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Canadian lawmakers recently introduced legislation to delay a planned expansion of their Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID) program for three years. Without this delay, the rapidly increasing Canadian suicide rates will explode as those suffering from mental health conditions will be allowed to commit suicide with the help of a medical professional. Not to be outdone, some Colorado legislators seem eager to expand the culture of death outside the womb and constitutionally enshrine a nonexistent “right” to death inside the womb. They are making the expansion of death a “hill to die on.” House and Senate legislators have introduced the...

Canada’s psychiatric community has been divided on the country’s emergence as a global leader in assisted death under the MAID program. The number of Canadians ending their lives through medically assisted death has grown at a speed that outpaces every other nation in the world. As Canada is poised to expand eligibility criteria under medical assistance in dying (MAID) legislation, data from all 11 countries where the controversial end-of-life treatment exists shows Canada is the fastest-growing adopter in history, an analysis by the Investigative Journalism Bureau and the Toronto Star has found.

Vermont on Tuesday became the first state in the country to change its medically assisted suicide law to allow terminally ill people from out of state to take advantage of it to end their lives. Republican Gov. Phil Scott signed the bill that removes the residency requirement for the decades-old law. Last year in a court settlement, Oregon agreed to stop enforcing the residency requirement of its law allowing terminally ill people to receive lethal medication. It also agreed to ask the Legislature to remove it from the law. ... Patients routinely travel to other states to utilize the best...

Medical assistance in dying (MAID) has been available in Canada since 2016 and is set to expand in March 2023, extending eligibility to those with a mental illness. Bill C-7 would allow individuals seeking MAID to apply solely on the basis of a mental disorder. Prior to the bill’s passage, MAID eligibility was based on having a “grievous and irremediable medical condition,” according to a report from the Canadian government on the practice. Creighton School of Medicine professor Charles Camosy said Wednesday on “Tucker Carlson Tonight” the bill would allow “mature minors” to be euthanized by state doctors without the...

New Zealand has voted to introduce an extreme assisted suicide law in a binding public referendum. Preliminary results, announced by the country’s electoral commission today, show 65.2% of voters supported the End of Life Choice Act coming into force as a new law. An estimated 480,000 special votes still need to be counted, but the margin between the support and opposition is so wide that the referendum is likely to succeed. The official results of the euthanasia vote will be published November 6, with the new law coming into effect one year later. The introduction of the law follows New...

Through nearly 73 years of marriage, George and Shirley Brickenden did nearly everything together. On March 27, they died together at their Toronto retirement home, holding hands, surrounded by family. George, 95, and Shirley, 94, became one of the very few couples in Canada to have chosen — and to have been allowed — to die together with medical assistance. And they're the first such couple to speak publicly about it. The Brickendens describe themselves as a mostly private family, but George, Shirley and their family felt it was important to open the conversation about doctor-assisted death, speaking with the...

http://www.scpr.org/news/2016/03/10/58421/assisted-suicide-new-calif-law-to-take-effect-june/ Assisted suicide:New California law to take effect June 9. Fourth state in the US with such a law.

OTTAWA, May 24, 2016 (LifeSiteNews) — UNICEF Canada is pushing for assisted suicide and euthanasia for children — or "mature minors" — arguing that this conforms with the Charter, Canadian legal precedent and the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. That would include euthanasia or assisted suicide for mature minors who suffer from a non-terminal illness or disability, according to UNICEF Canada's policy director Marvin Bernstein. UNICEF, or United Nations Children's Fund (originally, Emergency Fund) is a UN organization that is, according to its website, "on a mission to reach every child and ensure their well-being, no matter...

Dr. Jack Kevorkian, the Michigan pathologist who championed physician-assisted suicides, died early Friday after being hospitalized with kidney problems and pneumonia. The 83-year-old Kevorkian, who said he helped some 130 people end their lives from 1990 to 1999, died about 2:30 a.m. at William Beaumont Hospital in Royal Oak, Mich., close friend and attorney Mayer Morganroth said. An official cause of death had not been determined, but Nurses at the hospital played recordings of classical music by composer Johann Sebastian Bach for Kevorkian before he died, Morganroth said. Kevorkian was freed in June 2007 after serving eight years of a...

OLYMPIA, Wash. – Terminally ill patients with less than six months to live will soon be able to ask their doctors to prescribe them lethal medication in Washington state. But even though the "Death with Dignity" law takes effect Thursday, people who might seek the life-ending prescriptions could find their doctors conflicted or not willing to write them. Many doctors are hesitant to talk publicly about where they stand on the issue, said Dr. Tom Preston, a retired cardiologist and board member of Compassion & Choices, the group that campaigned for and supports the law.

