Alison Davis, who represents disabled people as national co-ordinator of No Less Human, a group within SPUC Pro-Life, has responded to the decision by the Crown Prosecution Service not to prosecute Michael Bateman (pictured) who assisted his wife Margaret to commit suicide.

Alison told the media earlier today:
"This case makes clear what I suspected when the Director of Public Prosecutions (John Smeaton, SPUC director

Shameful.  The UK prosecutors have placed disabled, dying, and chronically ill suicidal people at tremendous risk by refusing to prosecute a clear case of assisted suicide.  From the story:

A loving husband who helped his seriously ill wife commit suicide will not face legal action it was revealed today. In a landmark decision, the Crown Prosecution Service declared it would not be in the public interest to charge Michael Bateman with aiding or abetting suicide, despite sufficient evidence. The decision is the first , following a death in the UK, since Director of Public Prosecutions Keir Starmer announced legal guidelines outlining the distinction between mercy killing and assisted suicide.

Mr Bateman ‘freely admitted assisting’ Margaret Bateman in relation to her death in October 2009 the CPS said. However, Bryan Boulter, reviewing lawyer for the CPS Special Crime Division, said: ‘I concluded that a prosecution would not be in the public interest because Mrs Bateman, who had suffered from chronic pain for decades, had a clear and settled wish to commit suicide. Interviews with Mr Bateman and the couple’s sons supported this. ‘It was also clear that Mr Bateman was wholly motivated by compassion. He cared deeply for his wife and had taken care of her daily needs for several years. There was no evidence to suggest any motive other than compassion.

As in the George DeLury case, the cry of “she wanted to die” is easy to make.  And even when the suicide facilitator thinks he or she is being loving, that should not permit flagrant violation of an important law.  Alas.  The lack of principle behind this quasi-decriminalization policy–and the hurricane power of emotional narratives today–have conspired to undermine the rule of law and abandon vulnerable people.  The result will be more suicides that could have been prevented and an increased potential to mask elder and other abuses behind the benign mask of compassion.

More than one in 10 nurses say they have held back treatment such as morphine on terminally-ill cancer sufferers.(author unknown)

This is what happens when a country jumps off a vertical moral cliff.  First, the euthanasia numbers are climbing dramatically.  From the story:

Last year, 700 official cases of euthanasia were reported. The figure is 40 percent up on the year before, as 2008 only had 500 cases. Experts point out these are only official statistics, and estimate that these only represent 25 percent of the actual numbers.

Second, the guidelines become virtually meaningless.  As we have seen in the Netherlands, once a society countenances medical killing by doctors, the tend to do anyone they think should be euthanized regardless of the guidelines, and then just don’t report their own lawbreaking:

Doctors are hesitating to report euthanasia as they fear judicial problems. In Belgium, it is legal to carry out euthanasia, but only under very strict conditions.Only 1 in 4 doctors is believed to actually make an official report. On top of that, euthanasia seems to be on the rise in Belgium according to figures released by the daily Gazet van Antwerpen. Euthanasia expert Wim Distelmans, a professor at the Brussels university VUB, sees major regional differences. 80 percent of all official cases is reported in Flanders. He claims that doctors in the French-speaking part of Belgium are more inclined to decide on their own and skip the proper paperwork.

We are told that legalizing euthanasia makes it all so transparent.  We are told it will be strictly restrained by legalization to only the most intractable cases.  That pretense is clearly not working in Belgium.  But will that cause the country to backtrack?  Not on a bet.  Once medicalized killing is accepted, the details cease to matter.

Flemish doctors not only admit to killing patients who have not requested to be euthanized, but the levels of such terminations without request or consent are barely under the rate of legal voluntary euthanasia.  From the study published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal (may have to manually download):

We found that, five years after the euthanasia law was enacted in Belgium, euthanasia and assisted suicide occurred in 2.0% of all deaths in Flanders during the study period period. They predominantly involved patients less than 80 years old, patients with cancer and patients dying at home…The use of life-ending drugs without an explicit request from the patient occurred in 1.8% of the deaths in Flanders during the study period. Most of these cases involved patients 80 years or older and occurred in hospital. In the majority of cases, the patient was not involved in the decision, primarily because of coma or dementia; however, relatives and other caregivers were often consulted. Considerations involving the relatives and needless prolongation of life were reasons indicated by physicians for reaching the decision.

Or, we could say Flemish doctors murdered their patients since explicit request is required under the supposedly “protective” euthanasia “guidelines.”

