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Your duty to decrease the surplus population

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Especially if you’re old and suffer from dementia:

Elderly people suffering from dementia should consider ending their lives because they are a burden on the NHS and their families, according to the influential medical ethics expert Baroness Warnock.

The veteran Government adviser said pensioners in mental decline are “wasting people’s lives” because of the care they require and should be allowed to opt for euthanasia even if they are not in pain.

She insisted there was “nothing wrong” with people being helped to die for the sake of their loved ones or society.

The 84-year-old added that she hoped people will soon be “licensed to put others down” if they are unable to look after themselves.

That’s supposed to be ‘ethical’? Yikes. I’d hate to see what she considers morally abhorrent.

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Rebecca adds: Those who don’t know history may not be condemned to repeat it, but they do seem to be condemned to remain too stupid to know whom they’re imitating. As to people being a burden on the NHS (which is more properly understood to be a burden on the British people) – how long until someone tallies the cost of a second trimester abortion against the cost of a lifetime of care for someone with Down’s Syndrome, and declares it a moral imperative to abort babies diagnosed with it?

Oh what the heck, let’s kill people – they’re such a bother

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Assisted suicide bill passes California Assembly and Belgian legislators seek to legalize euthanasia for the unconscious and children.

California:

AB 2747 would authorize total sedation without nutrition and hydration for depressed and confused patients, whether or not their natural death was imminent. The bill would also allow family members to order the death of a mentally disabled person when a nurse opines they have less than a year to live, similar to Terry Schindler Schiavo’s death at the hands of her husband.

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This is the fourth time that the assisted suicide bill has been pushed by Assembly Democrats Patty Berg and Lloyd Levine. But this year, instead of proposing to have doctors administer lethal injections, AB 2747 aims to produce death by sedation abuse, a clear violation of life-affirming medical ethics. Until now, total sedation has been used only when death was imminent – within hours or days – and when strong pain medication was not enough. Medical ethics require that food and water (nutrition and hydration) not be removed when sleep-inducing drugs are used, since doing so would cause unnatural, as opposed to natural, death. Yet AB 2747 pushes total sedation even if patients have not rejected food and water.

Belgium:

A group of legislators in Belgium is seeking to expand the practice of euthanasia  to include those who are unconscious, as well as minors, according to a recent article in the Spanish newspaper Hoy.

The initiative, spearheaded by former Senator Jean-Jacques de Gucht, was originally launched in 2004 and failed, the article states. 

The new proposed legislation will allow people to create a type of “living will” that will allow doctors to euthanize them if they are unconscious and unable to give consent. 

While euthanasia has been legal in Belgium 2002, the existing law has prohibited the practice under the above-mentioned circumstances.

Doctors who refuse to kill their patients under the law will be required to refer them to a doctor who is willing to do it, reports Hoy.

Ah, progress. What would we do without it?

Health care workers and the right to choose

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Sakatchewan-Wanuskewin MP Maurice Vellacott has reintroduced a bill that would protect the conscience rights of healthcare workers. Read about it here.

I like the fact that he framed his bill in freedom of choice although I strongly feel that the irony will be lost on self-proclaimed “choice” advocates – as the weeping and gnashing of teeth over bill C-484 reminds us daily. If choice is, as we are told by Ujjal Dosanjh, “paramount,” it depends for whom and in what circumstances. As with everything abortion, the supremacy of choice is so relative it becomes absolute.

Re-introducing his bill in the Commons, Vellacott declared:

Mr. Speaker, the bill would prohibit coercion in medical procedures that offend a person’s religion or belief that human life is inviolable. The bill seeks to ensure that health care providers will never be forced to participate against their will in procedures such as abortions or acts of euthanasia.

This is a good thing. I have argued before that the right to have a conscience was but an empty shell without the right to act on it. And unlike what abortion advocates would have you believe, the abortion debate is everything but settled. In the absence of consensus on the morality and health benefits of abortion, it stands to reason that individual health care professionals should be the arbitrators of what they are about to perform.

I have not yet read Vellacott’s proposed bill but here are some hurdles I expect it to face. To begin, Vellacott’s bill will face the same accusations of back-doorism as bill C-484. But where Vellacott’s proposed bill notoriously parts from C-484 is that it might de facto prevent some women from getting abortions. Maybe not in large urban centers; but faced with a conscientious objector in a rural area, women might not have another choice but to pursue the pregnancy. Don’t shoot me for pointing The Other Side to their choice argument; they are well aware of it already.

