Free Republic

When Marc Weide's mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer, she chose euthanasia. Here, we publish his shockingly frank diary of her final days Marc Weide's mother, who was diagnosed with terminal cancer and chose euthanasia Monday February 11 2008 5.30pm: Dad is bent over the toilet bowl with a brush in his hand and a scowl on his face. I walk up to him. "Shall I give you a hand?" Dad begins to snigger, abandoning any attempt to make sense of the situation. We stand shoulder to shoulder with our backs to Mum, who paces around the landing with...

Ottawa, Canada (LifeNews.com) -- A member of the Canadian Parliament has announced his intent to propose a bill that would legalize assisted suicide in Canada. But one leading anti-euthanasia group isn't waiting for official introduction of a bill before asking pro-life advocates to start speaking out against it.The Euthanasia Prevention Coalition has launched a letter-writing campaign asking people to contact their MPs and urge strong opposition to a potential bill from MP Francine Lalonde, a member of the Bloc Québécois party.The organization has written sample letters but EPC director Alex Schadenberg encourages people to write their own to express...

LifeNews.com Note: Ken Connor is the chairman of the Center for a Just Society in Washington and a leading pro-life attorney who helped Terri Schiavo's family try to save her life. He is a former president of the Family Research Council. Even the most despicable ideas can be made palatable when euphemisms are used to spin them. That's why abortion advocates call themselves "pro-choice" rather than "pro abortion." It's also why they talk about "terminating a pregnancy" rather than "killing a baby." Controlling the language not only controls the argument, it often determines the outcome of the argument. Proponents...

Dover, DE (LifeNews.com) -- The family of Lauren Richardson continues to press her case and is now calling on the governor of Delaware for help to save her life. Richardson has become the next Terri Schiavo as her parents engage in a massive legal and philosophical debate about whether she should live or die.Richardson is a 23-year-old woman who overdosed on heroin in August 2006 while she was three months pregnant with a baby girl.Doctors kept Lauren on life support until she delivered her baby in February 2007. Shortly thereafter, her parents began a fight that is reminiscent of...

PATIENTS are being given the opportunity to decide whether they want to die under a program being rolled out through Victorian hospitals. The Respecting Patients' Choices program allows patients in the early stages of chronic or terminal illness to make a formal written statement declaring their desire to refuse life-saving treatment in hospitals. Its pioneers say it will save families from the emotional anguish of having to make such decisions on behalf of their loved ones.

LANSING, Mich. (AP) Michigan officials say assisted suicide advocate Jack Kevorkian will be paroled in June.

Sigrid Fry-Revere is director of bioethics studies for the Cato Institute. Just last week, seven New York funeral home directors pleaded guilty to stealing organs from thousands of bodies, including that of broadcaster Alastair Cooke. Bizarrely enough, the federal government's looking to get in on the same action. At a meeting today and tomorrow, the Department of Health and Human Services Advisory Committee on Organ Transplantation is expected to recommend that states adopt policies of "presumed consent" for organ donation. In other words, authorities could harvest organs from your dead body without prior permission from you or your family. If...

In a case of "Whose life is it anyway?" a state appeals court ruled yesterday that a mentally handicapped woman has no say over whether she should be kept alive on life support. In the unanimous decision, a five-judge panel ruled that the 26-year-old - who says she wants to be kept on life support in the event she's felled by illness or an accident - isn't competent to make that decision. Instead, her mother, who is her legal guardian, gets to make the call - and she doesn't want her daughter on life support. A lawyer for the woman,...

TORONTO, September 20, 2006 (LifeSiteNews.com) – At last week’s Toronto conference of the international Right to Die movement, speakers laid out the course of the movement’s strategy for legalization of euthanasia and assisted suicide around the world. Of particular note is the emphasis on the “right” to be starved and dehydrated to death, especially for patients suffering from dementia or cognitive disabilities. Seeing a “catch-22” in the dementia and euthanasia problem, the Right to Die movement says the problem is that some, while unwilling “to end life prematurely,” know that “it requires mental competence to take personal responsibility for choosing...

Canberra, Australia (LifeNews.com) -- An Australia lawmaker made good on her promise to deliver a speech with explicit instruction on how disabled or elderly patients can kill themselves. The speech was designed to get around an Australian law that prohibits disseminating assisted suicide or euthanasia instructions over the Internet or phone. Because South Australian Democrat Sandra Kanck is protected by legislative privileges, her speech can be posted online, including on the legislature's web site. Kanck gave the explanations during a speech to the South Australian Parliament. Lasting about half an hour the speech gave specific details about equipment, substances and...

SOUTH Australia's Parliament has voted to block the internet version of a speech from Australian Democrats MP Sandra Kanck which detailed ways to commit suicide. The Government last night presented a motion to Parliament's upper house which called for Ms Kanck's comments not to be displayed on Parliament's website. The motion was passed 10 votes to nine, with the Liberal opposition voting against the proposal on the grounds it would set a dangerous precedent. The speech will be included in the Parliament's hansard but deleted from the Hansard version placed on the internet. The vote followed a decision by state...