When I saw this headline, I wondered what it could possibly mean: "Drugs like LSD and Ecstasy 'could help terminally ill'." Turns out (drat!) that it doesn't mean that those hits of acid you may have swallowed when you were young and irresponsible will help you live longer. The first clinical trial involving LSD since the 1970s began in Switzerland in June with the aim of using "psychedelic psychotherapy" to help terminally ill patients come to terms with imminent death to improve the quality of their remaining life. Eight subjects will receive 200 micrograms of LSD - enough to induce...

Rabbi Gurkow: Welcome to the Rabbi's one on one chat room, how can I help you today? jewishscoller: whats the jewish take on assisted suicide Rabbi Gurkow: itis forbidden to take one;s own life or to help another take theirs jewishscoller: but why, whats so bad about puting somebody out of there misery jewishscoller: im sry to argue im am 100% against it i just want to get more details about it Rabbi Gurkow: let me ask you if you think it is ok to help a young functional man or woman out of their misery because they want you...

The Vermont House of Representatives voted against a proposal yesterday that would have made the state the second in the country to permit physician-assisted suicide, following Oregon. House members voted 82-63 against the measure euphemistically entitled "Patient Choice and Control at End of Life," after a week of impassioned debate on the issue, the Associated Press reported. The legislation would have made it legal for a doctor to assist a patient with a terminal illness to commit suicide by prescribe lethal medication. "In my view, (the bill) goes too far in enforcing one group's preferences on the traditional values of...

THE MAN I KILLED did not want to die, but he no longer felt he had much of a choice. He had gone from being tall and strapping, full of appetites and a brilliant manner of speech, to a skeleton, weak and full of messy needs. He and his wife still loved each other very much, but... he was 60 when he was diagnosed with cancer. ...One day over lunch, I told him that if he ever experienced too much pain or diminishment, I would try to help him die on his own terms, if he wanted. He was amazed,...

A long-dormant bill that would allow the terminally ill to obtain life-ending drugs from their physicians appeared to be headed for defeat Tuesday in a Senate committee after a wavering Democrat turned against it. Sen. Joe Dunn, D-Garden Grove, said he struggled with how to vote on the bill and ultimately decided it could lead to a broader use of assisted suicide than contemplated by the measure's authors because of future pressures to cut medical costs. "In this society, more often than not, public policy decisions are driven unfortunately by money concerns, not by policy concerns," said Dunn, the chairman...

The U.S. Supreme Court's rejection of the Bush administration's heavy-handed threats to prosecute Oregon physicians has revived the debate over whether California should allow doctors to help their terminally ill patients commit suicide. The fact that Oregon's law has survived the court challenge does not make physician-assisted suicide good public policy. It emphatically is not, for the simple reason that it exposes the most vulnerable members of society – the elderly, the disabled, the poor, the mentally impaired, the terminally ill – to unwarranted pressures to take their own lives because they are a financial burden on their families and...

"If one state can say it's legal for doctors to prescribe morphine to make people feel better, or to prescribe steroids for bodybuilding, doesn't that undermine the uniformity of the federal law and make enforcement impossible?" he asked

SACRAMENTO — Facing a potentially narrow defeat in the Assembly, Bay Area and Los Angeles lawmakers used an eleventh-hour political maneuver late Wednesday to catapult their landmark doctor-assisted suicide bill into the Senate. The move, called a "gut and amend," which transfers the legislation into a Senate bill, bypassed a Friday deadline for passage out of the house of origin and keeps the measure alive. The proposal has triggered widespread, emotional debate, with major forces lining up on either side. In committee hearings and behind the scenes, the clash has grown for months to the point where numerous Assembly members...

Years before he categorized Terri Schindler Schiavo in the persistent vegetative state, which led to her death by dehydration, neurologist Dr. Ronald Cranford was building the case for removing feeding tubes from society’s vulnerable. "…The United States has thousands or tens of thousands of patients in vegetative states; nobody knows for sure exactly how many," Cranford wrote in a 1997 Minneapolis Star Tribune opinion piece titled: When a feeding tube borders on the barbaric. (WorldNetDaily. Com, March 23, 2005). "But before long, this country will have several million patients with Alzheimer’s dementia. The challenges and costs of maintaining vegetative state...

Starving Terri Schiavo is Illegal Assisted Suicide Judge Greer's decision is controlled by Florida law, specifically Florida's Health Care Advance Directives, Chapter 365 of Florida Statutes. The judge may only rule on questions of fact and law relating to these provisions. He may not write new law from the bench. Judge Greer ruled that Michael Shiavo, Terry Shiavo's husband, was legally entitled to act in place of Terri and carry out her wishes regarding her medical treatment. He ruled that Terri was in a persistent vegetative state and would have wished to refuse artificial extension of her life by...