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The Ronald Reagan U.C.L.A. Medical Center, one of the nation’s most highly regarded academic hospitals, has earned a reputation as a place where doctors will go to virtually any length and expense to try to save a patient’s life. “If you come into this hospital, we’re not going to let you die,” said Dr. David T. Feinberg, the hospital system’s chief executive. Yet that ethos has made the medical center a prime target for critics in the Obama administration and elsewhere who talk about how much money the nation wastes on needless tests and futile procedures. They like to note...

As republican senators at last get a chance to read the health crimes bill being rammed through by the politburo, Obama’s boss, unrepentant Nazi collaborator, George Soros is poised to celebrate a major triumph in the advancement of his euthanasia agenda. “The bill changes some Senate rules to say we can’t vote in a future Congress to repeal the IMAB (death panels). A senate rules change would require 67 votes for cloture on the bill, but the parliamentarian decided it’s a ‘procedural change’ not a ‘rules change’ so they only need 60… Makes no sense. Anyway, it’s likely we could...

Elmira, N.Y. - Bobby Schindler watched his sister die in one of the most publicized end-of-life cases in the nation’s history. Now, he’s hoping a similar case in Chemung County has a different ending. Schindler, the brother of Terri Schiavo, was in Elmira Monday to show his support for Sara Harvey, who is attempting to regain custody of her injured husband, Gary Harvey. “We’re trying to support her efforts to bring her husband home,” Schindler said. Chemung County is the guardian of Gary Harvey, who has been in a persistent vegetative state since he fell down his basement steps in...

(Warning: This story contains content that may offend some readers.)Elderly people are now buying their loved ones suicide kits as Christmas gifts, according to a prominent euthanasia physician nicknamed "Dr. Death." Dr. Philip Nitschke, founder of Exit International and author of "The Peaceful Pill Handbook," has explained the use of legal drugs, inert gases, plastic bags and other methods for committing suicide to audiences all over the world, including in U.S. cities such as San Francisco, Calif., and Anaheim, Calif. He told Australia's Herald-Sun a so-called "peaceful pill" is being developed from Nembutal, the favored drug for ending life. Nembutal...

A new approach to organ donation doesn’t require waiting until the donor’s brain death....

In a submission to a consultation on relaxing the rules on assisted suicide - which ends today - a coaliton of five disabled groups, said that “to see suicide as the right solution is to abandon hope. Severely ill and terminally ill people do no deserve society to give up on them.” The group, which is lead by Baroness Campbell, accused others who were pushing for the change as “seeking to change the law by the back door by creating the impression that those who assist in a suicide will be immune from prosecution”. Over the past 10 years 100...

New guidelines on assisted suicide prosecutions issued following the case of Debbie Purdy, the multiple sclerosis sufferer, will ‘legalise killing’ a group of MPs and peers have warned. The All Party Parliamentary Group on Dying Well has written to Keir Starmer, the Director of Public Prosecutions, protesting about interim guidelines he was forced to draw up after Mrs Purdy won a legal challenge demanding that he make explicit the grounds on which those who assist someone to die would be charged with a criminal offence. The group, who include Ruth Kelly and Lord Patten, Labour and Conservative former education secretaries,...

The Vatican (LifeNews.com) -- In a Wednesday address, Pope Benedict XVI spoke out against abortion, euthanasia, and casual genetic testing that could lead to abortion decisions. The pontiff said more legislation is needed to protect human life form these very real threats and that laws are only just when they protect the vulnerable. The only just laws "are those laws that safeguard the sacredness of human life and reject the acceptance of abortion, euthanasia and unrestrained genetic experiments," Benedict said. Failure to recognize a respect for human life in the law leads to a "dictatorship of relativism which does not...

LifeNews.com Note: Center for Bioethics and Culture consultant Wesley J. Smith, is also a Senior Fellow in Human Rights and Bioethics at the Discovery Institute and the associate director of the International Task Force on Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide. He is the author of the Consumer's Guide to a Brave New World.   "Flash Forward" is a new and interesting television drama presented on the ABC Television Network. The premise is brilliant - due to reasons still unknown, everyone in the world (except the bad guys) blackout for two minutes seventeen seconds. Planes crash, people collapse on the streets, swimmers...