The study reeks with the usual terminal nonjudgmentalism we now see so often among the professional journal set.  Rather than condemning non voluntary killing and urging that all steps be taken to stop the practice and punish the perpetrators, the authors instead suggest blandly that greater efforts are needed to reduce the number.  More explicitly, it strongly implies that the non voluntary death doctors should at least use more effective drugs when they set out to kill:

Physicians in our study who indicated an intention to hasten the patient’s death without an explicit request from the patient most often used opioids, alone or with benzodiazepines. The use of opioids for ending life are discouraged because the patient may regain consciousness and because the procedure can take longer than expected. Furthermore, the life-shortening effect of opioids is subject to speculation. Recent studies have shown that the actual effect on the end of life is prone to overestimation. The estimated time by which life was shortened in many of the cases in our study was already very limited, especially compared with the estimated time in the cases of euthanasia and assisted suicide. We also found that, although physicians specified an intention to hasten death, opioids were often given in doses that were not higher than needed to relieve the patient’s pain. This suggests that the practice of using life-ending drugs without an explicit patient request in reality resembles more intensified pain alleviation with a “double effect,” and death was in many cases not hastened. The problem may also exist in other countries; for example, in the study in the Netherlands, opioids were also frequently administered to end life without an explicit patient request. This points to the need for education of caregivers about misconceptions of opioid use.

So, I guess Belgian doctors need continuing education on how to better kill their patients who have not asked to die.  Hippocrates weeps.

Pro assisted suiciders often claim that the only reasons to oppose euthanasia/self mercy killing are religious.  They will claim that opponents see suffering as “redemptive” and thus desirable–intentionally misstating that doctrine– and oppose mercy killing on the basis that only God can take a life.

That  caricature isn’t true, of course. Even the Catholic Church makes many arguments that are not based in its religious dogma but our human duty to care for the sick and protect the vulnerable.  Moreover, the rational reasons for opposing assisted suicide are more numerous and robust than religious arguments, because they hit squarely in one of the few remaining areas of broad value agreement in society–at least in the abstract–the need to protect and promote universal human rights.

I have been making the rational argument against euthanasia/assisted suicide for 17 years, and Rita Marker for more than twenty.   My good pal Nat Hentoff, an atheist, has been even more explicit in this regard, repeatedly arguing with his fellow secular humanists that opposing assisted suicide is that belief system’s proper position.

Now, Brendan O’Neill, the editor of Spike,  has weighed in with a good column making the humanist case against legalizing assisted suicide. I don’t agree with all of it. For example, he would seem to prefer no law rather than legalization or prohibition, because that would permit people to decide what to do in the privacy of family and physician decision making.  But once killing is not prohibited, it is by definition permitted–and the potential for abuse is way too dangerous to permit state neutrality on the issue.

But then, he makes some points, that euthanasia advocacy reflects a profound nihilism and anti human exceptionalism (my terms), that I think are very worth heeding. From the column:

It seems pretty irrefutable to me that the campaign to legalise assisted suicide has become bound up with society’s broader inability to value and celebrate human life today. It is clear that society finds it increasingly difficult to say that human existence is a good thing – you can see this in everything from the environmentalist discussion of newborn babies as ‘future polluters’ to the widespread scaremongering about the ‘ageing timebomb’. And you can see it in the fact that some in the pro-assisted dying campaign want to go beyond having ‘mercy killings’ for people close to death to having ‘assisted dying’ for the very disabled, the ill and even, in the case of Dignitas in Switzerland, the depressed. This effectively sanctions suicide as a response to personal hardship, and gives a green light to hopelessness.

That fits with squarely with my warning that humanism is mutating into anti-humanism. But back to O’Neill:

The campaign for the right to die has both been heavily influenced by and also influences today’s broader anti-life culture. It expresses a broader social pessimism, a shift away from improving human life towards focusing a great deal of our moral and political energies on bringing to an end damaged or impaired human lives. Quite often today the campaign for the right to die goes hand-in-hand with the idea that there are too many people – especially old people – and that society can’t cope with them. When Terry Pratchett, who suffers from early-onset Alzheimer’s, suggested creating assisted suicide tribunals he was championed by commentators who basically said: ‘Yes, we need to do something about all these old, mentally-ill people.’ One sympathetic commentator said the rising number of old people is a ‘social catastrophe’ and pointed out that a patient with dementia costs the economy eight times as much as a patient with heart disease. This is increasingly how we judge human life today: not by its internal worth or moral meaning, but by its financial implications or environmental implications.

Precisely. And it wouldn’t be limited to the elderly, but also people with disabilities and others who become deemed drags on society.  That becomes the default setting once society rejects human exceptionalism.

Assisted suicide/euthanasia is one tile in a much larger and dangerous mosaic, which, in its rejection of human exceptionalism, profoundly endanger universal human rights.  We need more secular humanists like O’Neill and Hentoff making that important case.

