“Medicine is supposed to be preventative; the fact that medicine is now developing a treatment to kill is yet another indication of how completely lost our society has become,” ...
Dr Michael Irwin, a retired British doctor who paid to help a terminally-ill patient commit suicide at a Swiss clinic, is set to be the first person charged under new guidelines for assisted dying. ...
Bill C-384, the private members bill that would have legalized euthanasia and assisted suicide in Canada was strongly defeated by a vote of 228 to 59. ...
In December, Josh Cooley could not walk across a room without help or start a conversation — lingering effects of a serious brain injury the Marine reservist suffered in 2005 in Iraq. But by March, he was doing those things and more. “He can shower standing up,” said his mother, Christine Cooley. “You don’t know how ... ...
I share this fear, but as a disabled person, I also have the opposite fear: that because I am disabled, there may be an assumption that I want to die. ...
“People with serious illnesses are sometimes fearful of the motives of doctors or consultants,” Dr. Toffler notes. “Such fears were never an issue before assisted suicide was legalized.” ...
Lane Individual Practice Association…which administers the Oregon Health Plan in Lane County, responded to Stroup’s request with a letter saying the state would not cover Stroup’s pricey treatment, but would pay for the cost of physician-assisted suicide. ...
The State of North Carolina has only recently recognized the unlawful acts that it performed on unknowing patients from 1929 to 1974, when over 7,600 sterilizations were performed. ...
Compassion and Choices, a national nonprofit group advocating for end-of-life choice, is one of the directive’s sharpest critics. They say most Americans would not want artificial hydration and nutrition if they were in a vegetative state. ...
Armed with the knowledge that an actor of the state took virtual ownership of a citizen’s body and life and that this particular actor of the state created the environment under which that undying person was deliberately made to die (for circumstances beyond that individual’s control), would you not sit up? Take notice? Get involved? ...
The national Eugenics Record Office would spend years amassing volumes of data on individuals and families, combining “equal portions of gossip, race prejudice, sloppy methods and leaps of logic, all caulked together by elements of actual genetic knowledge to create the glitter of a genuine science,” Edwin Black writes in War Against th...
The “quality of life,” often imposed by economic, social and psychological pressures, cannot take precedence over general principles according to which even the simple doubt of being in the presence of a living person morally obliges one to respectfully abstain from any act that aims at anticipating the person’s death. ...
Most patients who sought doctor-aided death in 2009 were white, dying of cancer and fearful of losing autonomy, state reports show. ...
On March 21, 2010, Fox aired an episode of Family Guy that featured a sketch called Terri Schiavo: The Musical. In it, Ms. Schiavo was called a plant, a vegetable and school children sang about pulling her plug. Here is Pamela Hennessy’s open letter to Family Guy’s producer, Seth McFarlane, in response. ...
Despite assurances that assisted suicide will remain illegal under British law, given the Netherlands’ sad history and the ease with which one step and then another can be justified on the road to legalized euthanasia — whither Britain? ...
Fortunately, we are more enlightened than Harvard professors were a hundred years ago. A century later we have totally repudiated the idea of eugenics, haven’t we? ...
Healthy elderly people who are simply “tired of living” could be allowed to end their lives with a lethal injection under new euthanasia laws being debated by the Dutch parliament. ...
Euthanasia campaigner Vicki Wood has taken her own life at the Dignitas clinic in Switzerland. Photograph: Al Stewart ...
As new prosecution guidelines on assisted suicide are announced Baroness Finlay of Llandaff says the medical profession should not use assisted suicide as just another healthcare option ...
Of the 63 people who received lethal doses of prescription medicine between March and December 2009, 47 are known to have died. ...
About 13 percent of parents said they had considered asking caregivers about ending their child’s life, and 9 percent actually had the discussion. Five parents, or 4 percent, asked for medications to end their child’s life. ...
Today the New York Times has a piece about the dilemmas of futile care. What is futile care? Glad you asked. ...
The assisted suicide prosecution guidelines list 16 factors that would favour prosecution for assisted suicide in the UK and 6 factors that are deemed to not be in the public interest for prosecution. ...
Dread genetic diseases are disappearing — because parents and doctors are eliminating the children who have them. ...
It seems that disabled people are the only people who can be suicidal and mentally competent at the same time. ...
Helping end someone’s life is a crime, which usually carries a 14 year prison sentence, but not so if the corpse is one of someone who was very sick and they were ‘asking for it’. ...