As the battle rages in our nation about a government take over of healthcare, one issue that has been a big part of the debate is how to handle the abortion question. It confounds me that we would even mention abortion in the same conservation as healthcare. Abortion and healthcare are diametrically opposed to each other. Abortion goes against the laws of God. Abortion deprives the most innocent and defenseless among us the basic right: the right to life. This is a right that our founding fathers fought and died for. Remember these words from the Declaration of Independence: “We...

BRUSSELS, December 9, 2009 (LifeSiteNews.com) - A Belgian judge has decide not to prosecute a doctor specializing in euthanasia after he was accused of murdering a woman who came to him seeking death, but who was not terminally ill.Dr. Marc Cosyns of Ghent euthanized the 88-year-old woman on January 5, 2008 after her own doctor had opposed the request for euthanasia. It was reported that the woman had an incurable disease that was not terminal and suffered from several other ailments.The woman's son filed a complaint with the public prosecutor after he learned of Dr. Cosyns part in his mother's...

AMSTERDAM, Netherlands, December 7, 2009 (LifeSiteNews.com) - A Dutch health researcher has called on the nation's government to allow physicians to euthanize newborns based on foreseen suffering, rather than only actual suffering, reports the Dutch medical journal Zorgkrant.    Hilde Buiting, maintains that such an amendment would only conform the law to the current practice among physicians.   "The current guidelines state that there must be actual grave suffering on the part of the newborn," she said, as quoted in Zorgkrant.  "In practice, physicians look not only to the actual suffering of the sick newborn, but also to the grave...

Over the past fifty years, the purposes and practices of medicine have changed radically. Where medical ethics was once life-affirming, today’s treatments and medical procedures increasingly involve the legal taking of human life. The litany is familiar: More than one million pregnancies are extinguished each year in the United States, thousands late-term. Physician-assisted suicide is legal in Oregon, Washington, and, as this is written, Montana via a court ruling (currently on appeal to the state supreme court). One day, doctors may be authorized to kill patients with active euthanasia, as they do already in the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg....

The case of Terri Schiavo--who died five years ago next March, deprived for nearly two weeks of food and water, even the balm of ice chips--continues to prick consciences. That may be one reason the case of Rom Houben, a Belgian man who was misdiagnosed for 23 years as being in a persistent vegetative state, is now receiving international attention. In 1983, Houben suffered catastrophic head injuries in an automobile accident. He arrived at the hospital unconscious. Doctors eventually concluded that his case was hopeless, and his family was told he would never waken. But the Houben family, like...

LifeNews.com Note: Christopher O. Tollefsen is Professor of Philosophy at the University of South Carolina and a senior fellow of the Witherspoon Institute. He is the editor of Artificial Nutrition and Hydration: The New Catholic Debate (Springer 2008). Tollefsen sits on the editorial board of Public Discourse, where this article originally appeared. Having spent 20 years wrongly diagnosed as in a persistent vegetative state, Rom Houben reminds us that disabled persons are capable of many more substantive opportunities for human fulfillment than we are initially inclined to believe. But is bodily life just as such worth preserving? Can care-givers...

It is remarkable how frequently we underestimate the most powerful force in the known universe: a mother’s love. The story of Rom Houben is further proof, if proof were needed. Houben spent 23 years in what doctors regarded as an irreversibly vegetative state after a car crash at the age of 20. His mother, Fina Nicolaes, a nurse, was at all times convinced that her only son was sentient — alive, in the fullest sense of the word. Yet all the experts involved in Houben’s care declared her son was simply a breathing cadaver. Nicolaes even took Houben to the...

I interviewed Dutch lawyer Eugene Sutorius in 1996 for my book Forced Exit.  I found him gracious, intelligent, and a quick legal mind.  I liked him a lot.  But he’s Darth Vader.Sutorious is absolutely committed to using the law as dynamite to create the broadest possible euthanasia license in his country, and indeed, I interviewed him because he represented the psychiatrist who won a Dutch Supreme Court ruling that assisting the suicide of the depressed is in keeping with euthanasia law.  Since then, Dutch doctors have been allowed to kill their mentally ill patients, but according to Sutorious and others,...

