Assisted Suicide Coming to the UK?

From the MercatorNet site, Careful!

Don’t be fooled, it’s mainly about money

by Peter Saunders | 3 Jul 2012 | 

Today, according to the Sunday Times, Lord Falconer (pictured) will publish his new bill on assisted suicide. In line with the recommendations of his sham ‘Commission on Assisted Dying’ he will push for doctors being given the power to help mentally competent adults with less than one year to live to kill themselves. 

There has been surprisingly little media coverage about this event, but Dignity in Dying (the former Voluntary Euthanasia Society) are planning a mass lobby on Parliament tomorrow to launch an ‘enquiry’ into this new bill which they hope will be debated in the New Year.

Over the last six years there have been three failed attempts to legalise assisted suicide in Britain since 2006 all of which have failed due to concerns about public safety.

An article in the Huffington Post this morning should heighten these concerns.

It gives an account of the deaths of the author’s father and a family pet, drawing similarities and effectively arguing for the legal right ‘to put one’s dad down’. But the most worrying paragraphs are the two about ‘the cost of keeping people alive’ which read as follows:

'In the United Kingdom, in the past 20 years the number of people over 85 has doubled - a total that could double again by 2033. Long term care costs for Britain's growing elderly population has increased 67% between 2007 and 2009, and could cost up to £106 billion a year, equivalent to paying for a second NHS, according to Henry Featherstone, Head of Policy Exchange's Health and Social Care Unit.

Most experts believe that technological change in medicine is the driving force behind the long-term rise of health care spending. However, if one analyses health care expenditures, over half of health care expenditure in both the UK and the USA are spent on patients who die within one year. It is unclear just how much is being spent for services that are not only unnecessary but unwanted. What needs to be analysed is who is benefiting from the billions being spent on health care for people who are being assisted to live against their wishes.' 

At a time of economic recession and shrinking health budgets we are going to hear more and more demands for euthanasia based on economic grounds.

Of course they will always be carefully clothed in the language of autonomy and compassion subtly disguising the fact that there are mainly families and politicians who have a lot to gain financially if those whose lives are judged to be worthless can be ‘mercifully released’.

As I have argued before on this blog there are four ingredients for a holocaust – public opinion in favour, economic pressure, a handful of willing doctors and a law allowing it.

The only one we don’t have in Britain is the last. If we don’t keep it that way we run the very real risk that the generation which killed its children (7 million of them) by abortion will in turn be killed by its children through euthanasia.

Don’t be deceived by talk of so-called ‘robust safeguards’ – that this is only for the mentally competent, only for adults, only for the terminally ill.

Those scenarios are frightening enough. But they are only the beginning. We have 15-20 Britons going to the Dignitas facility in Switzerland each year to kill themselves currently. But with an Oregon or Dutch law we would have 1,200 or 13,000 deaths annually respectively. And given the level of prejudice I this country that already exists towards the elderly it could be many more.

Let’s resist any further erosion of the law.

Dr Peter Saunders is a former general surgeon and CEO of Christian Medical Fellowship, a UK-based organisation with 4,500 UK doctors and 1,000 medical students as members. This article has been cross-posted from his blog, Christian Medical Comment

Euthanasia: Thinly Veiled Propaganda Disguised as a Report

Margaret Somerville | Wednesday, 14 December 2011 

Tipping the scales towards euthanasia

A widely publicized report published by the Royal Society of Canada presents a thoroughly one-sided view.

The Royal Society of Canada Expert Panel on End-of-Life Decision Making recently released its Report to much media attention. The parts of that report we can all agree on, for instance, the need for much better access to palliative care and pain management for terminally ill patients, was not the media’s focus. The panel’s recommendation that euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide (PAS) should be legalized was.

It has generated many calls for a national debate in Canada on these latter issues – mainly, I would guess, if not entirely, from people advocating the legalization of euthanasia. In entering such a debate and deciding whether they agree with this recommendation, it’s important for Canadians to understand the weaknesses of the Report.

The Panel’s mandate included the following direction: “The public would… benefit greatly from having a careful, balanced review of various pros and cons of decriminalization of physician-assisted death from well-reasoned ethical and legal standpoints.” The Report comes nowhere near fulfilling this mandate. It’s a pro-euthanasia manifesto – to paraphrase an advocate for disabled people speaking in another context, it’s “thinly veiled euthanasia and assisted suicide propaganda disguised as an expert report”.

This is not surprising in view of who the authors are. Many are well-known pro-euthanasia advocates and, as the Report is unanimous, one can assume all agree with this stance. The people I know whom the Panel lists as consulting to them are, likewise, pro-euthanasia -- three of them world-leading advocates.

