Free Republic

It’s official. Like Belgium, The Netherlands has completely lost any sense of respect for the law and has leapt, lemming like off the moral cliff.Dutch news is reporting on the euthanasia death of an elderly woman who sought euthanasia because she did not want to live in a nursing home.The report said that she visited a ‘special clinic set up to help people whose doctors do not support euthanasia’. This incident sparked the second reprimand of the ‘Life Clinic’ in the last four months. In the previous case the same clinic euthanasied a woman with identified psychiatric problems without enough...

A girl who nine years ago was expected never to regain consciousness and was abandoned by Massachusetts welfare authorities, hospital medical staff, and the courts now watches the Disney Channel, enjoys the music of Justin Bieber and her Westfield Evangelical Free Church congregation, and tells her adoptive parents she loves them. Haleigh, now 20, is by all accounts a happy woman living surrounded by love with her siblings, her adoptive parents Keith and Becky Arnett, and other foster children the couple have taken in over the years. But Haleigh is far from typical. Once the center of a public...

I think it is time to start calling Peter Singer ”Professor Death.”The Princeton moral philosopher–an oxymoron in his case–is the world’s foremost proponent of infanticide. He usually uses examples of disabled babies, but the reason he believes they can be killed is that they are supposedly not “persons.” Thus, Singer has refused to state that killing a baby because she was ugly would be wrong.Professor Death also supports euthanasia, both voluntary and non voluntary against ill human non-persons, such as Alzheimer’s patients.He has also stated that cognitively devastated people should have been used in developing the hepatitis vaccines instead of...

Health writer Larry Bernstein of the Washington Post has written an excruciating column about how awful and painful it is to die by thirst. The article laments–as any civilized person would–the potential mass deaths by dehydration of the Yazidi at the hand of the butchers of ISIS in Iraq.Dying of dehydration is an awful death. From the piece: I’m not about to start ranking the horrors visited on the human body this summer, from Ebola in West Africa to bombs and bullets in Gaza and Israel. But thousands of particularly excruciating deaths may soon be added to the list by...

The mainstream media has caused great confusion about the topic of euthanasia and has been extremely deceptive in its portrayal of human suffering and compassion. Most people who believe euthanasia and assisted suicide should be legal are not thinking the issue through. They are weighing personal autonomy and choice, or imagining what it would be like to be incapacitated and forced into a life they consider undignified or worthless, or perhaps seeing severely disabled people as having no quality of life.Dignity and quality of life don’t come from what we can or cannot do. They are not matters of efficiency,...

Dr. James Beattie, a cardiologist who works at the East of England NHS Foundation Trust in Birmingham, believes hospitals should let more elderly patients die and “quality of life” should be given more consideration.According to an article in the Daily Mail, Beattie said that society no longer accepts mortality and is much less familiar with death. ‘If a person is in hospital, particularly an elderly person with multiple co-morbidities, if they have a cardiac arrest it’s a sign they are in decline,’ he told Radio 4.‘It’s their act of dying and they should not be resuscitated, they should be allowed...

Aside from the misleading claim in the article referring to my sister, Terri Schiavo, as being in a persistent vegetative state (PVS), the Boston Globe did a wonderful follow-up story on Haleigh Poutre’s tragic situation.Back in 2006, Haleigh made national news when her stepfather beat her into a coma. It was just a short time subsequent to this act of violence that her doctors decided this 13-year old had zero chance to recover and her legal guardian went to the courts for permission to remove Haleigh’s life sustaining care.In fact, if Haleigh would have happened to survive the removal of...

WESTFIELD — The minister winds up his welcome to some 400 people, and soon lyrics flash karaoke-like on a large screen. A spirited Christian pop song, “Blessed be Your Name,” fills the Westfield Evangelical Free Church. In the back row, a young woman, sitting in a wheelchair next to her adoptive parents, lights up. Though she can’t read all the words, she sways to the music and claps her hands, the nails painted pink with white polka dots. She loves cheerful tunes and a crowd, and on this Sunday, she has both. Keith and Becky Arnett could have predicted that...

While the United Kingdom's National Health Service spends more than £50 million per year subsidizing breast augmentation surgeries it refuses to pay for a drug that can help extend the survival time for cancer patients. A stark contrast between the cases of Josie Cunningham and Reece Hawley has raised eyebrows. The buxom Ms. Cunningham's breast enlargement was funded by the NHS back in 2009. She currently is selling pay-per-view tickets at £10,000 a pop to see her giving birth later this month. Reece Hawley is a trainee teacher. NHS spokesman Howard Titman attempted to explain the seemingly anomalous treatment of...