I was going to post about this case–in which a husband with cancer murdered his wife with Alzheimer’s disease, and then killed himself–because the political opportunists at the assisted suicide advocacy group Compassion and Choices decided to exploit the case to push their agenda.  But Stephen Drake of Not Dead Yet, the disability rights group,  beat me to it over at the Not Dead Yet website.   He uses language I avoid, but he’s definitely got C and C’s number as to why its claim that legalizing Oregon-style assisted suicide could have avoided the shootings is disengenuous.  From his post:

Two reasons:

I’ve read all the press coverage concerning the deaths of the Vanacores.  Not one single article claims that Joan Vanacore was “dying” of Alzheimer’s disease.  Alzheimer’s can only be considered “terminal” in the final stages – a stage at which the person isn’t legally competent to request help in comitting suicide.  While she apparently wasn’t in the most advanced stages of Alzheimer’s, Joan Vanacore had apparently reached a point where she wouldn’t have been considered legally competent to make a life-and-death decision, according to her son:

John Vanacore, of North Haven said he doesn’t believe his parents conspired to end their lives, as his mother “wasn’t cognizant enough” to make such a decision, but that his father was thinking about others in the family. “My father was very private, but I feel he felt he was dying and didn’t want to have her be a burden on anyone,” he said.

So that’s the second reason: Competence. C&C pays lip service to the principle of limiting legalization of assisted suicide only to those people who are diagnosed as “terminal” (expected to live no longer than 6 months) and who are mentally competent to make the request.  Joan Vanacore wasn’t “dying” and she wasn’t regarded as “competent.”

Is C&C suggesting that legalization would somehow have made it possible for John Vanacore to discuss his wish to end his wife’s life with a doctor?

Advocacy for limiting assisted suicide to those who are competent with six months or less to live is a political expedient, which Drake notes below.  Indeed, once assisting the suicides of people with terminal illnesses became widely accepted, the movement would be on to other targets–as has happened in the Netherlands, Belgium, and Switzerland:

There are only two ways I can think of right now to interpret this cynical exploitation of a tragic situation:

1. C&C is testing the limits of the public’s gullibility.  They might be emboldened right now, seeing how the Final Exit Network – with its “open door” policy of suicide assistance to nonterminal old, ill and disabled people have gotten a sympathetic free ride in the press – and in many cases misreport the group as “aiding” people with “terminal illnesses.”  They might also have been pleasantly surprised at how the combined marketing efforts of HBO and CNN have repackaged Jack Kevorkian – from a lawless creepy ghoul to an eccentric champion for the terminally ill.  So maybe they’re keeping they’re fingers crossed that maybe the public really is too stupid to notice that the person who was killed wasn’t dying and didn’t ask to die.

2. It’s also possible that C&C is testing the waters with this release.  Anyone familiar with the passions of assisted suicide/euthanasia activists knows that the “terminally ill” limitation being promoted at present is just the first step in an incrementalist strategy.  Most of the supporters of assisted suicide and euthanasia want much broader “eligibility” – similar to the expansive eligibility in the Netherlands and Switzerland.

Well, C and C has already shown its true colors by resisting the kind of “protections” in Montana that it insisted on in Oregon and Washington.  Alas, as Drake knows, the media don’t care.  Heck, they still describe Kevorkian’s assisted suicides as being terminally ill when most were depressed and disabled.

The assisted suicide movement is ever about blurring vital distinctions and deconstructing crucial definitions.  One target has been the proper pain control technique known as palliative sedation, a rarely required procedure in which patients near death are sedated to control pain or other symptoms such as severe agitation or air hunger that cannot be alleviated in any other manner.

Confusion about this–some of it intentionally sown by assisted suicide advocates–induced the National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization to issue a statement clarifying the proper methods and purposes of sedation as a palliative technique. From the statement:

Availability

For the small number of imminently dying patients whose suffering is intolerable and refractory, NHPCO supports making the option of palliative sedation, delivered by highly trained healthcare professionals acting as an interdisciplinary team, available to patients.

Proportionality

Since the goal is symptom relief (and not unconsciousness per se), sedation should be titrated to reduce consciousness to the minimum level necessary to render symptoms tolerable.  For most patients this will mean less than total unconsciousness, allowing the patient to rest comfortably, but to be aroused…

Relationship to Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide

Properly administered, palliative sedation of patients who are imminently dying is not the proximate cause of patient death, nor is death a means to achieve symptom relief in palliative sedation.  As such, palliative sedation is categorically distinct from euthanasia and assisted suicide.

Contrast this with the intentional misdefinition of palliative sedation two pro assisted suicide legislators tried to foist on California (AB 2747), under the influence of Compassion and Choices, which would have mutated palliative sedation into terminal sedation via induced coma and dehydration:

442 (d) “Palliative sedation” means the use of sedative medications to relieve extreme suffering by making the patient unaware and unconscious, while artificial food and hydration are withheld, during the progression of the disease leading to the death of the patient.