So what does it all mean for any law that would protect conscience rights at the risk of limiting access? It will be the object of a Charter challenge pitting women’s rights and freedoms against those of health care practitioners. “But”, you tell me, “abortion is not a right in Canada.” Nope, but you can bet the farm that a bill such as Vellacott’s will push abortion advocates into the debate they don’t want to have. The only way to tear down Vellacott’s kind of bill will be to argue that it limits women’s rights and freedoms in a way that is neither reasonable nor justifiable in a free and democratic society.

Hopefully, we will be ready for that challenge when it knocks at our door. Because if abortion is enshrined as a constitutional right, there is no telling where that train will take us.

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Rebecca asks: Maybe someone can clear this up for me. It should be pretty straightforward for most doctors to avoid ever performing an abortion once they’re finished their schooling. I’ve heard that it can be a lot harder to get through medical school without carrying one out, and some people have argued to me that since a D&C (the procedure by which most abortions in Canada are carried out) is often necessary for things other than aborting a pregnancy (primarily removing tissue after a miscarriage) it’s legitimate for medical schools to require that graduates know how to do a D&C.

I’ve always wondered, though – precisely since many D&Cs are done for reasons other than abortion, why couldn’t pro-life medical students train by doing those (non-elective, non-aborting) procedures? There is a big difference between the ability to perform a procedure (which is identical whether it’s removing a viable living fetus from the uterus or removing dead tissue) and the circumstances under which it’s done. In practice, how hard is it to be pro-life in medical schools these days?

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Véronique says: Your reasoning is right in theory. My experience talking with pro-life med students is that this is more about power than about D&Cs.

I should maybe share the experience of a brilliant young man I met some years ago. He was invited for a med school interview following the selection of a written essay. The essay topic was “An Event that Changed Your Life.” Innocent, he wrote about attending World Youth Day in Toronto. During his interview he was grilled on his position on abortion. The interviewers asked about nothing else. When he was turned down for med school, his interview report said that the committee believed that his religious convictions would prevent him from offering optimal medical care to women. He appealed this decision to the University’s human rights board for religious discrimination and the University upheld the committee’s decision. He applied to another University, kept quiet about his religion and was admitted.

But I think you ask a great question: how hard is it to be pro-life in medical schools these days? I would love to hear our readers’ input.

Watch your language, part II

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I am a bit of a stickler for how we use words, especially in the context of hot-button issues like euthanasia and assisted suicide. We can’t settle these issues without debating them and we can’t debate them if we are not talking about the same thing. In an otherwise excellent article in this morning’s Ottawa Citizen, Naomi Lakritz writes:

The killing of Tracy Latimer was not euthanasia. It was murder. Euthanasia is also known as assisted suicide. Tracy did not commit suicide, let alone ask for assistance in doing so.

True, but euthanasia is not also known as assisted suicide, at least not in today’s academic literature in bioethics. With assisted suicide, a physician provides the means or information necessary for a person to end his or her own life. Physician-assisted suicide (PAS) also describes situations like Sue Rodriguez’ where the patient is able to express a desire to end his or her own life but unable to perform the required actions. Suicide is no longer criminal in Canada and the sticky issue with PAS is whether or not physicians should be allowed to facilitate it. Another sticky issue with PAS lies in the validity of someone’s desire to die. Is it a desire to die or a fear of suffering?

Euthanasia refers to the termination of someone’s life by another for the purpose of ending that person’s suffering. Accordingly, if PAS is technically suicide, euthanasia is technically murder and both should be debated as such.  Suicide is legal in Canada but assisted suicide is not. Accordingly, we oppose PAS by arguing that the presence of a third party no longer makes it a private decision. Since euthanasia is murder (or at least should be), we oppose it by arguing that disabled life in any way, shape or form, is as valuable as another. One of the sticky issues with euthanasia is precisely the lack of active involvement in the decision by the person whose life is to be ended. That person may have expressed a desire to be “euthanized” in the past, but the actual life-or-death decision is made by an external party. This is in great part why the Latimer debacle is so worrying for disabled Canadians: once you let able-bodied people decide what a life worth living is, you eliminate the experience of disability from the decision-making picture.

All this to say, both are wrong for similar reasons. But that doesn’t make them synonymous.

Kevorkian has a fan club?

