The first dehumanizing assisted suicide “statistics” from Washington are in, with 36 people reportedly overdosing themselves via lethally prescribed drugs in the first year. Washington voters were “sold” on assisted suicide, as is always the case, with the fear of being in pain that cannot be alleviated.  But, as in Oregon, assisted suicide in practice is mostly about existential fears.  These are serious issues to be sure, but they are not demises of writhing agony used by assisted suicide advocates to sell hemlock as if it were honey.  From the story:

Doctors said loss of autonomy was an end-of-life concern for all 47 patients. Ninety-one percent were also concerned about losing the ability to participate in activities that made life enjoyable, and 82 percent were worried about “loss of dignity,” their doctors said. The report also said that more than 40 percent were worried about losing control of bodily functions, 23 percent about being a burden on family, friends or caregivers, and 25 percent were concerned about inadequate pain control. Only one person was concerned about the financial implications of treatment, according to the doctors’ reports.

The report also states that 72% of people who committed assisted suicide were in hospice.  This marks the continues assault by assisted suicide consciousness on hospice medicine.  Suicide prevention is one of the important services hospice is supposed to provide, along with other interventions, to help a suicidal terminally ill patient get past the darkness to live the rest of his or her life.

It works, too.  Several years ago, St. Christopher’s  Hospice, founded by the great medical humanitarian Dame Cecily Saunders, released a report showing that of 1700 AIDS patients, only two had requested assisted suicide and none had killed themselves, a remarkable figure since this was when the epidemic was at its worst.  The point of the report was to show that quality of their care could overcome the worst situations. But with legalized assisted suicide, this essential service  is often (or always, who knows?) denied to patients, particularly since the ideologues of Compassion and Choices are usually involved in facilitating these deaths.

So, Washington looks like Oregon, redux.  And that’s too bad.  Terminally ill patients deserve better than to have their worst fears verified by doctors issuing lethal prescriptions instead of vowing to stay with the patient to the end caring for their pain, validating their dignity, and supporting the importance of their lives.

Thanks to suicide tourism and the Debbie Purdy case, the office of the public prosecutor for England and Wales has published final guidelines telling would be suicide assisters when they are more or less likely to face prosecution.  The document strongly denies that it is decriminalizing assisted suicide in some cases, and notes accurately, that it remains against the law. But when you tell people in advance when they are unlikely be prosecuted, the effect–and more crucially, the message that assisting is OK in some cases–moves society strongly in the direction of assisted suicide permissiveness.

As originally proposed, non prosecution would have been more likely to apply if victims were terminally ill, seriously disabled, or had a degenerating condition. That raised a real and righteous stink that the lives of these people were deemed by law enforcement to be less worthy of being protected.  Thus, in the final rule, the “victim”–whose assisted suicide is less likely to be prosecuted–remains undefined.  Rather, the guidelines focus on the  motives of the suspect without regard to why the “victim” wanted to die.  From the guidelines:

45. A prosecution is less likely to be required if:

the victim had reached a voluntary, clear, settled and informed decision to commit suicide;

the suspect was wholly motivated by compassion;

the actions of the suspect, although sufficient to come within the definition of the offence, were of only minor encouragement or assistance;

the suspect had sought to dissuade the victim from taking the course of action which resulted in his or her suicide;

the actions of the suspect may be characterised as reluctant encouragement or assistance in the face of a determined wish on the part of the victim to commit suicide;

the suspect reported the victim’s suicide to the police and fully assisted them in their enquiries into the circumstances of the suicide or the attempt and his or her part in providing encouragement or assistance.

This is nonsense.  Even people with the most base motives–as in the George Delury case–will claim that they were solely motivated by compassion and that they tried to dissuade the victim. Indeed, the guidelines write the script! Moreover, the non prosecution potential now applies to any victim–perhaps even those under 18 and those with “mental incapacity”–since prosecutors investigating assisted suicide in such cases are to  “tend” toward prosecution, which of course, does not guarantee them.