A lot of people seem emotionally invested in Rom Houben not actually being conscious. But all the evidence is on the other side.  Now, his doctor Steven Laureys is interviewed in the New Scientist about his diagnosis.  From the interview: Can you say what makes you so sure he is conscious?When I first saw Rom three years ago, he had been diagnosed as being in a vegetative state. We used the Coma Recovery Scale – Revised (PDF), which is a bedside behavioural assessment done in a very standardised way, and which you do repeatedly so as not to miss...

The family of Terri Schiavo, the Florida woman who was artificially kept alive for 15 years, say they feel both heartbreak and vindication over the news this week that a Belgian man thought to be in a persistent vegetative state (PVS) was fully conscious for two decades. Schiavo, who had been diagnosed with a profound brain injury, was at the center of a seven-year legal tug-of-war that involved Congress, the U.S. Supreme Court and even President George W. Bush before a judge granted her husband the right to allow her to die in 2005. In a strikingly similar case...

If Rom Houben's case proves anything, it is the arrogance of those who think they can pronounce upon the state of a patient's consciousness, and determine his subsequent fate--when humility should force them to admit they cannot possibly know what that patient may be experiencing. Houben is the Belgian man who spent 23 years misdiagnosed as being in a persistent vegetative state when he was actually conscious and suffering from locked-in syndrome as the result of an auto accident. Locked-in syndrome means the individual is paralyzed, but retains full consciousness. The misdiagnosis was discovered thanks to state-of-the-art brain scanning technology...

Friday November 27, 2009 French National Assembly Rejects Euthanasia Bill by Wide Margin By Hilary WhitePARIS, November 27, 2009 (LifeSiteNews.com) - The French National Assembly has rejected an attempt to legalize euthanasia in a 326 to 202 vote. "Euthanasia is not a medical act. The right to die is not a medical act," said Union for a Popular Movement party deputy Jean Leonetti, author of a 2005 law on dying that promotes the use of palliative care. The Alliance for Human Life welcomed the vote, saying that the bill "played on the ambiguity of the word 'dignity'" and "contributed...

LifeNews.com: Burke Balch is a pro-life attorney who is the director of the Robert Powell Center for Ethics at the National Right to Life Committee. He is considered one of the foremost experts on health care, euthanasia and bioethics issues. The U.S. Senate is poised to begin debate on the 2,074-page health care bill, crafted by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nv.), when senators return to Washington next week. In a release last week, the National Right to Life Committee (NRLC), the federation of right-to-life organizations in all 50 states, noted that Senator Reid's bill would authorize the federal government...

Brussels, Belgium (LifeNews.com) -- No sooner did Rom Houben make international headlines than skeptics and euthanasia advocates attempt to discredit the story of a man who says he was falsely tagged as being in a coma for 23 years. Houben has been embraced by those who say physicians are too quick to label patients as in a vegetative state. As LifeNews.com noted, Houben shared his story this week of how he is now able to talk with the world now that a scientists retested him, found his brain to be functioning normally, and provided him with therapy allowing him...

ROME, November 24, 2009 (LifeSiteNews.com) - The father of Eluana Englaro (known in the press as "Italy's Terri Shiavo"), Beppino Englaro, is making a name for himself as a euthanasia activist, and is continuing to claim justification for his successful decade-long court battle to have his daughter's food and hydration removed last year.  At the same time, according to a report commissioned by the prosecutor of Udine, the town in which she died, Eluana was in an "irreversible coma" at the time of her death.Eluana Englaro was an Italian woman from Lecco in northern Italy, who was diagnosed as being...

The Liverpool Care Pathway, a NHS programme for terminally ill patients close to death, has been at the centre of a storm of controversy. Now patients are demanding answers. Jean Cutler knows precisely how she would like to die. Alert and free of pain in the familiarity of her light-filled, home, she would glance one last time at her lovingly-tended garden, with its whispering trees and the stream winding into the bluebells, and kiss her husband Richard goodbye. But she knows, too, that this happy dream of death can never be. She is in the late stages of mesothelioma –...