It’s important to understand this is not a Report of the Royal Society of Canada, as many have mistakenly assumed, as that gives it an unmerited credibility. It’s a Report of an expert panel (only one member of which is a fellow of the Royal Society) set up by the Royal Society. The fairness and wisdom of the Royal Society’s choice of panel members must, however, be questioned.

The Report is very far from being a “balanced review” or adequately comprehensive. The arguments against the legalization of euthanasia and PAS are almost entirely absent. Issues are considered almost entirely at the level of the individual. There is almost no discussion of the impact of legalizing euthanasia and PAS at the institutional level -- in particular, the impact on healthcare institutions and professions, and the law – or at the societal level, in particular, on important shared values, such as respect for life. In fact, this value is not discussed, an extraordinary omission considering the topic of the report.

Discussion of abuses is deficient and selective

The discussion of the practices in jurisdictions that have legalized or allow euthanasia and assisted-suicide are seriously deficient and very selective so as to minimize the Report’s coverage of abuses, expansions of justifications for the practices, and other problems or controversies.

For example, the Report indicates there has been one case of the use of euthanasia on disabled babies in the Netherlands. This is probably correct in the short time since the Groningen protocol allowing such euthanasia was formally accepted. But, prior to that, an article in the New England Journal of Medicine documents 22 cases of babies with spina bifida being euthanized, which is not mentioned. Such “pro-euthanasia presentations” of the facts are concerning and misleading. Likewise, the availability in the Netherlands of euthanasia for children is not mentioned. The combination of euthanasia and donation of organs for transplant in Belgium and the recent case in Flanders of “joint euthanasia” of a terminally ill man and his healthy wife are ignored. And a survey of Belgian physicians who had carried out euthanasia, published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, which showed 32 percent of those physicians had carried out euthanasia without the patient’s request or consent is never mentioned.

The system set up under the Oregon Death with Dignity Act is presented as largely problem-free. The literature describing problems, for instance, articles and book chapters by renowned pain specialist and head of palliative care at Memorial Sloane Kettering, Dr Kathleen Foley, and Dr Herbert Hendin, a New York psychiatrist specializing in suicide prevention, is likewise totally ignored.

And although Canadian psychiatrist Dr Harvey Max Chochinov’s research is referenced, his ground-breaking work in the psychiatry of dying people, what helps them and what they want, is not discussed.

Through the lens of individual autonomy

The authors make an assumption that individual autonomy, implemented through “informed choice”, is always the prevailing value and construct their case for euthanasia and PAS from there. They do not consider that for many people some other value might prevail – for example, respect for human life which requires that we don’t kill each other, except when unavoidable to save life -- and what line of argument and decision outcomes that would result in.

In short, the authors have adopted a basic assumption, from which, as they state, everything else they accept and recommend flows, without adequately justifying doing so and not even mentioning the possible alternatives.

The essential difference between the pro and anti euthanasia positions is that the former gives priority to individual autonomy over respect for life, the latter does the opposite. We should keep in mind, here, that we are not just talking about the value of respect for each individual human life, important as that is, but also, respect for human life in general. The authors refer to the Charter as the primary source of our shared values: Apart from any other claims on behalf of the value of respect for life, it is one of the values enshrined in the Charter.

There is a strong emphasis in the Report on the burden and healthcare costs of an aging population and the Report gives the impression that euthanasia and PAS will help to resolve this “problem”. The authors note that euthanizing people “in advanced stages of dementia” will be an issue to be addressed in the future. In other words, they don’t reject the possibility that this might be acceptable.

The Report doesn’t mention survey results, such as those from an Environics poll, which last year (2010) asked over 2000 Canadians what the government priority should be - legalizing euthanasia or improving end-of-life care, or both. Seventy-one percent said improving end-of-life care and 19 percent said legalizing euthanasia, and 5 percent said both (the remainder were Did not know/Neither).

What about elder abuse?

Because the Report seems to have a special focus on aging, I note that the Environics polls also showed Canadians are very concerned about elder abuse if euthanasia or PAS is legalized. The 2011 poll expressly asked about "elder abuse" and 76 percent of respondents said they were concerned about it, if euthanasia were legalized. The 2010 poll did not expressly ask about "elder abuse", but did ask a question where 78 percent of respondents said they were concerned that elderly persons (disabled and sick persons too) would be euthanized without consent. To another 2010 question, 63 percent said they were concerned elderly persons could be pressured to accept euthanasia in order to reduce health care costs.

The authors recognize their position involves an inconsistency in that they champion individual autonomy as the prevailing value, but clearly will place limits on its exercise and not recognize the validity of the choice to die of all autonomous, competent adults.