In one sense, this is an improvement over the temporary guidelines because it doesn’t target certain categories of people.  But it now encompasses all of society.  Thus, by explicitly opening the door to non prosecution over a broader swath of suicidal people–the seemingly more restricted guidelines may actually increase, rather than lessen, the potential danger to the vulnerable.  After all, compassion of the assister is wholly subjective, a factor that can be invoked out of an almost unlimited set of circumstances.  Such is the power of the emotional narrative to overcome important principles and undermine society’s protection of its most vulnerable members.

The Netherlands vividly illustrates how euthanasia/assisted suicide cannot logically be limited to the restricted category of people diagnosed with a terminal illness. Since euthanasia began there under official sanction–first decriminalization and then formal legalization–the Dutch have fallen off a moral cliff in which all kinds of people are killed by doctors or assisted in suicide–including disabled infants and people who haven’t asked to die.  Had you told the Dutch that their “limited” license, under oh, so strict “guidelines” would lead to baby killing, I wonder whether it would have gone forward.

But that is water under Suicide Bridge. I have long believed that once killing is accepted as an acceptable answer to human suffering, the culture changes to the point that life itself ceases to matter if the person in question is perceived as “suffering.”  Now, Dutch citizens have rushed to put a measure before the Parliament that would allow people age 70 and older who are “tired of life,” to have access to assisted suicide–even if they aren’t sick or disabled.  From the story:

A lobby group hoping to win support for assisted suicide for the over 70s has raised the necessary 40,000 signatures to force a parliamentary debate on the issue.The organisation, which is supported by tv personalities and academics, says thousands of elderly people have had enough of life and would like professional help to commit suicide. The campaign was launched last week.

Unbelievable, but entirely logical. Once you start down this road, it is never enough.  And why limit it to people age 70 and over?  Surely 68 year olds who are tired of life deserve “choice.”  And in fact, why not just anybody sufficiently depressed to want to die for longer than two weeks?  Yup, that is already happening–officially approved by the Dutch Supreme Court.

As Canadian journalist Andrew Coyne once wrote so succinctly:

A society that believes in nothing can offer no argument even against death. A culture that has lost its faith in life cannot comprehend why it should be endured.

That seems to be the cliff of of which the Dutch have fallen. Culture of death, Wesley?  What culture of death?

Shades of the Traci Latimer murder from Canada, now a  mother in the UK has apparently overdosed her disabled son with pure heroin.  And this, after she was out on bail from a previous attempt!  From the story:

Ten days after Thomas was admitted to hospital, [Frances] Inglis approached a neighbour and asked her for pure heroin “to end his misery”, the court heard. She later told police she had only said it in a “fit of anger.” Over the following months Thomas’ condition improved so that he could open his eyes and move his limbs. On September 4, Frances Inglis visited the hospital’s High Dependency Unit at 5pm and was left alone with her son. “A nurse later noticed that Thomas Inglis was a strange colour and wasn’t breathing,” said Miss Moore. Thomas was resusciatated but, according to medics, his progress was slowed by the incident.

She was let out on bail, and amazingly, tricked caregivers into allowing her to be alone with her son:

She was charged with attempted murder but was released on bail on the condition she did not see her son. Staff at the nursing home where he was being held were issued with a photograph of her but Thomas was then moved to The Gardens Neurological Nursing Home in Sawbridgeworth, Herts for further treatment. Around lunchtime on November 21, 2008, a visitor signed in as Thomas’ aunt. Shortly afterwards, a nurse went to give Thomas his medication and found Inglis at the foot of his bed. Inglis ushered the nurse out of the room and shut the door, blocking it with an oxygen tank. When staff eventually forced their way in, Inglis allegedly screamed: “Leave him alone you stupid people. Don’t resuscitate him because I have done him already. He is in peace.” When police arrived she allegedly confessed to giving her son injections in his thigh and arms. A search of her home was said to have revealed provisions for what would happen once she was in custody including instructions for caring for the family dog and paying household bills.

The woman was clearly disturbed, but that said, I don’t understand why anyone would be surprised by this. A powerful meme has been loosed on the West that it is better to be dead than seriously disabled, a dangerous belief actively abetted by England’s head prosecutor when he essentially decriminalized assisted suicide of people with seriously disabling conditions by family and relatives.

