Keyword: medicide
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IF HIPPOCRATES, the "Father of Western Medicine" were alive today, would he favor Question 2, the Massachusetts ballot initiative to authorize doctor-prescribed suicide?Presumably not: The celebrated code of medical ethics that bears his name, which physicians for centuries took an oath to uphold, flatly forbids assisted suicide. "I will not give a lethal drug to anyone if I am asked," the Hippocratic Oath avows, "nor will I advise such a plan."Some things never change, and one of them is the beguiling idea that doctors should be able to help patients kill themselves when incurable disease makes their lives unbearable. The...
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An extraordinary poll published by the British Humanist Association (BHA) highlights the public ambivalence about assisted suicide and euthanasia. In conjunction with other recent surveys, it shows that more people are in favour of the law allowing the killing of relatively healthy patients like Tony Nicklinson than of those who are terminally ill. The "respectable" wing of the assisted dying movement, Dignity in Dying, wants a very limited right to medically assisted suicide: only people who are terminally ill and in full possession of their faculties would qualify. Even this limited position is hugely controversial. But the BHA believes that...
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A change in the law to allow doctors to help mentally competent adults to end their lives is 'almost inevitable', Dr Fiona Godlee said, and the medical profession should not oppose it. A survey of GPs found almost two thirds were in favour of the British Medical Association and the Royal Colleges adopting a neutral stance to the issue. Assisted dying is due to be debated at the BMA conference at the end of the month. Dr Godlee said the debate on assisted dying is similar to that of abortion reform in the 1960s when the main medical professional bodies...
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WASHINGTON — Old checklist for doctors: order that test, write that prescription. New checklist for doctors: first ask yourself if the patient really needs it. Nine medical societies, including the American Society of Clinical Oncology and the American College of Cardiology, representing nearly 375,000 physicians are challenging the widely held perception that more health care is better, releasing lists Wednesday of tests and treatments their members should no longer automatically order. The 45 items listed include: * Don't repeat colonoscopies within 10 years of a first such test * Don't perform early imaging for most back pain * Don't do...
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Well, I've seen Sarah Palin's "Death Panel" up close. I started not to write anything about it, but when Cheney got his new heart and the hullabaloo followed, I felt I needed to point out a few things. My mom had a bad stroke January 29 and was left paralyzed on her left side. She also had trouble swallowing and was given a nasal feeding tube until she could be tested and worked with by a rehab team. Her medical history was she was a 3 time cancer survivor and was on coumadin for a clot in her left leg....
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February 8, 2012 (LifeSiteNews.com) – The conundrum faced by the organ transplant industry, that the removal of vital organs kills the “donor,” can be “easily obviated by abandoning the norm against killing,” two leading U.S. bioethicists have said. In an article titled, “What Makes Killing Wrong?” appearing in last month’s Journal of Medical Ethics, the authors have moved the argument forward by admitting that the practice of vital organ donation ignores “traditional” medical ethics. “Traditional medical ethics embraces the norm that doctors … must not kill their patients. This norm is often seen as absolute and universal. In contrast, we...
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The perils of the social devaluation of people include legal assisted suicide and euthanasia It is not uncommon to hear people without disabilities and people who have recently acquired a disability say they would rather be dead than disabled. Although politically incorrect, embedded perceptions that life with disability is full of suffering and indignity promote the idea that it's a death sentence. Able-ist social conditioning equates disability with pain, frailty, incapacity, and poor quality of life. It views persons with disabilities as problems that need to be fixed. The 'problem' of disability I would argue the "problem" of disability...
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The “slippery slope” is often derided as a logical fallacy. But when one of the leading advocacy groups for euthanasia in Belgium posts an article entitled “Euthanasie: tijd voor de volgende stap, Euthanasia, time for the next step”, it’s hard not to think that it may not be so illogical after all. The Humanistisch-Vrijzinnige Vereniging (Humanist-Liberal Association) complains that eligibility for euthanasia is far too restrictive. At the moment, only people with unbearable suffering can be euthanased. This leaves out people in irreversible comas, people with dementia, people with irreversible brain diseases and people who are under 18. This is...
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A woman in Australia who was pregnant with twins decided to have one of her babies aborted after doctors discovered that he had a life-threatening congenital heart defect. The seriously disturbing part? The doctors aborted the wrong fetus, terminating a perfectly healthy child. After doctors realized the "blunder," the woman, who was 32 weeks pregnant, had to undergo an emergency cesarean to deliver the sick fetus, where it was later terminated. The Royal Women's Hospital confirmed the incident and referred to it as a "terrible tragedy." Um, yeah ... one could say that. I honestly really don't even know what...
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No amount of reassuring chat can disguise his advice that we should keep deadly drugs in our sock drawerDr Philip Nitschke, aka “Dr Death”, has been in town. According to a report in the Independent on Tuesday the Australian euthanasia campaigner has been telling audiences in London, York and Scotland that “his aim [is] to save lives”. His argument runs that “once people have a means of killing themselves, many who might attempt a botched suicide would instead prolong their lives, knowing they had a way out without having to call on a loved one to help, exposing them to...
