ProWomanProLife

“Doctor Death” has himself died. You always knew this was coming. It’s just hard to know what to say when a man like that dies. It takes a bit of a psychopath to kill over 100 people and then have “no regrets” about that.

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Jennifer adds: According to The Telegraph today, one in three doctors now support euthanasia.

Adelaide was recently ranked Australia’s “most liveable” city, making it a macabre location choice for Philip Nitschke’s specialist clinics.

GWENETH Nitschke believes she will live to see her son operating Australia’s first euthanasia clinic in Adelaide.

Not that the 90-year-old mother of voluntary euthanasia campaigner Philip Nitschke has a terminal illness.

She reluctantly moved into a northern Adelaide independent living centre last week after a fall at home, and although she has no major health problems, she is urging South Australian MPs to pass a bill allowing doctor-assisted euthanasia.

[...]

Dr Nitschke, the youngest of three children, quietly stopped in to check on his mother yesterday, as he scouted Adelaide’s suburbs for a suitable location to open a specialist euthanasia clinic.

He will spend two days in talks with prospective landlords, but will not disclose potential sites because he said the matter was as controversial as opening abortion clinics. “We really don’t want to go making it impossible to find a place,” he said.

“There is a degree of apprehension here, and people are starting to see this as an extension of the abortion clinic issue, where they fear they are going to be picketed.”

Dr Nitschke said a clinic would initially provide information on procedures required before a doctor could help a patient die, and be fully operational only if a proposed bill passed through both houses of the state parliament on a conscience vote.

The bill last week moved from the second reading stage into committee in the lower house, in what sponsors of the reform hailed as “historic”.

But right-wing Labor government MPs are opposed to the bill and Family First has threatened to withdraw election preferences from any MP who backs the bill.

Health Minister John Hill, who supported the bill last week during a speech about the death of his sister, yesterday said it was not designed to allow a stand-alone clinic. Labor MP Steph Key, who introduced the reworked bill, yesterday said Dr Nitschke’s plan was premature.

I wrote my Masters’ Thesis in bioethics on neonatal bioethics. While I didn’t write on neonatal euthanasia, I read plenty about it. Euthanasia is omnipresent in any intensive care litterature, especially neonatal intensive care. The great majority of theoretical case-studies supporting neonatal euthanasia and withdrawal of treatment overwhelmingly use two specific diseases to make their point. The first one is Tay-Sacks disease. The second one is Epidermolysis bullosa. I think these diseases are considered to make life so futile and painful as to not being worth living.

I love it when they are proven wrong.

See the life story of Alice Ervin, published in this morning’s Ottawa Citizen. It moved me to tears. There is no doubt that EB must have caused Alice great pain and suffering. But her worth and her dignity as a human being were not defined by it. I am glad to have met her, even briefly, through the pages of a newspaper.

The miraculous story of Wall-E,

A dog that an Oklahoma shelter “euthanized” and confirmed to be dead was recently found alive and well in the facility’s dumpster, News 9 in Oklahoma City has reported.

(The resurrected pup; Image: Petfinder.com)

The three-month-old male black and white puppy had supposedly been put to (permanent) sleep with injections to one of his limbs and to his heart. A stethoscope test at the Sulphur, Okla., shelter led to the declaration that he’d died.

“You might say that he’s an angel dog,” animal control officer Scott Prall told News 9, after Prall found the resurrected dog, now named Wall-e, wandering around inside the trash bin.

Disney-Pixar’s fictional Wall-e was a robot that was the last of his kind.

Four of puppy Wall-E’s littermates did die as intended during the euthanasia process. Someone had previously left the dogs outside of the shelter, already over-crowded with homeless pets. Staff there believed the puppies were thin and “appeared to be sickly,” so the decision was made to put them down.

Wall-e proved them wrong, however, by not just surviving but thriving.

“He was just as healthy as he could be,” Prall said after his surprise trash bin discovery, made a full day after the “euthanization” took place.

I can see proponents of euthanasia saying, “We would never let this happen with human beings. We would make sure there were no miracles!”

Euthanasia brings many issues to the surface. One of these is the presumption of a person’s desire for it in the first place. Even under so called “voluntary” consent, the possibility for a person in no condition to understand a consent form let alone willingly “choose” euthanasia is vast.

Seeing the room for error even in this situation, we cannot, especially without prior discussion or consent, simply assume someone would want to be euthanized.