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The View’s Whoopi Goldberg said, here, she’s a “big fan” of Kevorkian “because he believed that he could help people who were… in a place where no one was helping them.”

Euthanasia, like race, is one of those things nobody wants to talk about. It makes people very uncomfortable. I think euthanasia is, is an important thing and it should be there for people to make that decision if they chose to,” she said.
Goldberg did not mention her belief about involuntary euthanasia, where patients are frequently killed by family members or medical staff without their knowledge or consent.

There’s a lot more Goldberg didn’t comment on, like how severe the illness should be before euthanasia becomes an “acceptable” option, or whether or not this sets a precedent for assisted suicide in the case of mental anguish or illness.

Dare I say it? This is nothing at all like the race issue. Using race as a precursor to this unrelated and hotly debated topic presumes that Whoopi’s opinion on both these issues is born out of the same personal place; that her point of view in both cases should not be contested. Manipulative, much?

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1gX27C5MWM]

Watch your language

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Headline: “Girl Once Comatose and Scheduled for Euthanasia Will Testify against Attacker”

“Scheduled for euthanasia?” In Massachusetts, USA?  (Did I miss a news item on the legalization of euthanasia in Massachusetts?)

The story explains. Ventilator-dependant Haleigh Poutre was not “scheduled for euthanasia,” however, they were going to remove her from life support.

Haleigh was in fact scheduled to be left to die of her injuries by the child protection services who had authority over her medical care. In short, there is a lot to condemn in that decision without labeling it euthanasia.

LifeSiteNews reporter Thaddeus M. Baklinski’s use of the word “euthanasia” is wrong. To win the euthanasia debate we use terms correctly. If pro-life advocates call every questionable death “euthanasia” we will not meaningfully engage proponents of euthanasia.

We can debate whether Haleigh’s planned withdrawal of life support was premature, unjustified or motivated by administrative rather than medical imperatives. But it was not “the intentional killing of a person by another for compassionate motives,” which is the definition of euthanasia.

Calling removal of life-support “euthanasia” is a concern for critically ill patients and their families. In Canada for instance, euthanasia is not legally different from murder. Where life-support is often needed to help a patient survive a critical event, it was never meant to maintain life at all cost. Equating withdrawal of life-support – however unjustified it was in Haleigh’s case – with euthanasia may cause families to refuse life-support for their loved ones because of fears over over-treatment. On the flip side, families may request over-treatment for fear of “euthanizing/murdering” their loved ones.

The indiscriminate use of controversial words like euthanasia causes suffering. (See “Thad’s” comment on systemic concerns about addiction to pain killers in dying cancer patients.) Let’s be aware of it.

Unhappy

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So Robert Latimer is to be released from jail. That makes me angry. I understand that he’s no danger to society, and that he’s unlikely to re-offend. But that’s not the point, and never was. It is illegal – and wrong – to take the life of disabled people no matter what the reason. It bothers me that we live in a society that fully sanctions it when the disabled person is still in the womb, and tolerates it once the person is out.

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Andrea adds: More disturbing than what Latimer did–kill his daughter–has been some of the sanctimonious pontificating from the media, which has ranged from full on sympathy, to understanding tolerance. This article is no different:

Born with a severe form of cerebral palsy, Latimer’s daughter Tracy was 12 years old, weighed barely 40 pounds, had no mobility, suffered unrelenting pain and endured five to six epileptic seizures a day, when Latimer ended her life… She had little more than a newborn’s consciousness and could communicate only through expressions, laughing and crying.

This is false, but even if it were true, so what? They claim suffering, suffering, suffering on Tracy’s part, but always neglect to discuss her and who she was: Her personality, her preferences, her schedule, her day. Tracy Latimer was a sister and a daughter, who had favourite colours and foods, and was a part of a family just the same as me. And I mean that. Tracy Latimer was no less a person than I.  

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Véronique adds: About the likelihood of re-offending. When I was listening to excerpts of the parole board proceedings, the Board asked Latimer a question along the lines of: “What if one of your family members was disabled following a car accident? Would you take it upon yourself to end their life?” If my memory serves me well, Latimer never answered the question directly. It was a valid question that deserved an answer. While we are led to believe that disability is congenital and can be avoided by advocates of prenatal genetic testing, disability is often accidental. Latimer may never have to end the life of another daughter with cerebral palsy, granted. But it doesn’t mean that he will never be faced again with the disability of a loved one.

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