But, if individual autonomy trumps all other considerations, then why is there a need any other justification for euthanasia? Simply wanting to be dead and consenting to it should be sufficient: “Over 70 and tired of life”, as proposed in The Netherlands, would suffice. And why, even, does the person need to be “over 70”? What about the broken hearted 18-year-old whose first love has abandoned her; why can’t she exercise her autonomy to have assistance committing suicide?

And if there’s a right to commit suicide, then there is a duty not to interfere with people exercising that right. How then can we justify treating people brought to an emergency room who have attempted suicide?

The usual “confusions” used to promote the case for euthanasia are all present in the Report: equating all acts and omissions; arguing there is no difference between killing and allowing to die; conflating intention and motive in relation to desired and unwanted consequences of pain relief treatment; and so on. The opposite arguments are not presented. And the fact that courts and others rely on these distinctions daily in making legal and ethical decisions is ignored.

The section on dignity, which the authors recognize is a prominent concept in the euthanasia debate, is especially biased to the pro-euthanasia arguments and inadequate. In particular, a 2008 major and very comprehensive research report on the concept by the US President’s Commission on Bioethics is not even mentioned.

The above criticisms are not comprehensive, many more could be articulated. Fortunately, in my view, there is a wealth of grounds on which the Report can be easily dismissed.

Margaret Somerville is founding director of the Centre for Medicine, Ethics and Law at McGill University.

Retrieved December 14, 2011 from http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/tipping_the_scales_towards_euthanasia

Bishop grilled over right to die

Michael Cook, of MercatorNet, posts this video clip with this comment:  One of the smartest spokesmen for a Catholic stand on bioethics is Australian Bishop Anthony Fisher. Here he is interviewed by a right-to-die activist. There are no softball questions and he hits most of them out of the park. (An analogy for American readers.)

As a commenter points out, the interviewer here is not a right-to-die activist representing a pro-euthanasia group, but the presenter for an Australian public television show.  The clip's title, "Christian churches remain opposed to assisted dying" is symptomatic of the program's bias.  The assumption seems to be that all right-thinking Australians favor physician-assisted suicide or 'assisted dying' - the irresistible tide of progress/history-on-our-side rhetoric - so why can't the churches fall in line?

Kudos to the bishop for keeping his cool and making the argument.  Let's hope that, despite the biased presentation, some Australians are listening and beginning to have second thoughts.

Bishop Fisher is author of a new book, Catholic Bioethics for a New Millennium.

Why the disabled fear assisted suicide

by Jared Yee | 24 Jun 2011 | (4)

The recent BBC broadcast of the suicide of 71-year-old Peter Smedley in Switzerland was a public relations triumph for campaigner Sir Terry Pratchett. “This has been a happy event,” he told the BBC. But journalist Dominic Lawson took issue with this in the Independent:

“It is clear that the intended beneficiaries of Pratchett's campaign must be those who are physically incapacitated – as he fears he will be: the fully able-bodied need not call upon others to kill us. For this reason, any legislators thinking of backing Pratchett's cause would do well to consult the members of the charity Scope. Scope represents the hundreds of thousands of Britons with cerebral palsy, far and away the most common form of congenital physical disability and which affects, to a greater or lesser extent, one in every 400 children born in the UK.”

He continues:

“The chief executive of Scope, Richard Hawkes, having observed the head of steam building up behind the campaign for voluntary euthanasia, has sensibly been spending much of his time consulting his members, and other disability groups, about their feelings on this matter. Last month Scope released one of the results, a poll by ComRes, which revealed that no fewer than 70 per cent of disabled people are concerned that the changes in the law advocated by Pratchett would create pressure on vulnerable patients to ‘end their lives prematurely’.”

One woman named Valerie, a 71-year-old woman from Islington in north London, said at a meeting that if she fell over in the street when she was younger, people would help her up. However, she said, “now people just walk past.” Lawson comments:

“That is the state of mind, on both sides, in which assisted suicide for the severely physically disabled could so insidiously turn from being a liberating option into something more like an oppressive social obligation. I have no doubt that Terry Pratchett's campaign has good intentions; but for the very people he most means to help, they could pave the road to Hell.” ~ Independent, Jun 14

Retrieved June 25, 2011 from http://www.mercatornet.com/careful/view/9304/

Hawaii Four-0

Michael Cook | Wednesday, 9 February 2011

This week a committee of the Hawaii Senate voted to shelve a bill for physician-assisted suicide after listening to emotional public testimony. Here are some of the stories.