That didn’t pass.  But the crucial difference between palliative sedation–as described by the NHPCO–and terminal sedation–favored by the death with dignity crowd–is the difference between medically caring properly for patients and turning killing into both a means and an end.

I am not a big fan of Thomas Sowell, but I think his most recent column is right on.  It is about the purported “duty to die” that some are attempting to foist on society (rationing, futile care theory, etc.).  He notes that the agenda isn’t embraced by the people on Main Street, but among the big brained in the intelligentsia.  From his column:

One of the many fashionable notions that have caught on among some of the intelligentsia is that old people have “a duty to die,” rather than become a burden to others. This is more than just an idea discussed around a seminar table. Already the government-run medical system in Britain is restricting what medications or treatments it will authorize for the elderly. Moreover, it seems almost certain that similar attempts to contain runaway costs will lead to similar policies when American medical care is taken over by the government.

Make no mistake about it, letting old people die is a lot cheaper than spending the kind of money required to keep them alive and well. If a government-run medical system is going to save any serious amount of money, it is almost certain to do so by sacrificing the elderly.

That’s already happening in the UK under NICE, and in Canada and the UK, terminal cancer patients are sometimes denied life-extending cancer treatment because the several months of added life is deemed not worth the societal cost. I have noted repeatedly here that private health insurance companies would never be allowed to get away with such duty-to-die-sooner-rather-than-later thinking–but that could well change under Obamacare once government bureaucrats take over what will and will not be provided and to whom.

Sowell notes that other than the days in which indigenous people might have had no choice but to abandon the very sick and elderly, even those in severe poverty never believed their loved ones had a duty to die.  But the elites have different values:

I only began to hear that kind of talk decades later, from highly educated people in an affluent age, when even most families living below the official poverty level owned a car or truck and had air-conditioning. It is today, in an age when homes have flat-panelled TVs, and most families eat in restaurants regularly or have pizzas and other meals delivered to their homes, that the elites– rather than the masses– have begun talking about “a duty to die.”

That’s an interesting point–and it also applies to euthanasia.  We may be in danger of viewing ourselves and each other like products in a consumer culture in which we don’t fix our toys but throw them away. Sowell concludes:

Much of what is taught in our schools and colleges today seeks to break down traditional values, and replace them with more fancy and fashionable notions, of which “a duty to die” is just one. These efforts at changing values used to be called “values clarification,” though the name has had to be changed repeatedly over the years, as more and more parents caught on to what was going on and objected. The values that supposedly needed “clarification” had been clear enough to last for generations and nobody asked the schools and colleges for this “clarification.” Nor are we better people because of it.

Indeed.  The duty to die and the euthanasia movements justify abandonment and sap true compassion, the root meaning of which is to “suffer with.”

I found the article about the Belgian euthanasia coupled with organ harvesting referenced in my critique yesterday of a bioethics journal article  urging that very approach.  The woman in question was not terminally ill, but in a “locked-in” state, that is, fully conscious and completely paralyzed.  She wanted to die–a desire accommodated by her doctors.  Just prior to being killed, she decided to donate her organs. From, “Organ donation after physician-assisted death,” (Letter to the Editor) published in the journal Transplantation (21 (2008) 915–no link):

The day before the euthanasia, the patient expressed her will of after-death organ donation. The ethical and legal possibility of combination of the two separate processes, physician-assisted suicide and after-death organ donation was then considered and agreed by the institutional ethical committee president. The intravenous euthanasia procedure was performed according to the regular protocol, in the presence of the patient’s husband, in a room adjacent to the operative room. The patient was in her regular hospital bed. No member of the transplant team was present during the euthanasia. When the patient’s death was declared by three independent physicians after 10 min of absence of cardiac activity, her cadaver was placed on the operative table. The liver and both kidneys were harvested and transplanted according to the regular Eurotransplant organ allocation rules for after-death organ donation. Currently, more than 1 year later, all three recipients are enjoying a normal graft function.

If this doesn’t set off alarm bells about how the sick and disabled are increasingly being looked upon not only as burdens (to themselves, families, and society), but potential objects for exploitation, what will?  A disabled woman was killed, even though people with locked-in states often adjust over time to their disabilities and are happy to be alive. Indeed, the book The Diving Bell and the Butterfly-written by–Jean-Dominique Bauby–tells just such a story.

Moreover, agreeing to harvest organs from euthanasia/assisted suicides raises the very realistic prospect that despairing people with terminal illnesses or disabilities (or perhaps, just despair) could latch onto being killed for their organs as a way of bringing meaning to their lives.  This is very dangerous territory, made all the more treacherous by doctors, spouses, and a respected medical journal validating the ideas that dead is better than disabled and that living patients can, essentially, be viewed as a natural resource to be killed and mined.

