Free Republic

March 24, 2015 (NationalReview.com) -- I have repeatedly warned about articles published in medical and bioethics journals advocating killing the profoundly disabled or dying for their organs.The assault on the “dead donor rule” has now filtered down to the popular media. The Atlantic has an article advocating that dying patients be killed for their organs rather than having to actually, you know, die first. From, “As They Lay Dying:” A more useful ethical standard could involve the idea of “imminent death.” Once a person with a terminal disease reaches a point when only extraordinary measures will delay death; when use (or...

March 23, 2015 (LifeSiteNews.com) – The fight for life for the family of Lisa Avila, a mother of seven, continues.Avila, who has been in a coma for nearly six weeks, has been surrounded by family and friends who do not want Anaheim Regional Medical Center to remove the medical care that is keeping her alive.The hospital had planned to withdraw care on Friday afternoon at 4:00 p.m. local time, but chose to extend the deadline until Tuesday at noon.According to Avila's family, however, that's not enough time for their wife and mother to recover. They are insisting that she...

Conservatives often find themselves at odds with the libertarian crowd. However, is that anger really warranted? As President Reagan once said, “If you analyze it, I believe the very heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism.” True conservatives and libertarians, let’s not pretend there aren’t fakers on both side, all agree on the fundamentals: limited government, personal responsibility, and economic freedom. Neither group wants the government interfering in our daily lives and telling us what we can and cannot do. Now there may be slight disagreements on how that plays out in the policy arena, but we should not allow...

REMEMBRANCE of EASTER 2005 Crowd my eyes, you bevies of daffodils, And you forsythias in throngs of cheer, Dandelion galaxies and fountains of trees. Fill my mouth with the breath of hyacinths, you purple air And you roistering breeze. And you quince-buds so eager, you swelling seeds, You squirrels running stitches across the loom Of woven grasses, inflorescent weeds; Jasmine-bush, loop me with your lariats of perfume. Fill me, small birds, with your versicles, And chuckled replies. She is bleeding from the mouth and eyes. Sate me then, Sun, all dapple and spangle Crowd out all else Lade me...

It was in the early morning hours of Monday March 21st, 2005 that a Republican controlled Congress wrapped up a weekend series of sessions to pass legislation related to Terri Schiavo's case to allow federal courts to consider her right of due process. Final Senate passage of House Bill 203 came at 12:41 am and shortly thereafter President George W. Bush stepped out of his bedroom at the White House to sign the bill in a hallway. There was hope and fear surrounding the legislation. Hope from lawyers trying to save Terri's life and fear from Michael Schiavo. An emotional...

As we feared, the most egregious bill introduced this session is Senate Bill (SB) 128, a concerted effort to legalize physician-assisted suicide. Despite failing to pass similar laws five previous times in California, supporters of these so-called “Death with Dignity” laws have been emboldened by both a national effort to expand legalized physician-assisted suicide from coast to coast, and by the high-profile case of a 29-year-old California cancer patient who moved to Oregon to end her life there. While many such cases are tragic, just three states have succumbed to the legalization efforts of pro-death forces. Only Oregon, Washington and...

At the end of this month, Terri Schiavo will be ten years dead. But she is far from forgotten. Everyone reading these words knows the story, and everyone has an opinion. What began in 1990 as a private tragedy—a vivacious young woman stricken in the prime of life with a severe cognitive disability—became a source of profound cultural division, as likely to spark debate today as when the case first broke into the public’s consciousness. Why has her story remained so potent? Part of it has to do with the high-profile and vituperative legal and public-relations battle between Terri’s...

March 4, 2015 (LifeSiteNews.com) -- Although there has always been contraception, its acceptance and practice by society as a whole is a relatively new phenomenon. In the first part of the 20th century barrier methods became through mass production increasingly used. However, with the advent of the hormonal contraceptive pill in the 1960s the contraceptive era, ushering in the sexual revolution, really took off.The term “revolution” is by no means exaggerated, for the result was a fundamental change in the understanding of human sexuality in society. With the pill, people thought, nothing can happen, i.e. no child could be conceived....

According to a media report out of New Jersey, a third doctor–the others are Shewmon and Calixto–has signed a declaration stating Jahi McMath is not brain dead. The family attorney Chris Dolan says he will petition the California Secretary of State to rescind the death certificate. From the N.J.com story: Dolan provided NJ Advance Media with signed declarations from four doctors, including Charles J. Prestigiacomo, director of Cerebrovascular and Endovascular Neurosurgery at University Hospital in Newark and chair of the neurological surgery department at Rutgers, stating that McMath isn’t brain dead.“The brain structure evidenced in the MRI is not consistent...

Newsweek has a long article–in which I briefly appear–exploring how and why the euthanasia monster broke its fetters to turn the Netherlands into ground zero for the culture of death (now seriously challenged by the even more death-enthusiastic Belgians).Reporter Winston Ross interviewed experts and the impacted on both sides of the issue, so you should read the whole thing. What I wanted to share here, are the theories about why Netherlanders have permitted euthanasia with virtually no meaningful limits.First, media propaganda. From, “Dying Dutch: Once a supporter of euthanasia, he’s now one of its most vocal critics. Among the reasons...