TORONTO, ON, July 21, 2006 (LifeSiteNews.com) – A pro-abortion columnist writing for the National Post has followed the logic of pro-life arguments about the evils of embryonic stem cell research and concluded that, if true, then artificial reproduction techniques must also be considered murderous on the scale of genocide. “In short, if embryos are human beings with full human rights, fertility clinics are death camps—with a side order of cold-blooded eugenics,” writes Kinsley in an article entitled Where’s the Logic? “No one who truly believes in the humanity of embryos could possibly think otherwise.” Kinsley explains that in vitro clinics,...

ONE of Britain's leading experts on medical ethics has called for doctors to be able to end the lives of terminally ill patients — even if they have not given consent. Len Doyal, professor of medical ethics at the University of London, has taken the euthanasia debate into new and highly contentious territory. He says doctors should recognise they are already killing patients when they remove feeding tubes from those whose lives are judged to be no longer worth living. Some will suffer a "slow and distressing death" as a result. It would be better if their lives were ended...

TAMPA, Fla. - Michael Schiavo made a last-minute decision to give up on his fight to remove his brain-damaged wife's feeding tube last year as he was hounded by protesters and getting death threats, but his attorney talked him out of it, Schiavo said in a book about the end-of-life case that captivated the nation. On March 16, the day before Terri Schiavo's feeding tube was removed for the last time, Schiavo's longtime fiance, Jodi Centonze, persuaded him "to walk away from Terri," he said in the book released Monday and titled "Terri: The Truth." She was worried about the...

BREAKING ON THE AP WIRE: WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Supreme Court has upheld Oregon's one-of-a-kind physician-assisted suicide law, rejecting a Bush administration attempt to punish doctors who help terminally ill patients die.

As the yearslong battle between Michael Schiavo and Bob and Mary Schindler came to a head in March, the case drew in Congress, the U.S. Supreme Court, the Vatican and the White House. National TV networks chronicled every twist of the hot-button issue. Michael Schiavo wanted to carry out what he said were his wife's wishes not to be kept alive artificially. The Schindlers disputed their daughter had such end-of-life wishes and had held out hope that she could have improved with therapy. They said she had interacted with them. The dispute nearly created a constitutional crisis. Congress, the president...

FRIDAY, Dec. 2 (HealthDay News) -- Legalizing doctor-assisted death wouldn't undermine patients' trust in their physicians, a new study finds. "Overall, three times as many people disagree as agree that legalizing physician-assisted death would cause them to trust their personal doctors less," researcher Mark Hall, a professor of public health sciences and professor of law at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, N.C., said in a prepared statement. He and his colleagues conducted a telephone survey of 1,117 American adults, who were asked to use a five-point scale to rate their agreement or disagreement with this statement: "Assume for the purpose...

It turns out that many of the most horrific stories we heard about New Orleans in the aftermath of Katrina weren’t true. But there’s one nightmarish story that may turn out to be an exception—a story that should cause anyone who plans on growing old to lose some sleep. Following Katrina, stories began to circulate about the goings on at Memorial Hospital. These stories depicted an overwhelmed and increasingly desperate staff repeatedly discussing the unthinkable: “euthanizing patients they thought might not survive the ordeal.” Fran Butler, a nurse manager at Memorial, told CNN that her “nurses wanted to know what...

LARGO - In what could be a final chapter in the legal saga of Terri Schiavo, Pinellas-Pasco State Attorney Bernie McCabe says he could find no evidence that Michael Schiavo caused his wife's collapse 15 years ago. In a June 30 letter to Gov. Jeb Bush, McCabe suggested ending the state's inquiry into the case. Bush responded Thursday in a two-sentence letter to McCabe: "Based on your conclusions, I will follow your recommendation that the inquiry by the state be closed." Bush asked McCabe last month to investigate Schiavo's collapse on the morning of Feb. 25, 1990. He cited questions...

Gov. Jeb Bush said Thursday he might ask a state attorney to investigate allegations that Terri Schiavo's husband waited more than an hour to call 911 after her 1990 collapse. "There's some doubt about when she did collapse and how long it took ... for the 911 call to be made," Bush said. "Which I think is worthy of some investigation. I don't know what form it would take." Bush said he might ask Bernie McCabe, state attorney for Pinellas-Pasco, to look into the issue, but that would have to wait until McCabe returned from vacation.

The Hemp Evolution website (hempevolution.org) is in red- alert mode in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court's decision Monday upholding the right of the federal government to prosecute users of medicinal marijuana. "The Supreme Court rules against the sick," is one of the milder headlines on just one of the Internet websites dedicated to promoting the wondrous benefits to be obtained by smoking marijuana. A close reading of some of the latest mainstream media dispatches indicates that users of medicinal marijuana, now permitted in 10 states including Colorado, don't really have much to fear from the court's decision. Authorities...

Protecting family members and others who cannot defend themselves is fundamental to a civilized society. Terri Schiavo’s family, and many others, tried to protect her because that is what wild animals and civilized humans do for their own kind. When a migrating goose is ill or injured, other geese stay with the downed goose until it can fly again or dies. They do not drown the disabled goose so they can conveniently resume their flight. The concept that physicians should not kill unborn babies or hasten the deaths of patients came from Hippocrates, a 400 BC Greek pagan. As Western...