Oh, you say, “But Thomas didn’t consent!”  True, but once the idea that killing is an acceptable answer to human suffering goes mainstream, it is a very small step from allowing assisted suicide to shrugging at the mercy killing  of those who can’t consent–for their “own good,” of course. Notice that this kind of thing happens all the time in the Netherlands, with the only difference is that doctors do the killing, and nothing serious is ever done about it.

It will be interesting to see what kind of punishment is meted out in this case. She might not get off easy. First, she badly embarrassed the authorities by allegedly doing the deed after they let her out.  On the other hand, he was profoundly disabled, and the murderers of such people, particularly family members, often receive generous mercy from the courts.  But this could be her downfall:

Described by neighbours as a “pillar of the community”, she became a “permanently angry and changed woman” and refused to believe doctors who told her that her son would get better, a court heard.

The murder of people expected to improve is likely, alas, to be treated differently than the killing of someone who wasn’t.  The potential for improvement undercuts the power of the emotional narrative of ending pointless suffering out of love. I predict little leniency.  But it will be well worth watching.

I was planning on commenting about the reported increase in Dutch euthanasia deaths. But the indefatigable Alex Schadenberg of the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition (to the left of the old guy in the center as you look at the photo), beat me to it. From his blog:

An article in the Dutch News has reported that there were approximately 200 more euthanasia deaths in 2009 as compared to 2008 in the Netherlands. This means that approximately 2500 euthanasia deaths took place in 2009 in the Netherlands, but the actual number is unknown because the government acknowledges that only 80% of all euthanasia deaths are reported.

Actually, some studies show that 50% go unreported.  But back to Alex:

In order to have an accurate picture of the number of deaths that are directly and intentionally caused by physicians in the Netherlands, you need to know that assisted suicide is a separate category in the Netherlands. Therefore you must needs to be added the assisted suicide deaths to the number of euthanasia deaths. The number of assisted suicide deaths was not reported in the article but it is approximately 400 deaths each year. Another category of deaths is deaths without explicit consent. The most recent government report (2005) showed that the number of deaths without explicit consent was approximately 550. Many of the 550 deaths are directly and intentionally caused by the physician but not reported as euthanasia because they lacked consent.

Isn’t that amazing? The number of euthanasia deaths are under-reported because non voluntary and involuntary euthanasia don’t count as euthanasia because the patient didn’t consent!

And that isn’t all. As Alex notes, these statistics don’t include the unduly high numbers of terminal sedation deaths–palliative sedation used not as a legitimate pain control technique but as back door euthanasia–infanticide, and etc.   I would also point out that Dutch doctors refer patients they don’t want to euthanize with how-to-commit-suicide information.

Here’s the bottom line: The Dutch prove that once euthanasia consciousness is accepted, there is ultimately no real control.

I reported a bit ago about the case of Francis Inglis, the mother, who while out on bail for trying to kill her seriously disabled son Tom, went to his hospital room and murdered him.  In the UK, as here, such cases often generate “mercy” from the courts. But I predicted she would do do time in this case–primarily because doctors said the young man was improving.  I was right. From the story:

A mother who gave her brain-damaged son a lethal heroin injection to end his “living hell” was told today she must serve at least nine years in jail. Frances Inglis, 57, was given a life sentence for killing 22-year-old son Tom after he suffered severe head injuries when he fell out of a moving ambulance. She gave a tearful and emotionally-charged account to jurors of how she had “no choice” and had done it “with love” to end his suffering. But a judge instructed them to put emotion aside and told them no one had the “unfettered right” to take the law into their own hands.

This is a proper instruction and a just result in a tragic case. Alas, I believe if he had been deemed “incurable,” we might have seen a far different approach by both prosecutor and court.

A very telling bill has been tabled in the Scottish Parliament to legalize assisted suicide. Notably, it is not restricted to the terminally ill–but allows people who can’t live independently to receive poison pills. Also, the age limit is only 16.  From the End of Life Assistance Bill (no link):

Eligibility requirements(1) A person may make a formal request for end of life assistance under this Act only if the person
(a) is 16 years of age or over at the time of making the first formal request;
(b) has been registered with a medical practice in Scotland for a continuous period of at least 18 months immediately prior to making that request; and
(c) satisfies the requirements of subsection (2).