Earlier this week, by a vote of 4 to 0, a committee of the Hawaii Senate killed SB803, a bill that would have legalized physician-assisted suicide for the terminally ill. The issue was dropped after 4½ hours of testimony which was resoundingly against the proposal. This is the third time in Hawaii that assisted suicide has stalled in a legislative committee.

But rather than read about the politics of the debate, read what some of the bill’s opponents told the committee in their written testimony. It’s hard to go past first-person stories. (The submissions have been lightly edited for grammar and spelling.)

Not everyone opposed the bill, of course. Some people wrote to support it emphatically. But nearly all of them were the worried well. The people below are not well, but they’re not worried, either. You can access submissions to the Hawaii legislature about the bill here.

This is the latest in a long run of losses for pro-euthanasia lobbies in the past year. As Peter Saunders reported recently in MercatorNet's blog on euthanasia, Careful!, it has been defeated in six countries: the US (Hawaii and New Hampshire), France, Israel, Australia (South Australia and Western Australia), Israel, and Scotland.

* * * * *

Charlotte Smith
I'm sick to death of hearing about death with dignity. I prefer life with enthusiasm. From this side of the veil, death is not important. What is important is life. I'm 72, and have been unable to stand or walk since age 10. But I earned 2 degrees in biology, worked 26 years at NASA, travelled around the world, and become the first paraplegic woman to earn a pilot’s license, And I've used my head a lot. My brain has no moving parts -- but it goes everywhere!

* * * * *
Rhodora S. Rojas

At the age of thirteen, I was injured in an automobile accident and experienced a traumatic brain injury. I have had many life and death experiences, and that is why I'm talking to you today.

I am glad and grateful my parents and family supported me at the time. They were told that I would die or be a vegetable the rest of my life. Have you ever seen a vegetable get on a plane and fly to Honolulu to give testimony at a hearing!? Look at me now. I'm so very glad that they stood up for me. I'm worried that others may not have the chance of life if you pass the S8803.

I have finished my Bachelor of Arts degree and I'm working towards my masters degree in vocational rehabilitation counseling. I work at the Hawaii Center for Independent Living on Kauai. If they had killed me, how could I have accomplished what I have? Even though my life can be hard, I feel very blessed and very grateful to have the life I have.

Please do not pass S6803. It might be cheaper to encourage someone to die than to be there for them and help them live, but I don't believe it would be the right thing to do. Thank you for hearing my testimony.

* * * * *
Beth Arnoult

In 1991, I was In a bad ATV 4-wheeler accident and broke my back, leaving me paralyzed from the waist down with excruciating pain. I am now a paraplegic confined to a wheelchair the rest of my life. It was considered a good day if I could sit up for longer than two hours, due to the extreme back pain. It seemed to always be worse at night, leading to depression. I had all of my mind, never even lost consciousness during the accident, but, I'm sad to say, that If Physician Assisted Suicide had been available to me at that time in my life, even up to several years after, I'm afraid I would have opted for that route.

And that is so sad! It makes me cry just to think about it. It takes a lot of guts to try and commit suicide on your own, trust me, I've been there, and was never successful. Thanks to God. If it was legal and readily available, that would have taken all of the guilt out of my decision, because, “hey, if it's the law, then it must be OK!” Right?

Wrong!!!

God had purpose for my life! I just needed to go through a time of suffering, years to be exact, to get where I am now. I have a beautiful 14-year-old son, born 6 years after my accident! I have travelled the world for 10 years playing professional wheelchair tennis, retiring after representing the US in the 2008 Beijing Paralympics, Since then I even joined a crew of adaptive paddlers and even paddled the Molokai Channel in a six-man outrigger. I make an impact on many lives every day. I often get people who come up to me and say that they are going to stop complaining about their sore ankle, or other ache or pain, after seeing what I have overcome in my life.

I love life and am truly blessed. This accident was a part of my journey to make me who I am today.
* * * * *
Elsie
My name is Elsie and I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis In 1986. I am 49 years young. I have asked someone else to read this testimony for me as I am in the hospital at this time and cannot come myself…

A lot of people seem to have the opinion that it would be better to be dead than disabled and I can tell you from my own experience that this simply isn’t true for me. I have had my low moments and if PAS [physician-assisted suicide] was available I might have jumped at the opportunity during those low times. However, we all have those low moments and though most of you would be protected, I can't assume that same protection would extend to me or others like me who might not be as blessed as I am with loving family & friends...
So, opening the door to the acceptance that there are lives not worth living (terminally ill people in this case who want to die) sends the wrong message to caring people. It changes and distorts perceptions of life with all its ups and downs. We all know that trying to put safeguards into law doesn't really protect anyone when economics comes into the picture and there is no question that we are already seeing that In Oregon where disabled people can't get needed services but can get the pills to kill themselves. Please, I have too much to live for & so do others--•we can all live without this bill.
Sincerely, Elsie

PS: Day before yesterday I got a new roommate and I heard the staff speaking to her. They were evidently repeating to her that she had made the decision to stop eating and drinking and getting treatments because she had decided to die as she wasn't strong enough to walk around. I figured they were just trying to make sure they truly understood what she wanted. Her friends at the bedside also said that, yes, she had told them she just wanted to die. She hadn't eaten in a week she just wanted to die -- that's why she moved to this floor -- to die.

