Posted on 11/10/2011 3:50:31 PM PST by wagglebee
AMSTERDAM, Netherlands, November 10, 2011 (LifeSiteNews.com) – When a 64-year-old Dutch woman with dementia was killed in March, she was the first to be euthanized without the ability to consent, Dutch media reported Wednesday.
But anti-euthanasia activists are contesting the claim, saying Dutch patients have been killed without their consent for years.
The woman, a long-time euthanasia advocate, had progressed in her illness to the point where she lacked the ability to consent, but a committee of doctors approved the euthanasia nevertheless.
She left a note expressing her wish to be euthanized, and her husband and children supported her decision.
Alex Schadenberg, who heads the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition in Ontario, warned that allowing euthanasia without the ability for the patient to consent is a “whole other track.”
“When a person has dementia, the greater sufferer is the family member who is watching that person suffer,” he said. “So now really what they’re saying is, the family members who are experiencing the person with dementia, that we can have euthanasia to alleviate their suffering.”
“If you can do this to someone with dementia, and they’re also doing this to people with head injuries, well that means we’ve defined cognitive disabilities as a reason to euthanize,” he added.
The Netherlands formally legalized euthanasia in 2002, provided it was requested by a patient experiencing unbearable suffering.
But the law’s interpretation has since broadened to the point where the Royal Dutch Medical Association last month released new guidelines claiming the law allows euthanasia in cases of “mental and psychosocial ailments” such as “loss of function, loneliness and loss of autonomy.”
In reporting their 2010 statistics, for the first time the Dutch government reported instances of euthanasia for dementia patients. In 2010, 21 persons suffering from the early stages of dementia, but who were otherwise in good health, were euthanized.
“Euthanasia is beyond effective control in the Netherlands,” wrote bioethicist Wesley J. Smith on his Secondhand Smoke blog. “Folks, believe me when I tell you that ‘protective guidelines’ are not really meant to protect, but give the false illusion of control.”
“Once you accept killing as an acceptable answer to the problem of human suffering, ‘choice’ has increasingly less to do with it,” he added.
If that is not consent, what is?
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Men acting like God, Danger!
Hitler lives again.
I would think we will hear from Sara Palin. Death panels ping.
If you all will serve as my shrink for the moment, I will discuss my deep fears. What I fear the most is not death but the manner of death. The way they killed Terry Schiavo put a deep fright in me.
If the law is going not just approve of euthanasia but actually mandate it - and I bitterly disagree with the law - I don’t think treating humans worse than dogs is appropriate. I mean, when your dog gets sick and you have to put him down, you do it as painlessly and quickly as we know how. But when they killed Terry Schiavo they did it using the slowest, perhaps most brutal method known to man — they let her starve and die of dehydration!
Why not load them up with Heroin and let them enjoy the ride out? If you must stop the heart, do it when the patient is unconscious. I mean, take every precaution to make sure there is no pain and no psychological torture either. What we did was barbaric, we wouldn’t treat our pets that way why the courts play this game of “well, we didn’t actually kill her, we just withdrew food and water” they knew exactly what they were doing and lacked the courage to admit it. I hate them more for that than for anything else.
The boomers’ ole abortion mantra “human life is inconvient to me and my lifestyle, so kill it” is going to come back to haunt.
Boomers are going to be a terrible burden on the younger generation and they will abuse boomers with carelessness as they learned from their parents.
Very creepy.
Not only this but they also:
A. Claimed that she was feeling "euphoric" due to the dehydration, which is odd because if she was in a "permanent vegetative state" as was claimed she wouldn't be able to "feel" anything.
B. Loaded her up with morphine, which is odd because they claimed that she was in a "permanent vegetative state" which meant she shouldn't have needed morphine or, conversely, that she was "euphoric" which would also negate the need for morphine.
Coming here with Obamacare. Sebelius and Rahm Emmanuel’s ghoulish physician brother are almost as taken with euthanasia as they are with infanticide. If they will murder the healthy young in the womb, don’t think for a moment they will hesitate to dispatch the sick and the old. An outcry temporarily sidetracked the death panels, but they will be back, following a media campaign depicting euthanasia as “merciful.” An appalling vista.
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