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An artist's rendering of the unborn child at 32-weeks gestation. MELBOURNE, Australia, November 23, 2011 (LifeSiteNews.com) – A 32-week set of twins were both aborted after staff at an Australian hospital initially killed the healthy twin by accident, and then also aborted the sick sibling after realizing their mistake, reports the Herald Sun. The paper reports that the mother of the children was told that one of her twin children had a congenital heart defect that would require years of surgery, and that the child may not survive. After she decided to have the child aborted, doctors then gave...
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Julia Gross with her mother Estelle. LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM, August 22, 2011 (LifeSiteNews.com) – A recently retired New York Times reporter has penned a book in which she details how she followed through on a shocking pact to help her 88-year-old mother, Estelle, starve to death. In an excerpt from the book, “A Bittersweet Season,†published recently in the Daily Mail, Jane Gross describes her mother’s increasing dissatisfaction with life as her health deteriorated, and her mounting desire to die, despite the fact that she was not terminally ill. “So here we were, my mother and I, wishing that she...
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LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM, August 22, 2011 (LifeSiteNews.com) – A recently retired New York Times reporter has penned a book in which she details how she followed through on a shocking pact to help her 88-year-old mother, Estelle, starve to death. Julia Gross with her mother Estelle. In an excerpt from the book, “A Bittersweet Season,” published recently in the Daily Mail, Jane Gross describes her mother’s increasing dissatisfaction with life as her health deteriorated, and her mounting desire to die, despite the fact that she was not terminally ill. “So here we were, my mother and I, wishing that she...
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Most philosophical arguments against the personhood of embryos, fetuses or comatose patients focus on consciousness as the capacity that corresponds to the possession of moral value. Conscious human beings, even minimally conscious, are obviously ‘one of us’ — have interests, feel pain, perceive objects, and can offer at least rudimentary gestures of self-report. Since they are “persons†they should not be subjected to purely instrumental treatment such as lethal experimentation or deadly dosages of drugs. Those who cannot exercise consciousness are either not yet persons (e.g., embryos) or no longer persons (e.g., irreversibly comatose patients). In end-of-life issues, all the...
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Karen Royle’s memories of the last precious hours with her cherished mother Rona are far from the serene, comforting images that she had hoped for. Before arriving in Zurich, Karen, 51, had envisaged a pretty Swiss chalet, with perhaps a view of the Alps — ‘just like the pictures in the book Heidi, which I’d loved as a child’. But the Dignitas ‘apartment’ at No  84 Gertrudestrasse, where 74-year-old Rona chose to end her life rather than succumb further to the ravages of Motor Neurone Disease (MND), bore no comparison to the picture-postcard tranquility her family had imagined. The image Karen...
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In 1992, my friend Frances committed suicide on her 76th birthday. Frances was not terminally ill. She had been diagnosed with treatable leukemia and needed a hip replacement. Mostly, though, she was depressed by family issues and profoundly disappointed at where her life had taken her.Something seemed very off to me about Frances’s suicide. So I asked the executor of her estate to send me the “suicide file” kept by the quintessentially organized Frances and was horrified to learn from it that she had been an avid reader of the (now defunct) Hemlock Quarterly, published by the aptly named Hemlock...
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When Dr. Jack Kevorkian, a leading proponent of right-to-die legislation, died June 3, he may have achieved something he was unable to accomplish in his last years: perhaps return the issue of physician-assisted suicide (PAS) to a serious level of legitimate public discourse. Public opinion polls conducted during the middle of the last decade by CBS/New York Times and the Pew Research Foundation show that Americans are pretty much split down the middle on whether PAS should be an option for dying patients and their families. Yet in more recent years, the debate, while unsettled, seems to have subsided even...
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The BBC has received hundreds of complaints from views over a program it aired Monday night showing an assisted suicide of a person killing himself at a suicide tourism facility in Switzerland. The program featured footage of a man dying at a Dignitas suicide tourism clinic in Switzerland and it was hosted by Sir Terry Pratchett and it showed millionaire Peter Smedley taking a lethal cocktail of drugs that resulted in his death. Almost 900 people contacted the BBC to complain while just 82 supported the showing of the program. Four senior peers complained abotu the program and accused the...
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Today, at age 83, Dr. Jack Kevorkian slipped into eternity and left in his wake a trail of civilizational wreckage from which we may never recover. With his Physician Assisted Suicide (PAS) movement, he was one of the Twentieth Century’s architects of the Culture of Death; the Margaret Sanger of the opposite end of the life spectrum. As Msgr. William Smith taught so very well:1. All social engineering is preceded by verbal engineering.2. All evil begins with a lie. Identify the lie, and we succeed in unmasking the evil.Kevorkian began his evil with a lie by omission. He frightened terminally...
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Dr. Jack Kevorkian, the Michigan pathologist who championed physician-assisted suicides, died early Friday after being hospitalized with kidney problems and pneumonia. The 83-year-old Kevorkian, who said he helped some 130 people end their lives from 1990 to 1999, died about 2:30 a.m. at William Beaumont Hospital in Royal Oak, Mich., close friend and attorney Mayer Morganroth said. An official cause of death had not been determined, but Nurses at the hospital played recordings of classical music by composer Johann Sebastian Bach for Kevorkian before he died, Morganroth said. Kevorkian was freed in June 2007 after serving eight years of a...
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