Defending Vulnerable People's Right to Live
Friday September 10, 2010
Switching off cancer patient's life support machine was 'premature', anaesthetist said
By Chris Brooke
Daily Mail, 27 January 2009
Inquest: Stephen Kettley, 52, may have recovered if his ventilator was kept on
A cancer patient who died after his life support was switched off might have had a chance of getting better, an inquest was told yesterday.
The First Reading of the Government’s Coroners and Justice Bill will be on 15th January 2009. The law on assisted suicide is to be “simplified”. Amendments could be put forward, in due course.
Members of “Dignity in Dying” have been requested to ask their M.P.s to sign Early Day Motion 230, which “expresses concern that some terminally ill adults end their suffering by travelling abroad to die.”
Montana Assisted Suicide Advocate Made Up Quote by Plaintiff
The media usually report the assisted suicide agenda by, basically, printing the proponents' press releases and pretending that it is objective news. But sometimes, it comes back to bite them, as when the PR is mendacious.
It's how you live, not how you die
From The Times
December 9, 2008
Times reader Tudor Spencer, whose wife has multiple sclerosis, argues that people should live for today, instead of fixating on the end
When my wife Hilary was told that she had multiple sclerosis more than 25 years ago there were no articles about sufferers seeking assisted suicide. If there had been, perhaps we would have started to think about putting boundaries around our commitment to life and to each other. Perhaps we would have had discussions about at what stage Hilary might have “had enough” or at what point it would become “unfair” to ask me to support her.
Government End of Life Care Strategy: Open to misinterpretation?
Statement by ALERT Against Euthanasia
GOVERNMENT END OF LIFE CARE STRATEGY
Open to misinterpretation?
From reliable evidence, including official enquiries, it seems that some hospitals and care homes sometimes get things wrong where the elderly are concerned. The government's new "Quality Markers" have been sent out for consultation. Could they be misinterpreted, perhaps by staff influenced by the new official spokesman for the elderly, Joan Bakewell, who thinks that there are too many of them?
UK Official Denigrates Elderly with Profound Cognitive Impairments by Using the Hateful V-Epithet
By Wesley J. Smith, 18 November 2008
Sickening. Just sickening. A public official in the UK who is "Labour's czar for the elderly," posits a duty to die by having society refuse to medically support demented patients, and denigrates them with the V-Epithet to boot. From the story:
Over the last month, two interesting documents have been published on End of Life Care. Dignity in Dying, formerly the Voluntary Euthanasia Society, issued a Charter for Dignity at the End of Life; and Help the Hospices published a report on End of Life Care in England. These two documents are interesting for the different approaches they adopt to the same question.
Sadness at the prolonged illness of young Hannah Jones is only exceeded by sadness at the heavy-handed paternalism that decided Hereford Hospital consultants to try to remove her from her family and home and force her to have a heart transplant against her considered will.
Her reasons are her own but perhaps include some realisation that living hearts can only come from living bodies, as well as her generosity in thinking of others who are waiting for such an operation. As we admire her courage, we can pray that she will continue to enjoy life at home for much longer than is at present anticipated.
“Licensing People to Put Others Down”
By Dave Andrusko
When “bioethicist” Peter Singer moved to the United States, our loss was the rest of the world’s gain. In the time Singer has been the DeCamp Professor in the University Center for Human Values at Princeton, he has continued pioneering (so to speak) new anti-life vistas.
He is best known to pro-lifers for writing that “a period of 28 days after birth might be allowed before an infant is accepted as having the same right to live as others.” He added (in the book Should the Baby Live?), “It does not seem wise to add to the burden on limited resources by increasing the number of severely disabled children.” In a later volume Singer explained that the pool of candidates should include those with spina bifida and Down syndrome.
The sad death of Daniel James has produced many emotions. I do not judge or criticise his parents whose bereavement must be awful, and will get worse. But few can have imagined the response of Lady Warnock, New Labour's advisor on ethics. Quite right too, was her message; he had a duty to kill himself. Everyone who would need so much expensive care should get out of the way.
The implication of her beliefs are profound. Obviously, if severely disabled people who can commit suicide have a duty to do so, then all the people not able to think for themselves – mentally handicapped, brain damaged, apparently permanently comatose and so on – should certainly be killed by someone else. No doubt Mary Warnock has got a little list - they never would be missed, they'd none of them be missed - but how is she going to decide who exactly to kill, or to urge to kill themselves? Where will be the cut-off where she thinks society should bother to care for them? Four limbs lost, or three, or just two?