The authors don’t see it that way, of course. They have visions of organs dancing before their eyes:

This case of two separate requests, first euthanasia and second, organ donation after death, demonstrates that organ harvesting after euthanasia may be considered and accepted from ethical, legal and practical viewpoints in countries where euthanasia is legally accepted. This possibility may increase the number of transplantable organs and may also provide some comfort to the donor and his (her) family, considering that the termination of the patient’s life may somehow help other human beings in need for organ transplantation.

Taking the organs was the easy decision. Once you’ve pulled medicine into the forbidden zone of active killing, finding self-congratulatory justifications becomes a most desirable quest.

Some might defend the act by noting the patient’s decision to be euthanized was not made concurrent with her decision to be an organ donor.  I don’t see the distinction. Besides, once society accepts that the two can be joined, saving others could easily become a frequent motivation for asking to be killed.  Heck, given the number of non voluntary euthanasia deaths in the Netherlands–coupled with the push for “presumed consent” to harvest organs–”choice”  itself could one day become moot.

This isn’t the first time that coupling assisted suicide/euthanasia has been suggested as a potential concept, but it may be the first time it has been actively advocated.  Oxford bioethicists Julian Savulescu–for whom virtually anything goes–writing with Dominic Wilkinson argue that euthanasia coupled with organ harvesting would be a splendid way to obtain more kidneys, livers, and hearts. From “Should We Allow Organ Donation Euthanasia?” published in Bioethics (citations omitted):

It is permissible to withdraw life support from a patient with extremely poor prognosis, in the knowledge that this will certainly lead to their death, even if it would be possible to keep them alive for some time. It is permissible to remove their organs after they have died. But why should surgeons have to wait until the patient has died as a result of withdrawal of advanced life support or even simple life prolonging medical treatment? An alternative would be to anaesthetize the patient and remove organs, including the heart and lungs. Brain death would follow removal of the heart (call this Organ Donation Euthanasia (ODE)). The process of death would be less likely to be associated with suffering for the patient than death following withdrawal of LST (which is not usually accompanied by full anaesthetic doses of drugs). If there were a careful and appropriate process for selection, no patient would die who would not otherwise have died.  Organs would be more likely to be viable, since they would not have sustained a period of reduced circulation prior to retrieval. More organs would be available (for example the heart and lungs, which are currently rarely available in the setting of DCD). Patients and families could be reassured that their organs would be able to help other individuals as long as there were recipients available, and there were no contraindications to transplantation. This is not the case at present with DCD, since many patients do not die sufficiently quickly following withdrawal of LST for organ retrieval.

That has been argued before, as we have discussed here often. But the bioethicists take it even a step farther, coupling it with assisted suicide, as apparently has been done in Belgium:

If we believe that we should not remove organs from patients who are still alive, even where they have consented to this and would otherwise die anyway, then one alternative would be to euthanize the donor and retrieve organs after cardiac death had been declared. This would already be a theoretical option in countries where euthanasia is permitted. Organ donation after cardiac euthanasia has been described in a patient in Belgium. Organ donors could be given large doses of sedative, and cardioplegic agents (to stop the heart). Again, this would reduce the risk of patients suffering after withdrawal of LST and make organ donation possible for some patients who would otherwise not be able to donate. In an extreme case, they might choose to undergo euthanasia at least partly to ensure that their organs could be donated.

As you may recall from my first piece against assisted suicide, published in my innocent days before immersing myself in these issues, I suggested that eventually assisted suicide and organ donation would be tied together “as a plum to society.” I just didn’t know it had actually happened–as opposed to having been “merely” advocated.  We now learn it was done in Belgium.  I will get that article and report about it here at SHS (and perhaps elsewhere).

I have a theory: If you are a bioethicist–the more brutal your ideas, the more denigrating of human exceptionalism you become, the more crassly utilitarian direction in which your advocacy flows–the more prestigious the university that will give you a tenured chair and a big salary, and the more likely you are to get the big grants.  Think, Peter Singer and personhood theory/infanticide/Great Ape Project and Princeton and, as here, Jullian Savulescu and Oxford.  Interestingly, both are Australian, so perhaps a pleasing accent is part of the mix. In any event, this article not only supports my theory, but proves another point I often make–if you want to see what is going to go wrong in society tomorrow, just read the professional journal articles published today

Ah, those compassionate people at Dignitas, the Swiss assisted suicide clinic that will make you dead for about $10,000.  Allegedly, they dumped the ashes of former “clients” in a lake. From the story:

BOSSES of Swiss suicide firm Dignitas were facing jail today after the discovery of up to 300 urns containing human remains in a lake. British “suicide tourist” ashes are believed to be in some of the caskets found at the bottom of Lake Zurich by police divers. Authorities were first alerted in 2008 when Dignitas staff were caught pouring the ashes of 20 clients into the water.

