Free Republic

We live or die by the health of the physical environment which we struggle to conserve. Just as crucially, we are nourished by an ethical environment, the moral oxygen of our human world.In the beautiful words of Dr. Margaret Cottle, a colleague of mine, we have been standing among ancient trees, an old-growth forest of noble principle. It has been growing organically for 2,400 years, since Hippocrates, a “delicate social ecology of mutual support and protection” which forbids the killing of a patient.Carter v. Canada , the judge-decreed legalization of physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia in Canada, tries to take a...

Tony Nicklinson is 58 and paralysed from the neck down after suffering a stroke in 2005. He is seeking legal permission for a doctor actively to end his life. A Channel 4 Dispatches programme this week, ‘Let our dad die’, put Tony’s case with powerful emotion but it did not tell us that most people with locked-in syndrome do not actually think like this man. No one can help but be sympathetic to Tony Nicklinson, but cases like his are extremely rare and hard cases make bad law. The overwhelming majority of people with severe disability - even with ‘locked-in...

Switzerland, which already permits suicide purveyors to make a lot of money out of suicide tourism, is now bringing self termination into nursing homes and hospitals. From the Swiss Info story: Vaud is set to become the first Swiss canton to introduce a law explicitly regulating assisted suicide. On Sunday, 62 per cent of people in the French-speaking canton voted in favour of a proposal obliging nursing homes and hospitals to accept the practice. The plan was put forward by the cantonal parliament and when the new law comes into force, doctors in nursing homes and hospitals must respect the...

The issue of euthanasia in Canada is no longer simmering on a back burner. After the Supreme Court of British Columbia found yesterday that Criminal Code provisions which prohibit doctors from helping their patients commit suicide are unconstitutional, it is on a full, rolling boil. In the landmark decision, Justice Lynn Smith set down that if suicide is legal, preventing handicapped persons from taking their lives must be discriminatory.  Judge Smith gave Canada's Parliament a year to draft a law permitting assisted suicide. In the meantime she granted the principal plaintiff in the case, Gloria Taylor, an exemption. This makes...

Right-to-die activists hope more countries will allow assisted suicide or euthanasia in coming years as the world population ages, but opponents are determined to stop them, a dispute that flared ahead of competing conferences in Switzerland. "We have seen over the last 20 years a general migration of positivity towards this being a just cause," Ted Goodwin, the American president of the World Federation of Right-to-Die Societies, told a news conference in Zürich on Tuesday. … Assisted suicide has been legal in Switzerland since 1942, if performed by a non-physician who has no direct interest in the death. Euthanasia, or...

In 1994, Dr. Charles Cleeland authored a study that found that 42% of cancer patients with pain were receiving inadequate therapy for their pain. This led to the Health and Human Services (HHS) guidelines for more aggressive pain management and the ubiquitous question about your level of pain “on a scale of 1 to 10” every time you visit the doctor for any reason. The interest in pain management was actually a response to the push for legalized assisted suicide. Advocates of assisted suicide claimed that uncontrolled pain justified aiding cancer patients to end their lives. At the time, there...

According to the newly released report, Dying with Dignity, co-signed by nine Quebec politicians, people are now ready to regard death through a new lens. We can free ourselves from a traditional "paternalistic" relationship with our physicians in order to embrace a more informed attitude in facing suffering and end-of-life issues. Our values, the report says, have greatly evolved in the past 20 years; therefore, it is only normal that in our farewell to life, we should take a close look at a new option offered by the state. The report's writers caution that although in the past Quebecers' values...

Respect for autonomy is one of the most convincing arguments for euthanasia. It was the theme of a strong defence of legalising it in Australia in the Journal of Law and Medicine by Margaret Otlowski and Lorana Bartels in 2010. They concluded that “ in a secular society with an ageing population” legalisation is inevitable. However, in the latest issue of the JLM a criminologist at the University of Tasmania has made a vigorous response. Jeremy Prichard doubts that many people in the community will be able to give full and voluntary consent to ending their lives. He contends that...

The Secret Suicides of Oregon Health & SpiritualityApril 2nd, 2012 Michael Cook Oregon’s public health division has released statistics on deaths under its physician-assisted suicide (PAS) legislation. It shows a steady increase in the number of lethal prescriptions and in the number of deaths. In 1998, the first year after PAS was legalised, there were 24 prescriptions and 16 deaths. In 2011, there were 114 prescriptions and 71 deaths. A total of 935 people have had lethal prescriptions and 596 have died.The Physicians for Compassionate Care Education Foundation, a staunch foe of the legislation, analysed the 2011 figures. Here are some of its...

On March 27th , the government of Switzerland released a report on the practice of assisting suicide with a dramatic conclusion: five out of every 1,000 resident deaths now involve assisting suicide. Swiss authorities recorded a steady rise of assisted suicides over the decade that records were kept.While assisting suicide is legal in only a tiny handful of jurisdictions both in the U.S. and abroad, the Swiss practice operates extra-legally. Assisting suicide in Switzerland is technically illegal, but the law on the matter punishes only those with selfish motives–which has turned out to be nearly impossible to prove in Swiss...