A car crash victim has spoken of the horror he endured for 23 years after he was misdiagnosed as being in a coma when he was conscious the whole time.Rom Houben, trapped in his paralysed body after a car crash, described his real-life nightmare as he screamed to doctors that he could hear them - but could make no sound. 'I screamed, but there was nothing to hear,' said Mr Houben, now 46, who doctors thought was in a persistent vegatative state.'I dreamed myself away,' he added, tapping his tale out with the aid of a computer. Doctors used a...

My friends, I ran into Sarah Palin a week or so ago. Well, not the Sarah Palin — and not comedian Tina Fey, either. Temporarily away from my mission work and visiting old friends at an Irish parish, I was enjoying the (rare) sunshine after Mass, greeting parishioners as they left church, when I noticed a young mother pushing her daughter in a baby carriage. Her child — like all children — was radiant to me, with a shock of orange hair and a smile of beautiful wonderment at just about everything. Her head rolled back and forth as if...

Kudos to the Black&Right blog for finding this. You tell me we don't have political militants who are eerily vindictive. "In response to the Wall Street Journal piece, “Palin’s Book: The Overview”, a commenter added this example of liberal tolerance…"

The Netherlands has the world’s most liberal euthanasia law, which is even more radical in practice.  Its doctors assist the suicides of the depressed and  the grieving, a practice long since approved by the country’s Supreme Court.  Some “terminate” patients “without request or consent.”  Babies born with serious disabilities are subjected to eugenic infanticide. Doctors whose patients may not qualify for euthanasia refer patients to an on line “auto euthanasia” how-to-commit suicide” site. Doctors who decide it is too difficult to kill patients directly, put them into terminal sedation so they don’t do the deed directly and in person.And now:...

This week, the Quebec College of Physicians and Surgeons tentatively approved euthanasia. That means it's essential that we look, specifically, at the impact that euthanasia would have on physicians and the profession of medicine, in order to understand why this approval is a very bad idea. In mainstream media, and therefore in the general public forum, the euthanasia debate has been focused, almost entirely, on the impact that legalizing euthanasia (a term I use in this article to include physician-assisted suicide) would have at the individual level. But we must also consider the impact legalizing it would have at institutional,...

In the end the young father could fight no longer. For more than a year he had made daily visits to the hospital bedside of his chronically-disabled son. For six emotional days in the High Court he had battled against the hospital - and the baby's mother - who were reluctantly seeking the right to withdraw life support. Finally, faced with overwhelming evidence, he made the 'agonising' decision to let his beloved son go. Both parents wept as the court was told he no longer opposed the hospital's application. They said later they wanted to spend 'what little time remains...

SASKATOON, Saskatchewan, November 5, 2009 (LifeSiteNews.com) - Pro-lifers must be clear about the nature of euthanasia and assisted suicide, insisted Alex Schadenberg, Executive Director of the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition, during an address at the Canadian National Pro-Life Conference last weekend in Saskatoon.  "If we allow confusion about what euthanasia or assisted suicide is then we lose!"The pro-life conference was held as the Canadian Parliament considers Bill C-384, which seeks to legalize euthanasia and assisted suicide.Schadenberg stressed the importance of properly defining euthanasia and assisted suicide, which he said are commonly misunderstood.  Contrary to the popular understanding, they are not...

The international assisted-suicide movement has many faces. America's "Dr. Death," Jack Kevorkian, probably comes most readily to mind. The activist groups, Compassion & Choices and Final Exit Network, are also well known. Then there is Australia's "Dr. Death," Philip Nitschke, who travels the world teaching people how to commit suicide with helium or animal-euthanasia drugs obtained from Mexico. On Sunday, Nitschke will bring his suicide seminar to the Buddhist Center in San Francisco, where he will teach attendees how to kill themselves. Shouldn't there be limits to assisted-suicide permissiveness? Not according to Nitschke, who bluntly takes assisted-suicide advocacy to its...