Guess what!

The next day she started eating her breakfast and told everyone who came into the room that she wanted to live. They had to send a number of people in to verify that that was really true and then they moved her upstairs. They seemed to question her sanity when she said she wanted to live. I would have thought “You would question her sanity when she said she wanted to die". It's a bad idea to make it too easy for people to take their lives at a low time.
Michael Cook is editor of MercatorNet.

Retrieved February 10, 2011, from http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/hawaii_4-0/

Assisted suicide fails in Scotland

Assisted suicide fails in Scotland’s parliament
by Michael Cook | 2 Dec 2010 |

Scotland’s Parliament has overwhelmingly defeated a bill which would have legalised assisted suicide for the terminally ill. The final result was 85 votes to 16 with two abstentions.

MSPs were allowed to vote according to their conscientious convictions, not on party lines.

However, Scottish Health Secretary Nicola Sturgeon said that the government did not support the bill. Furthermore, she added, "I personally find myself particularly concerned and fundamentally concerned about the difficulty I think would always and inevitably be present in determining that someone choosing to end their life had not been subjected to undue influence."

A parliamentary committee which reported on the issue in November failed to support it.

The Independent parliamentarian who sponsored the bill, Margo MacDonald, who has Parkinson’s disease, blamed the lobby group Care Not Killing for the defeat. Waving a piece of paper in the debate, she said: "I'll cut to the chase and condemn as unworthy and cheap, the contribution made by the publishers and authors of this catalogue of linguistic contortions, headed 'Care not Killing'. This postcard was distributed through churches and caused alarm among frail, elderly and disabled people."

Care Not Killing is a UK-based alliance of disability and human rights organisations, healthcare and palliative care groups, and faith-based organizations which promotes palliative care and opposes assisted suicide and euthanasia.

Retrieved December 2, 2010 from http://www.mercatornet.com/careful/view/8385/

Two Books

Two important books I am reading. One is Christopher Wolfe's Natural Law Liberalism. Wolfe argues against Rawlsian liberalism, the prevailing form of intellectual contemporary liberalism that draws primarily on Rawls's theory of justice.

Wolfe analyzes the inadequacies of Rawls's theory and argues that liberalism "has to be freed of its insensitivity to the fact of the deep influence of the 'regime'--including liberal democratic political communities--on the formation of people's ideals and character: their thoughts, desires, attitudes." The "tendency of toleration to evolve into forms of skepticism and relativism (at least about the human good) and principled religious indifferentism, and the tendency of equality and freedom to evolve into an egoistic individualism that undermines the family and commitment to human goods beyond consumeristic well-being" (p.4)--all this has to be jettisoned.

Moderated in this way so that when it shapes citizens, as it must, "it does so in ways that are more fully compatible with important intellectual and moral goods: with reason and faith, and with the moral virtues that regulate the passions and promote individual and social well-being" (p.4). For its part,

Natural law, without disturbing its convictions that there is a truth, that human beings can know it, and that their well-being lies in finding and and living in accord with it, has to be so formulated to recognize, in ways that its historical representatives have sometimes failed to do, the intrinsic importance--the necessity--of human freedom and the limits of coercion and law.

Freed from their excesses and formulated correctly, Wolfe suggests, both natural law and liberalism, despite their historical antagonism, can reinforce each other's strengths and avoid their weaknesses.

The other book continues William Brennan's important work of exposing and dissecting the language games we play, the euphemisms, medical metaphors, and the like used to dehumanize the most vulnerable and desensitize us to the inhumane and oppressive way they are treated. In his earlier book Dehumanizing the Vulnerable, Brennan, professor in the School of Social Service at St. Louis University, examines the way language has been abd is used to justify horrendous treatment of women, Jews, Blacks, and unborn babies. His latest book, examines the same phenomenon through the lens of Pope John Paul the Great's teaching about the culture of life. John Paul, as Brennan describes, persistently and brilliantly showed how the distorting semantics of the culture of death dehumanizes those for whose killing--through abortion, embryo-destructive research, euthanasia, and assisted suicide--it apologizes.