But “piles” of urns bearing the logo of the company’s cremation service have now been found by chance on the lake bed. Dignitas boss Ludwig Minelli now faces up to three years jail and a £3,000 fine for carrying out unauthorised burials.

So, facilitating the suicides of these people is perfectly fine, but burying them wrongly–that gets Minelli in trouble!  The word irony fails to adequately characterize the situation–particularly as the country’s Supreme Court created a constitutional right to assisted suicide for the mentally ill.

Assisted suicide advocates often claim the mantle of compassion–as Minelli often has. But as with Kevorkian, that is often a mask for indifference and abandonment.

Assisted suicide has tremendous power to rend family unity and sow distrust over motives. A recent suicide tourism case in the UK–in which a rich widow committed suicide, changing her will to benefit the son who helped–illustrates the danger. From the story:

DETECTIVES are investigating the death of a wealthy British widow at a Swiss suicide clinic amid confusion over a key legal document. Kathleen Dobson was not terminally ill but suffering from rheumatoid arthritis when she decided to end her life at the Dignitas clinic in Zurich. A friend said that although the 74-year-old multi-millionairess had been in some pain, she was able to drive, enjoyed playing bridge and had a satisfying social life on Guernsey. In April 2008 she fi lled out a Dignitas form which required that photo- copies of her instructions must be sent to her three sons, Richard Carlton, Graham Carlton and Robert Carlton. Although she made Richard and Graham aware of her intentions and they accompanied her to Switzerland, Robert was not sent the photocopies and believed she was living a normal life. In June that year Mrs Dobson changed her will, leaving her home, a bungalow worth £815,000, to Richard and £100,000 to his partner Nicola. They live in the property, The Meadows, near Guernsey’s capital St Peter Port.

Robert Carlton, who lives in Dorset, says he was not told of his mother’s decision to change her will and was surprised because as far as he knew she had already left another property on the island, worth £1.7million, to Richard. Robert told the Sunday Express: “The document which carries my name and says I have a photocopy of my mother’s instructions to take her life, is fraudulent. I was kept in the dark over her visit to Dignitas and was never sent any documents by them or anyone else.

Assisted suicide abandons the suffering, exposes the vulnerable to coercion and pressure (as in the Delury case), and can tear families apart.  In the end, it is the opposite of compassion.

I have embedded the trailer for the upcoming puff HBO bio of the murderer Jack Kevorkian, entitled, You Don’t Know Jack, at the bottom of this post. Before viewing it, take a look at a few of the key aspects of Kevorkian’s “career” that I have listed below.  Anyone want to bet whether the movie will bring these facts up?

1. Before assisting the suicides of disabled, terminally ill, and the non sick despairing, Kevorkian went to most prisons where executions are conducted asking to experiment on condemned prisoners.
2. He never limited his killing practice to people with terminal illnesses. About 70% were disabled. Five of Kevorkian’s patients were not sick upon autopsy.
3. Kevorkian took the kidneys from one assisted suicide victim–a man with quadriplegia–and held a press conference offering them “first come, first served.”
4. Janet Good (played by Susan Sarandon), conspired with Kevorkian in his reign of lawlessness, even planning to help kill a patient and then, with Kevorkian, rush the cadaver into a hospital, so organs could be procured. (They never carried out the plan). She committed assisted suicide and her autopsy showed that her pancreatic cancer was not near the terminal stage.
5. Kevorkian did not care much about alleviating the suffering of patients, (he once said he couldn’t remember their names) but rather called it “a first step, an early distasteful professional obligation” toward obtaining a license to engage in human experimentation, writing further:

What I find most satisfying is the prospect of making possible the performance of invaluable experiments or other beneficial acts under conditions that this first unpleasant step can help establish–in a word, obitiatry–as defined earlier.” [Kevorkian liked to coin terms. Obitiatry is the word he invented to describe experimenting on people as part of the practice of human euthanasia.)

6. Kevorkian wanted to experiment on the brains and nervous systems of people he was euthanizing, writing in his 1991 book Prescription Medicide:

If we are ever to penetrate the mystery of death–even superficially–it will have to be through obitiatry…But knowledge about the essence of human death will of necessity require insight into the nature of the unique awareness of consciousness that characterizes cognitive human life. That is possible only through obitiatric research on living human bodies, and most likely by concentrating on the central nervous system

Jack Kevorkian is a dangerous nut who should be shunned, not celebrated.  But you won’t see any of this in the movie, because HBO, the producers, and Pacino don’t know Jack.  And the worst part is that they–and the popular media generally–don’t want to know Jack.  They have a story they want to tell and facts would just get in the way.