 Orthopedic Surgeon Dr. David Janda has a blistering commentary on the newest House version of Obamacare that succinctly and powerfully illuminates the danger to all of us–well, not the elite who never are bound by the same rules–if this monstrosity passes. From his column “Obamacare versus the Hippocratic Oath (all emphasis within the text): The sad fact is that the Obama-Pelosi-Reid Administration’s 1990 page health care reform bill (HR3962) and supplement(HR3961) violate The Oath by stripping  freedom from every person, family and business in Our country . This 19 ½ pound pair of documents, entitled ”Affordable Health Care For Americans...

Doctors want to take the one-year-old, born with a rare neuromuscular condition, off the ventilator which allows him to breathe. Their application is supported by the child's mother, who is separated from his father. On Monday, the hospital will take its application to take the boy off life support to the High Court, where lawyers for the father will fight the case. The one-year-old, known only as Baby RB, was born with congenital myasthenic syndrome, a muscle weakness which severely limits the movement of his limbs and the ability to breathe independently. Lawyers for the father say the baby's brain...

WASHINGTON – A proposed revision to the directives that guide Catholic heath care facilities would clarify that patients with chronic conditions who are not imminently dying should receive food and water by “medically assisted” means if they cannot take them normally. “As a general rule, there is an obligation to provide patients with food and water, including medically assisted nutrition and hydration for those who cannot take food orally,” says the revised text of the “Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services” proposed by the U.S. bishops’ Committee on Doctrine. “This obligation extends to patients in chronic conditions...

The Canadians may put up with bureaucrats telling them what medicine they can and cannot receive–but we in the US are not so passive.  Alas, we could become so if Obamacare passes and we let centralized rationing boards to take control of our entire health care system.  If we do, in about ten years, we will begin to see stories such as on reported  in today’s Globe and Mail that tells the terrifying story of young women, who need a combination of drugs to fight pulmonary disease, being told–Nyet! And now, as a direct consequence, one woman is close...

Patients with terminal illness are being heavily sedated by doctors before their deaths in a form of “slow euthanasia”, research suggests. A poll of nearly 3,000 doctors found that almost one in five had administered infusions of drugs to keep patients unconscious for hours or days at a time. In appropriate doses, sedatives and strong painkillers are considered a valuable way of easing the pain and anxiety of patients who are dying with conditions such as cancer. But 18.7 per cent of British doctors polled said they used drugs to invoke “continuous deep sedation” in a dying patient, a practice...

Doctors who support the legalisation of assisted suicide are more likely to withdraw or withhold treatment from dying patients, a study has found. Actively helping someone to die remains illegal in Britain but more than a third of GPs and hospital doctors report making decisions which they expected would accelerate the death of a terminally-ill patient. A significant minority — 7 per cent — said that they had taken steps such as withdrawing medications, foods or fluid, with the intention of hastening a patient’s death. But doctors who actively support a change in the law to allow assisted suicide are...

VANCOUVER, October 26, 2009 (LifeSiteNews.com) - The Unitarian Church of Vancouver has stepped in to provide a Canadian venue for Australian right-to-die activist Philip Nitschke after he was refused workshop space to hold a seminar on how to commit suicide by the Vancouver Public Library.Rev. Steven Epperson of the Unitarian church said he believes Nitschke, director of the suicide advocacy group Exit International, has the right to free speech, even if he's telling people how to kill themselves."Historically, we have provided a forum, a space, for controversial, difficult ideas to be presented," Epperson told the Vancouver Province.The Vancouver church has a...

LifeNews.com Note: Ken Connor the chairman of the Center for a Just Society and co-author of "Sinful Silence: When Christians Neglect Their Civic Duty." A pro-life attorney, he was intimately involved in the fight to save Terri Schiavo and is the former president of the Family Research Council.The subject of how best to honor and care for those facing death due to terminal illness or old age has always been controversial. As talk of "death panels" and "rationing" stirs debate over the government's proper role in health care, two new studies funded by the National Institutes of Health are lending...