(2) The requirements of this subsection are that the requesting person
(a) has been diagnosed as terminally ill and finds life intolerable; or
(b) is permanently physically incapacitated to such an extent as not to be able to live independently and finds life intolerable.

Imagine the potential for abuse, coercion, and abandonment.

Anyone who says the assisted suicide agenda is merely a “limited safety valve” when nothing else can be done to alleviate suffering is really not paying attention.

The new Scotland Parliament bill to legalize assisted suicide–which I noted in an earlier post, permits disabled or dying teenagers access to “end of life assistance”–clearly includes active mercy killing.  From the bill (no link, my emphasis):

1. Lawful to provide assistance under this Act(1) It is not a criminal offence or a delict for a person (a) to provide end of life assistance in accordance with this Act; or (b) to provide assistance, including assistance by participating in any step required by this Act, to enable another person to obtain or provide end of life assistance in accordance with this Act.
(2) In this Act “end of life assistance” means assistance, including the provision or administration of appropriate means, to enable a person to die with dignity and a minimum of distress….

11. Requirements relating to the actual provision of assistance (1) The end of life assistance must, so far as reasonably practicable, be provided in accordance with the agreement between the requesting person and the designated practitioner.

Note that since the method of killing isn’t specified or limited, it would seem that any method agreed upon by the suicidal person and the killing actor would be legal, theoretically including being shot in the head, so long as it  “allowed a person to die with dignity,” which is in the eye of the dying person, it would seem, and caused “a minimum of distress,” which a bullet to the head would provide. Most wouldn’t want to be shot, of course, but these days, who knows?

And it is very clear that the actual suicide assister/killer need not be the patient’s physician or, for that matter, even a health care practioner:

10 Agreement on provision of assistance (1) Where the second formal request is approved, and before end of life assistance can be provided, the requesting person and the designated practitioner must agree (a) that end of life assistance is to be provided; (b) who is to provide the end of life assistance; (c) on the place where that assistance is to be provided; and (d) on the means by which that assistance is to be provided.

While Secton 11 (6) requires the doctor to be present, he/she clearly need not do the deed.

So, in summary: Under the bill, qualified teenagers can be killed without regard to parental approval, doctors need to OK the euthanasia/assisted suicide but need not perform the act–demonstrating yet again, that euthanasia is not a medical act–and any swift method of killing is okay so long as it is done in private.  Good grief!

I was asked by First Things to write an “On the Square” essay about the awful comments by the novelist Martin Amis, who yearned for “euthanasia boxes” to be placed on every corner to do away with the “stinking” elderly.  I did.  From my piece, “Everybody Matters, No Matter What:

The noted British novelist, Martin Amis, became the latest to support establishing a radical euthanasia license. In an interview in the January 24 Sunday Times (London) Amis expressed views that were hardly compassionate—the usual pretext for supporting euthanasia/assisted suicide. To the contrary: He denigrated the elderly as a “silver tsunami,” whose very existence threatens society. “There’ll be a population of demented very old people like an invasion of terrible immigrants, stinking out the restaurants and cafes and shops,” Amis told the Times. His answer to this malodorous demographic incursion? “Suicide booths on every corner,” Amis offered, a hyperbolic turn of phrase that quickly went viral.

It would be easy to bash Amis’s crassness. But I saw something else at work.

Mostly missed in the resulting commentary to Amis’ diatribe is that he wasn’t as much ageist as self-loathing. “Medical science has again over-vaulted itself so most of us have to live through the death of our talent,” Amis said. “Novelists tend to go off at about 70. And I’m in a funk about it. I’ve got myself into a real paranoid funk about it, how talent dies before the body.”

In other words, Amis rejected his own intrinsic dignity and moral worth in the apparent belief that should he become incapable of producing good writing, his life would be rendered useless. This terror of not being “special”—certainly not limited to the cognoscenti—isn’t really about a feared loss of talent (or productivity, or independence, and so on), but an abiding worry that if we lose our vigor or health, we will become unworthy of being loved.

The answer to that fear is radical self giving to the suffering and despairing.

This existential terror can only be overcome by embracing human exceptionalism and its corollary that each and every one of us matters—no matter what. But this corrective is quite beyond the most brilliant intellectual argument or reliance upon religious or philosophical principles—which at most, effectively can be deployed as holding actions. If we really want to reverse the tide, we must strive to love our neighbor even more than we love ourselves.

