Defending Vulnerable People's Right to Live
Friday September 10, 2010
Mother Fights to Save Daughter's Life
Story from Telegraph News, by Richard Savill
1 July, 2008
The mother of a terminally ill six-year-old girl is to launch a "right-to-life" legal battle against a hospital after doctors said they would refuse to give her daughter life-saving treatment.
Lesley Hartland, whose daughter Amber has a rare brain disorder and needs intensive care treatment when she has chest infections, has vowed to contest the action "with every breath in my body."
Elderly Woman Rescued by Family from NHS Dehydration Order
From LifeSiteNews.com
By Hilary White
Deemed "due to die" by doctors in February, Ellen Westwood is now home and recovering.
BIRMINGHAM, UK, July 2, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) - "Ellen Westwood was due to die in February but her family's Catholic and for them, life is sacred." So begins the television coverage by the BBC of a battle by a Birmingham family to prevent the NHS from dehydrating their mother to death.
According to the BBC's report, doctors decided on a Friday in February that Mrs. Westwood was "due to die" by the following Monday, but the family, with the intervention of their priest, fought the order to remove the woman's hydration.
Good: Delaware Didn't "Learn the Lesson" of Schiavo
The Delaware House of Representatives has passed a resolution in support of protecting the life of Loren Richardson, who like Terri Schiavo before her, is the subject of a bitter court fight over removing her feeding tube. The resolution states:
Australian "Euthanasia" Manslaughter Convictions
From Wesley J. Smith, 19 June 2008.
Good news and bad news. An Australian jury has convicted two women who killed an Alzheimer's patient. From the story:
The Sydney jury found Shirley Justins guilty of manslaughter and Caren Jenning guilty of being an accessary to manslaughter for the euthanasia drug death of former Qantas pilot Graeme Wylie...Justins pleaded guilty to aiding and abetting suicide early in the trial, and said Wylie was desperate to die before his dementia got worse. Jenning also told the jury she was motivated by mercy in travelling to Mexico to obtain the Nembutal for Wylie, who was one of her oldest friends.
Normally, such a defense melts hearts and juries--caught up in the "quality of life" ethos of our age--often will not convict. And that brings us to the bad news:
Pressuring Media to be Assisted Suicide Propagandists
From Wesley J. Smith, 13 June 2008
Assisted suicide advocates pushing Washington's I 1000 are resorting to coercion to pressure the media into using their advocacy phrases when describing the pro-assisted suicide initiative. From the Eye on Olympia blog :
Cancer Patient Commits Suicide When Told NHS Will Not Cover Chemo
From Wesley J. Smith
ALS "Depression" About the Same as the General Public
From Wesley J. Smith
ALS, called Lou Gehrig's disease in the USA and motor neurone disease in the UK, is the bloody flag often waved by euthanasia activists as a reason to legalize mercy killing. "Of course he wants to die," they will say. and then some will assert falsely and cruelly that death from ALS will agonizing by choking on saliva, even though patients receiving proper care do not die choking.
My last hospice patient died peacefully in his sleep from ALS. While I was with him, euthanasia was in the news with ALS patients featured on ABC Nightline as wanting euthanasia. Bob was fit to be tied! After being suicidal for more than two years--because he felt so abandoned by his friends, not due to the disease--he told me that his ending period was the best time of his life. (Yet, had assisted suicide been legal, he would have probably missed the good times--or so he told me. But people from Compassion and Choices say that people like Bob can't commit suicide because their lives are already over.) And he is not the only ALS patient I have known with that incredibly positive attitude.
Now, there is some journal evidence that ALS patients quality of life is not unremitting horror. From the story:
Golubchuck Futility Case: Can Wanted Life be a "Harm?"
From Wesley J. Smith
After three doctors resigned rather than maintain--and thus, extend--the life of the catastrophically ill Samuel Golubchuk, an unnamed physician has agreed to provide the wanted care. From the story:
Three doctors at the city's Grace Hospital have refused to continue providing care to the elderly patient, Samuel Golubchuk, who they say has no brain function and should not be kept physically alive on a ventilator.
State denies cancer treatment, offers suicide instead
'To say, we'll pay for you to die, but not pay for you to live, it's cruel'
State officials have offered a lung cancer patient the option of having the Oregon Health Plan, set up in 1994 to ration health care, pay for an assisted suicide but not for the chemotherapy prescribed by her physician.
The story appears to be a happy ending for Barbara Wagner, who has been notified by a drug manufacturer that it will provide the expensive medication, estimated to cost $4,000 a month, for the first year and then allow her to apply for further treatment, according to a report in the Eugene Register-Guard.
Patients need proper care, not euthanasia
By Melanie McDonagh
For someone contemplating death, Debbie Purdey seems radiantly alive. She is the multiple sclerosis sufferer who was allowed a judicial review this week to clarify what would happen if she were to travel to a Swiss or Belgian euthanasia clinic to end her life.
She wants to make sure that her husband, Omar, would not be prosecuted if he accompanied her. The Director of Public Prosecutions, Sir Ken Macdonald, has refused to publicise the official policy on assisted suicide. However, according to the pro-euthanasia organisation Dignity in Dying, which is backing her case, 100 Britons have travelled to suicide clinics abroad since 1992 - and none of their relatives has been prosecuted.