The British Broadcasting Corporation in England has deemed it necessary to try and absolve Darwinism from any responsibility for the Holocaust and the many other atrocities committed in the name of evolutionary progress ever since Darwin published his Origin of Species in 1859. To achieve this, BBC2 produced a TV “documentary” entitled Darwin’s Dangerous Idea,[1] written and presented by their journalist and political commentator Andrew Marr. This 3-part series...

"If nobody wants a "death panel" fiddling with Grandma's oxygen tube, then why do people who want health care to be a more collective experience have such a history of saying old people ought to die? The latest is a video that went viral last week of a 2007 speech from Robert Reich, one of the progressives' big-idea guys. Reich told a crowd what a candidate for president should say if he were honest. Among the gems: "If you're very old, we're not going to give you all that technology and all those drugs for the last couple of years...

I have been warning for nearly ten years that the Medical and Bioethics Intelligentsia were committed to imposing futile care theory on the most weak and vulnerable patients.  Lately, we have been discussing the pronounced threat of health care rationing under Obamacare.  Today, I noticed two new studies in the New England Journal of Medicine that could be abused by health care rationing and medical futility advocates to justify policies that prevent certain patients from receiving wanted life-extending treatment.One deals with late stage dementia as a terminal illness, and the other with providing kidney dialysis for the frail elderly....

When is suicide, not really suicide?  When assisted suicide advocates decide that promoting their agenda requires the deconstruction of accurate and descriptive language.    It is one thing when ideological activists try to redefine terms to win a political debate. It is quite another when a judge does it by judicial fiat.   But that is precisely what may happen in Connecticut.  After advocates failed to legalize assisted suicide in the last legislative session, two Connecticut physicians—aided by the assisted suicide advocacy group Compassion and Choices (formerly Hemlock Society)—filed a lawsuit requesting a court order unilaterally changing the definition of suicide....

Most of Obama’s stated plans for America are indistinguishable from those of George Soros. As the left forces nationalized health care on us, we may want to consider Soros’s Project on Death. Soros is a leading promoter of the assisted suicide movement. He papers over it with tripe about compassion; in reality, the project is a push for palliative care rather than treatment for gravely ill patients. As always, it’s all about the money:

At around 4am on Monday, a friend of mine was woken by a call from the private care home in south-west London where her 98-year-old grandmother is resident. "Mrs ------- has breathing difficulties," the night manager told her. "She needs oxygen. Shall we call an ambulance?" "What do you mean?" my friend responded. "What's the matter with her?" "She needs to go to hospital. Do you want that? Or would you prefer that we make her comfortable?" Befuddled by sleep, she didn't immediately grasp what was being asked of her. Her grandmother is immobilised by a calcified knee joint, which...

In a September 2007 speech at UC Berkeley, Robert Reich told his audience the following: "We're going to have to, if you're very old, we're not going to give you all that technology and all those drugs for the last couple years of your life to keep you going for maybe another couple months. It's too expensive...so we're going to let you die." Reich wasn't just Clinton's Labor Secretary. He's NOW a confidante and personal advisor to Obama. He's a player and he knows what's happening in the administration.

MONTREAL – When it comes to euthanasia, Quebec medical specialists are in sync with the rest of society. In survey of its members released Tuesday, the Quebec Federation of Medical Specialists found that 84 per cent of responders are ready for a public debate on the issue and 74 per cent “would certainly favour or probably be favourable” to euthanasia within a legal framework. Federation president Gaétan Barrette likened the euthanasia controversy to the abortion debate of 20 years ago where society seemed several steps ahead of legislators. More to come.

The assisted suicide movement doesn’t give a fig about consistency. If people attack legalized suicide, they pound the podium and assert that we must respect state’s rights.  But when states refuse to legalize assisted suicide–as in Montana–they file lawsuits hoping an activist judge will find a heretofore unheard of “right” to assisted suicide.First came an attempt to impose assisted suicide nationally via U.S. Supreme Court fiat. That failed 9-0. Then, Florida, where the court also said no. Ditto, California and Alaska.  Finally, pay dirt in Montana.  And now, even though Connecticut got nowhere in the last legislative session in an...