Stephan Bolton of Liverpool, Nova Scotia, is seeking confirmation from some authority that euthanizing his wife without her consent was the right thing to do:

Bolton drove the few minutes to the Queens RCMP detachment on the other side of Liverpool to tell police he had played a role in his terminally ill wife’s death last month.

But before he did that, Bolton telephoned The Chronicle Herald to explain that he wanted to go public to spur much-needed public debate about the issue of euthanasia.

“I don’t have an agenda. I have a guilty conscience,” he said.

And then he told this newspaper what he said he did.

It was Jan. 22.

His wife, 59, was suffering with Stage 4 breast cancer and in palliative care, with Bolton her primary caregiver.

One Liverpool resident who asked not to be named said it was well known in the community that Barbara was very ill and in great distress.

Stephan Bolton said his wife had, at most, a couple of months to live.

While she wasn’t in terrible pain, Bolton told The Herald his wife was very depressed. He said he gave her a lethal injection of two medications — morphine and Nozinan — and was taking the drugs to the detachment with him.

They had not discussed the possibility of euthanasia, he said, or did he ask Barbara if she wanted the lethal injections.

You can’t tell someone how to feel. But this is sad:

The Saskatchewan farmer who killed his severely disabled daughter almost 20 years ago says he has no regrets. In a CBC interview, 57-year-old Robert Latimer says he knew the 1993 mercy killing of his daughter Tracy was the right thing to do.

I’ll also take issue with the language used in the report. There is no such thing as a “mercy killing.” He killed his daughter, full stop.

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Brigitte wonders: Would “mercy murder” make murder sound somehow better? Then why do people use “mercy killing” as a way to soften the killing part?

Provincial hearings in Montreal on assisted suicide seem to be getting the yellow light from the regions’ most vulnerable groups.

The Association quebecoise de gerontologie, which includes more than 300 health professionals, called instead for the expansion of palliative care services to provide comfort to the terminally ill.

And the Association de spina-bifida et d’hydrocephalie du Quebec argued that a debate on euthanasia is premature, given that health services for the disabled are lacking everywhere.

Catherine Geoffroy, president of the association of gerontologists, told the National Assembly committee that assisted suicide and euthanasia are often presented as ways to die with dignity -a dig at the committee, which uses the motto.

“In a society where ageism is rampant, where the elderly are often held responsible for the difficulties in access to health care … how can we believe that consenting to euthanasia would be free of all societal pressures?” Geoffroy asked.

She noted that only 10 per cent of Quebecers have access to palliative care at the end of their lives, and that many elderly die in nursing homes where there is little palliative care.

“We believe that adequate palliative care can decrease the factors that lead a small proportion of people to demand an end to their lives,” she said.

“Palliative sedation, carried out in a strict medical manner, can respond to the concerns about dying in uncontrollable pain.”

Marc Picard, president of the association that represents 9,000 Quebecers living with spina bifida and congenital hydrocephalus, said his group is taking a neutral position on euthanasia and assisted suicide.

He argued the government should “fulfil its obligations to provide basic psychological and health services to the population before talking about the possibility of legalizing euthanasia and assisted suicide.”

While it would’ve been nice to have had these kinds of considerations before legalizing (or just not ruling on) abortion as well, I’m happy these groups are having their voices heard in the public sphere. For them, it’s not up for discussion yet, they see a serious lack in services and want these wrongs to be righted before a debate can even begin on euthanasia.

Quite a touching clip on why opposition to legalized assisted suicide and euthanasia is important. I don’t actually think you have to have any faith at all to relate. In matters of life and death, on the precautionary principle alone, we should stand on the side of life because our own understanding is always limited.

A great editorial in the Montreal Gazette today, since Quebec is holding hearings about euthanasia these days:

Support for mercy killing is usually couched in terms of dignity, which seems bitterly ironic since it’s hard to think of a more extreme denial of dignity than killing, however benevolent the motive.

I’m very pleased this is their editorial position. So rational, logical and life affirming. From this position, however, it’s only logical to say the same of the unborn. We don’t kill to solve our problems, no matter how big those problems might be.

Oh look, what a surprise:

Euthanasia cases in Holland have increased by 13 per cent in the past year, according to new figures.

Last year a total of 2,636 Dutch people were killed by euthanasia, with 80 per cent of cases involving people dying at home after their doctors administered a lethal dose of drugs. This compares with 2,331 reported deaths in 2008.

In 2003, the year after Holland became the first country since the fall of Nazi Germany to legalize the practice, there were 1,815 cases.