an author.

In his sharply observed book The Culture of Narcissism, the American social critic Christopher Lasch remarked that, in modern life, ‘The usual defences against the ravages of age – identification with ethical or artistic values beyond one’s immediate interests, intellectual curiosity, the consoling emotional warmth derived from happy relationships in the past – can do nothing for the narcissist’. 

In a generation that has forgotten that it stands in the midst of a long line of past and future generations, Lasch noted, many live ‘for the feeling, the momentary illusion, of personal wellbeing, health, and psychic security’.

As Lasch later lamented, his exploration of narcissism was widely misunderstood. In his writing, narcissism referred not to a confident self-centredness, but to the inability of an entire culture to see beyond the corners of itself, to understand the self’s place in history, or to believe in its ability rationally to control the future. Lasch claimed that the survival of the self – not self-improvement – had become the highest aspiration.

There is more than a whiff of narcissistic survivalism in the openness of many Western societies to assisted suicide. This was best symbolised by the trip Gill Pharaoh, a healthy, 75-year-old retired nurse, took to the LifeCircle suicide clinic in Switzerland. Pharaoh, who died on 21 July this year, was not ill, but wished to die. She noted in her final blog that she wanted ‘people to remember me as I now am – as a bit worn around the edges but still recognisably me!’.

This ‘snapshot’ sentiment, whereby we preserve ourselves for posterity, is surely illusory. We can neither control how people remember us nor can we preserve a moment in time. There is no perfect moment or ideal physical presence, no ‘real me’, because life is a process, constantly unfolding. We continually learn and change, and the ‘authentic’ self cannot be captured at one specific time. Nor is a ‘perfect’ or merely ‘good’ death meaningful to the deceased. Killing oneself does not preserve anything – it destroys the prospect of further experiences and interactions.

Pharaoh resolutely rejected religion; she once complained that she was ‘ignored by the law, which originates from a god in whom we have no belief’. But, in the absence of any broader meaning or belief system, it is almost as if assisted-suicide advocates like Pharaoh are recreating a religion of the self. This is a religion that sees the world as a mirror, that perceives the importance of people in terms of how they are perceived, and that feels no obligation to the previous generations that struggled to make life easier and leave a legacy for future generations. It is this mindset that leads people like Pharaoh to take their own lives. But why would she imagine that those in the future would welcome her decision to sacrifice her life – all because of a fear that it would get harder and less pleasurable?

Pharaoh had been a member of the Society for Old Age Rational Suicide (SOARS), a UK-based group that aims to change existing law to provide elderly, mentally competent individuals, who are suffering from various health problems, with a doctor’s assistance to die. Many of those who belong to these groups see themselves as rugged individuals who blaze their own paths. But this is also delusional. Rugged individualism would surely demand that you do the act yourself, rather than get government assistance to do it. Pharaoh was a nurse who surely knew how to ensure her own death without having to fly to Switzerland. But part of the plea for assisted suicide is always a plea for official validation of suffering.

The narcissist feels a constant need to be noticed, to be recognised, to have his or her feelings validated and find some reflection of his or her self in the world. If the narcissist is fearful, then the world must do something about it. The narcissist sees a world that does not feel their existential pain (after all, physical pain does not even feature in the top-five reasons why people in Oregon opt for assisted suicide) as the cause of that suffering.

If this is not narcissism, then why are Pharaoh and other assisted-suicide advocates so vocal about their need, not just to slip away quietly, but to have their decision validated by the state? The drive behind the assisted-suicide lobby is the idea that the world must mould itself around the perceived needs of ‘afflicted’ individuals.

Euthanasia cannot be contained, especially if the criteria is to eliminate suffering.

By Paul Russell - the Director of Hope Australia and Vice Chair of the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition - International. This article was originally published by Hope Australia.

Paul Russell

In November last year I attended a debate in Brussells between my Canadian colleague, Alex Schadenberg and two leading Belgian pro-euthanasia academics.

As I reported at the time, the comments made by Professor Etienne Vermeersch in not only defending the Belgian laws but also in arguing that there was ‘not enough euthanasia’ in his country left many of us speechless. Vermeersch was very clear: his aim to eliminate all suffering is a program of eliminating all sufferers. His observation that ‘not enough euthanasia’ deaths were occurring followed by a pointed attack on an audience member where Vermeersch said, ‘Wait until you are paralyzed’ said it all.

No-one wants to suffer and no-one wishes suffering upon another. This point, at least, we can say that we share with Vermeersch. But once we make the elimination of suffering the criteria for killing people were spinning out of control in a vortex that has only one logical conclusion: totally unfettered and unregulated euthanasia – with or without request.

We should be wary of accepting the opinion of one academic to draw such a calamitous conclusion. But Vermeersch’s words are also supported by what has occurred and what continues to occur in his country.

One recent example of what we could call ‘euthanasia anarchy’ should send shivers down the spines of any thoughtful observer. An official recent statement from the Belgian Society of Intensive Care Medicine boldly asserted that doctors need to be able to give lethal injections to shorten lives which are no longer worth living, even if the patients have not given their consent.

Michael Cook, from Mercatornet reports:

The Society has decided (decreed may be a better word) that it is acceptable medical practice to euthanase patients in critical care who do not appear to have long to live — even if they are not suffering, even if they are not elderly, even if their relatives have not requested it, even if they have not requested it and even if it is not legal.

The Society spells out its policy very carefully. It is not about grey areas like withdrawing burdensome or futile treatment or balancing pain relief against shortening a patient’s life. It clearly states that “shortening the dying process by administering sedatives beyond what is needed for patient comfort can be not only acceptable but in many cases desirable”.

“Shortening the dying process” is a euphemism for administering a lethal injection.

Most dying patients in intensive care have not made advance directives and “are usually not in a position to request euthanasia”.

Therefore, “difficulty can arise when the purpose of the drugs used for comfort and pain relief in end-of-life management is misconstrued as deliberate use to speed the dying process.” The Society’s solution to this difficulty is to allow its members to kill the patients.

Note: Belgian law does not support such behaviour, but it is likely, in a country that recently supported euthanasia for children, that this is being received by the Belgian populous with little more than a passing thought.

And for those who might be tempted to find solace in the thought that euthanasia laws might somehow protect vulnerable people, think again: This behaviour shows up the recent intense parliamentary debate on child euthanasia in Belgium as the sham that it really always was.

Whilst the law makers deliberated over euthanasia for children, including so-called safeguards, the medicos themselves have said, in very clear terms, that the law–regardless of what it does and does not allow–is redundant; that they and they alone will decide who lives and who dies. The statement is, by the way, inclusive of euthanasia for children in the same terms.

This kind of thinking, that the doctors are the prime (if not sole) moral agents and ethical guides in determining who should die by euthanasia, is quite common. We first saw a public expression of this kind of development in 2004/5 in The Netherlands with the advent of the Groningen Protocol which allows for the euthanasia of disabled neonates.

This remains, as it was then, outside the parameters of the Dutch law. As a postscript, the Dutch Medical Association said in 2013 that ‘parental suffering’ was a sufficient reason for infant euthanasia, even in circumstances where the child might not actually be suffering.