Conversations with Al Pacino & Susan Sarandon

Der Spiegel is one of the best news magazines around. In the current issue, it carries an interview with an emergency room physician who thinks he should be able to refuse to save the life of patients whose quality of life he finds too low, and kill others, based on the same criteria.  From the interview with Berlin ER physician, Michael de Kidder:

De Ridder: We need a concept for the treatment of hopeless cases. We can delay the time of death almost indefinitely with dialysis, artificial respiration and feeding tubes. But at what point does this no longer serve the welfare of the patient? As an intensive-care doctor, there have been times when I’ve treated patients and said to myself afterwards: That wasn’t a good decision. I too have experienced the long-term consequences of medical aid that doesn’t make sense.

Even assuming his perspective is right–and I don’t–many of these situations involve circumstances in which the outcome is uncertain.  That something didn’t work out well, doesn’t mean it was wrong to try.  But De Ridder would rather lose someone who could be saved in difficult circumstances than save many who will live in a severely disabled condition:

SPIEGEL: What criteria should a doctor use to decide which lives are worth preserving?

De Ridder: It isn’t about morals. It’s about empiricism. You could say, for example: If a treatment was not successful the first 100 times, it should not be used for the 101st time. With the example of resuscitation: No brain can survive without oxygen for more than eight to 10 minutes. If I know that this time limit has been exceeded — the patient has enlarged pupils and is almost clinically dead — then my efforts are pointless. Unless of course, I think it’s a good thing to produce patients in a vegetative state, at a 99-percent success rate. But doctors are fighting such concepts with all their might. They say: But you never know! There are 100 extraordinary circumstances that may mean that it is possible to help one out of 100 patients to continue to live a meaningful life, they say.

SPIEGEL: So should that person, that one out of 100, simply be abandoned?

De Ridder: Let me answer that with a question: Should I be allowed to put 99 people into a terrible situation, just because what I do benefits one person? How ethical is behavior where 99 decisions cause suffering: Are these (decisions) not as important? The guiding principle for any physician is not to harm the patient…

The italicized statement should turn on everyone’s flashing red lights! These are value judgments, not medical determinations, that the physician has no right to impose.

Having decided he can abandon patients whose quality of life he disdains, De Ridder then assumes the right to kill patients who want to die, including people with disabilities:

SPIEGEL: Would you help [kill the patient]?

De Ridder: Yes, if their decision were permanent and it was reached without external pressure, and if there is no evidence of psychiatric illness. You have to know the patient very well for this. [Me: This is just pabulum. In Oregon, for example, many patients have received assisted suicide from doctors they had just met for the purpose of being made dead--e.g.,  rank Kevorkianism.] Over the past year and a half, I have come to know a young woman, a brilliant scientist, who, since an accident two years ago, has been paralyzed from the head down and is completely without feeling. She wanted the artificial respiration shut off but she was refused, as that is clearly illegal. She was literally reproached for being the only patient in the ward who didn’t want to live.

SPIEGEL: How is the young woman doing now?

De Ridder: She is breathing on her own again. But she says that she can’t touch anyone anymore, she can’t do her work anymore, she can’t even lift a pebble. She doesn’t want to live like this. Mind you, it’s a life that wouldn’t even exist without advanced medical procedures and it’s also one that she can no longer end on her own. In that situation, I can’t exactly order that the woman should be turned so-and-so-many times a day, that she should be fed and that she should lie there for another 40 years, just because we have the technological know-how and we want to satisfy our ethical standards.

SPIEGEL: So what do you intend to do?

De Ridder: If she stands by her decision, then I will help her. And I will face the consequential controversy.

I am reminded of an important statement made by another German physician Christoph Wilhelm Hufeland back in the 19th Century, whom I have quoted before:

It is not up to [the doctor] whether . . . life is happy or unhappy, worthwhile or not, and should he incorporate these perspectives into his trade . . . the doctor could well become the most dangerous person in the state.

Hufeland’s worry was prescient, as history proves.  Alas, physicians like De Ridder want to move us away from human exceptionalism in health care,  and replace it with a discriminatory quality of life ethic that can only victimize the medically vulnerable and defenseless.  This view cannot be allowed to prevail or none of us is ultimately safe.

By Kathleen GilbertPINELLAS PARK, Florida, March 31, 2010 (LifeSiteNews.com) - On the fifth anniversary of the court-ordered death by starvation and dehydration of Terri Schindler Schiavo, Terri's family, pro-life leaders and anti-euthanasia advocates have united to call attention to the silent...lsn@LifeSiteNews.com

By Thaddeus M. BaklinskiBOSTON, March 31, 2010 (LifeSiteNews.com) - A study published in the March edition of the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine suggests that a few physicians may have killed children who were very sick by giving them fatal morphine doses, after the parents had...lsn@LifeSiteNews.com

ST. PETERSBURG, FL, March 23, 2010 (LifeSiteNews.com) -- On March 21, 2010, Fox aired a prime time episode of The Family Guy, which featured a satire about Terri Schiavo, the disabled Florida woman who was starved to death by court order in 2005 after a lengthy court battle.   The sketch...lsn@LifeSiteNews.com

In the five years since Terri Schiavo was slowly dehydrated to death, her loving family has been subjected to repeated  callousness and intentional cruelties–canards about their motives, personal vituperation, etc.. That’s life in the public eye.  But now a new line of despicability has been crossed that cannot be allowed to stand.