I give some examples of how people ease others’ suffering and conclude:

There will always be the Martin Amises of the world raging in despair against life’s vicissitudes. But they will be rendered societally impotent if each of us loves actively. As St. Paul put it so eloquently, love “bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never fails.” In the end, if we want to finally defeat euthanasia, it will have to be so with us.

We must engage the holding actions to stop legalization, etc.  But to putting the movement itself back into the grave will require actions more than words.

According to polls, the UK is becoming ever more assisted suicide friendly. From the story:

The public’s support for a change in the law on assisted suicide and euthanasia was uncovered by the YouGov poll following a succession of high profile court cases. Three quarters of those polled said the law should be amended to allow assisted suicide, a crime punishable by up to 14 years in prison. Even if the law was not changed, more than 80 per cent of the 2,053 people questioned said relatives of terminally ill people, who had made it clear they wanted to die, should not be prosecuted.

The disconnect shown by this poll result is rather astonishing.  Assisted suicide has been pushed for the last year in the UK by cases that did not involve terminal illnesses.  Debbie Purdy, for example, has non terminal MS.  Her lawsuit to protect her husband from prosecution if he took her to Switzerland for assisted suicide led to the public prosecutor effectively decriminalizing–by promising not to prosecute–assisted suicides of the terminally ill, disabled, and those with degenerating conditions, so long as the deed is done by family or friends (proving, at least, that AS is not “medical”).  Most recently, a woman who assisted the suicide of her chronically ill daughter (a bad case of chronic fatigue syndrome), was found not guilty of attempted murder–the wrong crime to charge, especially as she had plead guilty to assisted suicide–and is now in all the papers about how killing her daughter as an act of selfless love. Perhaps so, but that is easy to say by those really motivated to put the “beloved” out of their own misery–as was the case with George Delury’s doing away with his wife Myrna Lebov.

And now Terry Pratchett, a famous novelist–what is it with UK novelists these days?–has proposed literal death panels:

Sir Terry Pratchett, the author who suffers from Alzheimer’s disease, is due to deliver a lecture in which he will call for assisted suicide “tribunals” that would give the terminally ill permission to end their lives. In the Richard Dimbleby Lecture, he will offer himself as a test case for just such a tribunal. The panels would include a legal expert in family matters and a doctor with experience of serious, long-term illness, who would determine whether sufferers were of sound mind.

The UK’s social structure is in serious trouble across a broad front–a growing crisis about which the pundits hand wring all the time. The recent UK plague of  assisted suicide deaths–so reminiscent of the Kevorkian binge here in the 1990s–reflects that decline.  Add in the UK’s quality of life-based health care rationing, and it doesn’t look good for the UK’s elderly, disabled, and otherwise expensive for whom to care.

The awful (and tragic) comments of novelist Martin Amis, suggesting that “suicide booths on every corner” would be a splendid solution to the purported problem of the “stinking” elderly– my take here–continues to provoke comment.  The Times of London reports the reaction of the 92-year-old writer Diana Hathill, who urges that the elderly be treated as individuals. From the story:

The author of five volumes of memoirs — the most recent, Life Class, was published last month — is not against euthanasia. “I would like to think if I wanted to end my life I could. People shouldn’t have to beg to die.” However, she says that is different from Amis’s view that people should be bumped off when they are no longer useful to society. “You have to have some control. People don’t want to be burdens, everyone I know who is old frets that their family has to cope with them but they don’t really want to die before their time.” Animals sometimes receive better treatment than old people, she thinks. “The British like animals because they are simple creatures, they give them clothes, furniture, gourmet pet food, it’s getting ridiculous.”

The elderly should be treated as individuals, she says. “You shouldn’t expect them all to retire at a certain age, I carried on working until I was 75. One does eventually go off the boil but you shouldn’t take the pan off the hob too early.” It was, the writer says, agonising moving into a retirement home. “Quite dreadful, but now it’s rather nice. Some people here are very old indeed, but you suddenly discover they are still very interesting.”

Hathill is talking at cross purposes with herself. On one hand she says she rejects Amis’s thesis, but then accepts it in the next breath, just not as crassly.