Colorado lawmakers rejected a proposal to give dying patients the option to seek doctors’ help ending their lives, concluding a long day of emotional testimony from more than 100 people.For one lawmaker who voted no, the issue was personal. Tearfully telling her colleagues she was a cancer survivor, Democratic Rep. Dianne Primavera recalled how a doctor told her she wouldn’t live more than five years. But she found a doctor who gave her a different opinion. […] A House committee considering the bill voted 8-5 against it after dozens of people with serious illnesses and others who have seen relatives...

In a momentous ruling this morning, Canada’s highest court unanimously ruled to open the door to a doctor helping kill someone nearing the end-of-life stage, a ruling comparable to the sweeping Morgentaler ruling 27 years ago that allowed a doctor to kill someone at the earliest pre-born stage of life. In Carter v. Canada, the Court overturned a previous law prohibiting assisted suicide, in effect reversing the previous 1993 Rodriguez decision in which it said the state’s obligation to “protect the vulnerable” outweighed the rights of the individual to self-determination. The ruling makes Canada join the ranks of Switzerland, the...

OTTAWA, February 6, 2015 (LifeSiteNews.com) — In a momentous ruling this morning, Canada’s highest court unanimously ruled to open the door to a doctor helping kill someone nearing the end-of-life stage, a ruling comparable to the sweeping Morgentaler ruling 27 years ago that allowed a doctor to kill someone at the earliest pre-born stage of life. In Carter v. Canada, the Court overturned a previous law prohibiting assisted suicide, in effect reversing the previous 1993 Rodriguez decision in which it said the state’s obligation to “protect the vulnerable” outweighed the rights of the individual to self-determination. The ruling makes Canada join...

People with grievous and irremediable medical conditions should have the right to ask a doctor to help them die, Canada's highest court says in a unanimous ruling.. The Supreme Court of Canada says a law that makes it illegal for anyone to help a person commit suicide should be amended to allow doctors to help in specific situations. The ruling only applies to competent adults with enduring, intolerable suffering who clearly consent to ending their lives. The court has given federal and provincial governments 12 months to craft legislation to respond to the ruling; the ban on doctor-assisted suicide stands...

CORPUS CHRISTI, TX, February 2, 2015 (LifeSiteNews.com) -- A 12-year-old Texas boy who slipped into a coma after suffering a severe asthma attack has begun breathing on his own – just hours after hospital officials fought to take him off life support because they believed he was legally “brain dead.”  Now, his family has obtained a court order requiring the hospital to provide nourishment to the boy via a feeding tube, and hope to have him transferred to another facility within the week.Joey Cronin has been at Driscoll Children’s Hospital in Corpus Christi since January 14, when he suffered cardiac...

Will You Still Need Me, Will You Still Feed Me, When I’m 64? A Refutation of the Latest Assisted Suicide Bill By: Msgr. Charles PopeA bill has been introduced in the Washington D.C. City Council to legalize assisted suicide. And thus yet another battle is before us in the cultural meltdown of our land. Unpleasant though it is, dear reader, consider with me the proposed legislation and why we, as both Christians and those dedicated to Natural Law and the common good, must vigorously oppose it.As a tool for reflection, I am using an article published recently on the website DCist.com. I...

I sometimes gauge the virtue of a particular public policy by posing a hypothetical question: What if we promoted this policy exclusively within a disadvantaged sector? Secular progressives love assisted suicide. They fawned all over Brittany Maynard’s decision to take her own life last year, declaring the beauty of such a thoughtful, pensive, decision. After all, any decision that requires so much deep thought and garners a large online following must be the right one. So here’s the test. What if we marketed assisted suicide as an option, especially to inner-city blacks? Television commercials and billboards could tout a peaceful...

The history of human knowledge as it relates to the human body is a fascinating and terrible thing. In every age, the ability for physicians and other medical practitioners to effectively treat wounds or combat disease has been constrained by the technology – or lack thereof – available at the time. In the past, people often died from illnesses or injuries that are quite treatable today. Over the centuries, we’ve come a long way. Our understanding of human physiology and biology has enabled us to improve quality of life and extend life expectancy beyond anything our ancestors could have imagined.Despite...

Immoral bioethical policies and practices advance toward implementation through discourse–first in professional journals, and then in elite popular media columns.That process is now gearing up regarding what I call “VSED-by-Proxy.”VSED stands for “voluntary stopping eating and drinking”–suicide by self-starvation–pushed for the elderly and others by those compaaaaa–ssssss–ionate death zealots at the Hemlock Society Compassion and Choices.But what about mentally incompetent residents of nursing homes who willingly eat, but who years previously stated in an advance medical directive that they wanted to be made dead by starvation under such circumstances?We see increasing advocacy in bioethics that nursing homes be required to...

After a terminally ill woman made headlines when she moved to Oregon so she could end her life under a doctor’s care, two State Senators are hoping to bring a similar law to New York. “There are only five states in the country that allow for people to make end of life decisions similar to what Oregon does, and New York is not one of them,” State Senator Diane Savino told the Observer. Brittany Maynard, 29, was suffering from brain cancer when she ended her life November 1 with a lethal dose of secobarbital prescribed by her physician. In New...