Fox’s Family Guy stooped even beneath its usual scatological obsessions to literally mock a dead woman, whose only “crime” was to have been profoundly cognitively disabled. The episode–which I embedded below only after much thought, opens with a fictional school play, Terri Schiavo: The Musical.  In it, Terri is depicted as having been hooked up to every conceivable machine, a total lie since all she needed to remain alive was food and water delivered through a tube.  But the facts this case have been continually misstated from the beginning, so that is nothing new.

But what is novel–and truly beneath contempt, not only because it mocks and degrades Terri, but also, everyone now living with serious cognitive impairments–are the lyrics.  “Michael Schiavo” says, “She’s a vegetable,” and the chorus responds, “We hate vegetables!” to which the audience breaks up in laughter. Later she is depicted as having “mashed potato brains,” which are poured into a bowl, and being “the most expensive plant you’ll ever see.”

This doesn’t just mock a dead woman who can’t defend herself.  It is hate speech against people similarly situated.  Indeed, the V-word should be rendered just as societally unacceptable as the N-word has thankfully become.  Both epithets serve the same purpose, that is, to demean, dehumanize, and exclude–so as to open the door to oppression, exploitation, and killing.

And imagine how those with loved ones with these conditions must feel seeing such cruel mockery.  I asked Bobby Schindler, Terri’s brother, to react.  He told me: “These people have no regard for disabled people and their families, or the pain such mockery causes.  What kind of a human being would think this was funny?”

(Update: Apparently, somebody like Thaddeus Pope.)

And what kind of network would countenance such discriminatory hate speech on one of its prime time programs?  Fox Entertainment.  If you think the Family Guy should be jerked off the air–just as the show would if it mocked, say Michael Vick, over his race–you might want to make your voice known. Here is someone you might want to contact in protest:

Ms. Gail Berman, President, FOX Broadcasting Company, P.O. Box 900 Beverly Hills, CA 90213 (310) 369-1000E-Mail: askfox@foxinc.com

One final point: Don’t think the dehumanizing of the cognitively disabled in entertainment isn’t relevant to the current struggle over health care.  I am not alleging a conspiracy, but Hollywood consistently pushes themes that are consistent with accepting the direction in which we are being taken politically.  Shows like Family Guy soften the ground for the coming campaign, the effect of which will be to do away with the expensive for which to care, whether through rationing, futile care theory, perhaps even assisted suicide/euthanasia.  Indeed, Hollywood has long pushed culture of death issues–such as the upcoming puff biopic of Jack Kevorkian, starring Al Pacino.

Stories like the one I discuss below are ubiquitous.  Indeed, my first hospice patient (I was a volunteer) got kicked out because he unexpectedly got better.  But when he entered the program, he wailed in my arms that he wanted to die immediately because he was a burden. Under Compassion and Choices values, he would never have survived to continue on with his life.  And all the self congratulations about the compassion of helping him die would have been made without knowing or caring that giving him poison–which I know he would have taken–had cheated him of the rest of his life.

An article in the Daily Mirror tells a similar tale. From “Living Proof Assisted Suicide May Not be the Answer:”

At the hospital where my wife works doctors are wrestling with the thorny issue of ­whether or not to treat sick elderly people insistent that they want to die. The whole debate about ­assisted suicide puts doctors in an incredibly invidious position. But one story emerged last week that provides real food for thought. A doctor in palliative care spoke of how her ageing ­mother suffering from ­advanced breast cancer was desperate to be allowed to die. “As far as she was concerned she didn’t want any more chemotherapy, and the end could not come soon enough,” she said. Her mother was in ­excruciating pain, had given up hope and didn’t want to be a burden on anyone.

But her daughter gave her pain relief and persuaded her mother that she had an active mind and at 84 still had much to live for. Gradually her mother began to improve, the radiotherapy began to work and the pain disappeared She went on to live for ­another four years. “Those four years,” said the daughter, “were the most ­precious gift and some of the richest times of her life.” It is only one story… and admittedly a doctor in ­palliative care has her own reasons for recounting it. But if such a turnaround is possible for her mother, then clearly it is possible for ­others. How sad for the elderly and sick to throw away a few ­remaining years of happiness simply because they feel a burden on their family. How very sad.

I have noticed that stories such as these don’t grab the attention of people in the same way as do tales of families helping sick loved ones kill themselves.  I am not sure why that is, but I suspect that many have bought into the culture of death meme that death is better than disability or dependence.