The problem of elders feeling a burden shouldn’t be understandable.  Rather, it should be opposed.  The reason so many accept the “burden” meme is that they hear the message that their lives, at some point, aren’t worth living  and as Hathill points out, become too expensive to maintain.  But legalizing euthanasia promotes that very dehumanization of the elderly.  You can’t say treat them as equals with the rest of society, but also assist their suicides.  That is akin to saying, don’t smoke, but if you do, use filter cigarettes: What you end up with is people smoking.

The first Washington State legal assisted suicide has happened. C and C, of course, promptly issued a press release. From the story: The woman, Linda Fleming, 66, of Sequim, Wash., on the Olympic Peninsula, died Thursday evening after taking lethal medication prescribed by a doctor under the law, according to a news release by the group, Compassion and Choices of Washington. The release said the woman received a diagnosis of Stage 4 pancreatic cancer a month ago, and “she was told she was actively dying.”

Ms. Fleming was quoted in the release as saying: "I am a very spiritual person, and it was very important to me to be conscious, clear-minded and alert at the time of my death. The powerful pain medications were making it difficult to maintain the state of mind I wanted to have at my death."Often early pain control can cause these symptoms, but as the body acclimates, often more cogency returns.

Be that as it may, once again we see that assisted suicide isn't about suffering that can't otherwise be alleviated. That is just the baloney C and C slices to sell the agenda. If Oregon is the template, once people have swallowed the hemlock, that justification evaporates into the ether as the death group facilitates the overwhelming majority of the hastened life endings regardless of the potential for effective palliation and available interventions that can help with the important issues of emotional distress and mental health.

More proof--as if it were really needed--that the assisted suicide movement believes in death on demand for any non transitory physical or mental condition perceived by the suicidal person as causing unbearable suffering. From the bill (C-384):(7)
Despite anything in this section, a medical practitioner does not commit homicide within the meaning of this Act by reason only that he or she aids a person to die with dignity, if (a) the person (i) is at least eighteen years of age, (ii) either

(A) continues, after trying or expressly refusing the appropriate treatments available, to experience severe physical or mental pain without any prospect of relief, or

(B) suffers from a terminal illness.Note that the patient does not have to be physically ill--mental pain will do. Note also that even if the patient could have suffering reduced through proper treatment or care, he or she is still eligible to be aided in suicide by choosing death over treatment. Finally, there is no definition for what is meant by "death with dignity" or "aid in suicide," and hence, I believe that this bill could be interpreted to authorize doctors to administer the death causing agent.
Repeat after me: Assisted suicide is not about terminal illness. Assisted suicide is not about terminal illness. Assisted suicide is not about terminal illness.

Sigh. We have repeatedly discussed the sloppy language used by media to discuss crucial moral issues--which is important because of the power of lexicon to materially impact our views. Now, the BBC is the latest media outlet to misuse the term "brain death," to apply to a South Korean patient in a PVS whose life support removal has been authorized by the country's supreme court. From the story:

South Korea's Supreme Court has upheld a landmark ruling giving a brain-dead woman the right to die. The court agreed to a request from the family of the 76-year-old woman, who has been comatose for a year, to remove her from life support. It is the first case of its kind in South Korea and follows a series of legal challenges...

South Korea's top court said that the sustained treatment of terminally ill patients such as in this case potentially violated a patient's dignity. "Whether to continue artificial life support and feeding for comatose patients is a matter that should be considered carefully," said the Supreme Court ruling. "If it is obvious that the patient in question will soon die judging from her conditions, we can conclude that she has already entered a phase of death. In this case, continued hospital treatment only serves to hurt her human dignity."

The title of the piece is, "South Korea Court Grants 'Right to Die." Huh? If someone is already dead--which is what brain dead is--how can she be described as "terminally ill" and granted "a right to die?" (This case is really about the right to remove unwanted life-sustaining treatment.) Also the children say this will relieve their mother's pain (from the AP story linked below). But if she's in pain, she isn't dead. (And if she's truly unconscious, she's not in pain.)

The use of brain dead to identify living cognitively devastated patients is not only unconscionably sloppy, but is just another way of dehumanizing those who are already way too dehumanized.

But kudos to the AP for correctly reporting the story.