It says a lot about the opinion-forming classes that pretty much the only right they get excited about these days is the "right to die". They treat the right to free speech as a negotiable commodity which may be snatched away from un-PC people. They have given the nod to the watering down of other essential rights, such as the right to trial by jury and the right to silence. But the "right to die"? They cleave to that like crazy. It is the one right which, if you will forgive the pun, they would die for. Today, MPs are...

Dr. Peter Goodwin killed himself this week. He took advantage of Oregon’s 15-year-old assisted-suicide law, which allows residents of the Beaver State to score a legal dose of drugs by obtaining a prescription from an enabling physician. Goodwin happened to be one of the first physicians to voice support for Oregon’s euphemistically titled “Death With Dignity Act,” which took effect in late 1997. “I don’t think we would have aid in dying in Oregon without Dr. Goodwin,” said Barbara Coombs Lee, who worked closely with the former family physician to get the law the passed. Indeed, the late Dr. Goodwin’s...

Disability rights activists from across Massachusetts will speak today before the Massachusetts legislature’s joint Judiciary Committee in opposition to a ballot question that would legalize assisted suicide. The activists are members of the recently formed group, Second Thoughts: People with Disabilities Opposing the Legalization of Assisted Suicide. The hearing will be at 1 p.m. in room A-2 at the state house. “Second Thoughts is a group of disability rights activists and organizations who believe that assisted suicide is a dangerous mix with a broken, profit driven health care system,” said John Kelly, the group’s director.“Economic and family pressures can make...

When I was a teenager I was extremely lucky, landing in the middle of a cultural and social revolution. Driving into assembly on the back of a motorbike, having a fling with an unsuspecting English teacher and being desperate to get myself laid at 15 gave me immediate membership to the only club worth joining - the club that was 'the 60s'. Apart from occasional doses of teenage angst, I was what you might call very, ‘alive and kicking’; anything I could kick against, I did. And therein lays the problem - the one about being alive. Consider the figures...

ATLANTA – Georgia's top court on Monday struck down a state law designed to discourage assisted suicides after a legal battle brought by four members of a suicide group who said the law also violated free speech rights. The Georgia Supreme Court's unanimous ruling concludes the 1994 state law "restricts speech in violation of the free speech clauses" of the U.S. and Georgia constitutions. The court's opinion held that Georgia only criminalized assisted suicides that include a public offering to assist. It said the law didn't expressly prohibit assisted suicides, meaning some were legal in Georgia. The opinion, penned by...

An experienced doctor who works with terminal patients has asked whether assisted suicide is just a cost-saving exercise. Dr Elizabeth A Burroughs, in a letter to a national newspaper, said: “Quality palliative care costs money; assisted suicide is a cheaper option. But how long would it be before pressure was being placed on the terminally ill to ‘do the decent thing’?” Dr Burroughs also commented: “In 30 years as a GP, I was asked by at most a handful of terminally ill patients to hasten their deaths." Care “In 17 years working in hospices I cannot recall ever having received...

Egbert, a slightly built, genial and energetic retired anesthesiologist with a snowy goatee, turns to his computer, his back to me, content to answer an e-mail while I sort through the pile. Once I finish untangling, I hold in my hands a curious plastic sack, about 21 inches long and 18 inches wide. A bunched white elastic strip, reminiscent of a garter, circles the mouth at the open end. A thick plastic tube runs into the sack, stretching 37 inches before branching into a T-shape with 12-inch arms extending from each side of the joint. Egbert calls it an “exit...

Michael Nazir-Ali is Director of the Oxford Centre for Training, Research, Advocacy & Dialogue, and was formerly the Bishop of Rochester. Time and again, Parliament has refused to relax the law on assisted suicide.  Having failed there, attempts were made to get around the law by persuading the Director of Public Prosecution to revise guidelines about who might be prosecuted for helping a relative or a friend to end their life.  A relentless campaign has been kept up in the media inspite of the thinness of the medical, legal and moral arguments which are regularly brought up in support...

This time, the proponents of assisted suicide think they've got it right. Trapped in the nebulous area of trying to establish criteria for when assisted suicide should be allowed, without danger of being accused of sliding down that proverbial slippery slope, British advocates have come up with a proposal.They seem to think that this time, it's foolproof. It isn't.The U.K.'s Commission on Assisted Dying released a report of 400 pages this past week, authored by lawyers, doctors and an ex-police commissioner, which would allow for assisted suicide in people 18 or older, who are mentally competent and have a maximum...

TORONTO, Ontario, January 6, 2012 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Starting Friday, Canada’s largest national pro-life organization will send a powerful warning to households across the country about what could happen if the courts acquiesce to recent pleas for the legalization of euthanasia and assisted suicide. Campaign Life Coalition has launched a month-long national media campaign with 60-second TV ads running on the Sun News Network from Jan. 6-29.  It is expected to reach over 3.2 million viewers. Mary Ellen Douglas, CLC’s national organizer, said the campaign comes at a crucial time as there has been a renewed push to legalize euthanasia in...