I am not sure why so many “science” bloggers and writers want to opine on ethics. Perhaps having to be objective and purely evidence based gets boring.In this context, now comes the Evolution Blog by Jason Rosenhouse, which one would presume, would be about the evidence for, and arguments about, evolution.But Rosenhouse attacks me over my recent First Things article about how the euthanasia movement is pushing suicide by starvation as a means of bludgeoning society into granting permission for lethal injections. (He also went after my Discovery Institute colleague, David Klinghoffer, who can defend himself.)Rosenhouse badly misleads his audience...

This is the inescapable logic of euthanasia: It is much more expensive to care for ill and disabled patients than “compassionately” kill them. As I like to say, it may take $1000 for assisted suicide but $100,000 to provide the care that helps the patient not want end to their lives.The new Lithuanian Health Minister–apparently not having yet received her talking points from the Hemlock Society Compassion and Dying–clearly followed this logic in describing why she might support legalizing euthanasia.From the Delfi.It story: New Health Minister Ilze Šalaševičiūte took an awkward and sensitive topic – it proposes to legalize euthanasia...

We are quickly becoming a pro-suicide culture–indeed to the point now that organizations like the Hemlock Society Compassion and Choices, bioethicists, and the mainstream media promote suicide by self-starvation as the new big thing in making oneself dead. Philip Nitschke is one of the international rock stars of euthanasia advocacy. He is also its most candid. He believes that everyone owns their own body absolutely and thus have a right to suicide whenever they want and for whatever reason. Indeed, he told NRO’s Kathryn Lopez that suicide pills should even be made available to “troubled teens.” I clashed with Nitschke in Australia when I traveled the country on...

Matthew Schellhorn, a highly-regarded classical pianist, has kindly given me permission to reproduce below his moving account of his late mother’s terminal illness and his insightful arguments against Lord Falconer’s assisted suicide bill, being debated at Second Reading today: Living life to the fullWhen my mum was diagnosed with late-stage cancer she turned to me and said, ‘We will get through it.’ At the time, I did not know what that could possibly mean.Looking after my mum disrupted my normal life. Being her carer took away my time. It made me lose interest in music and endangered professional opportunities. It...

In a recent Politico Magazine article titled, “Let’s Talk About Death Panels,” Harold Pollack urges reviving one of the most notorious proposals that did not make it into the Obama Health Car Law – “advance planning consultations.”During the debate over Obamacare’s enactment, there was considerable controversy over a provision in an early version under which health care providers would have been paid by Medicare to discuss with their patients whether they would want life-saving medical treatment.After former Alaska governor and vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin dubbed the planning sessions “death panels,” the provision was dropped from the law ultimately enacted.As Pollack...

The Daily Mail UK is reporting that a former euthanasia supporter, Professor Theo Boer, has told the House of Lords in the UK not to make the same mistake as the Netherlands. Next week, the British House of Lords will debate the Falconer assisted suicide bill. Lord Falconer is a long-time supporter of assisted suicide who is also known for writing a one-sided report calling for the legalization of assisted death in Britain.The Daily Mail reported Dr Boer to have told the House of Lords: ‘Don’t do it Britain,’ ‘Once the genie is out of the bottle, it is not...

It is perhaps in the nature of celebrities to champion causes they perceive to be popular. Celebrity bishops are no exception and Desmond Tutu’s support for Lord Falconer’s Assisted Dying Bill is not surprising but deeply disappointing.Dignity in Dying, the former Voluntary Euthanasia Society, has assembled over 50 actors, sportsmen, entertainers, authors and other celebrities to add weight to their campaign – similar people to those advertisers draft in to provide endorsement for consumer products.The implication is that we should follow these celebrities and embrace their preferences.And there is no doubt that so-called ‘assisted dying’ resonates strongly with the spirit...

The world’s fourth richest person, Warren Buffett, ploughed $1.23 billion into abortion groups over eleven years, a media watchdog has found. The Media Research Center (MRC), which analysed tax returns for Buffett’s foundation, labeled him the ‘king of abortion’. The MRC says the money given ‘is enough to pay for the abortions of more than 2.7 million babies in the womb’ – which, it points out, equates to the entire city of Chicago. MRC’s report lays out the money Buffett’s foundation gave between 2001 and 2012, saying it amounted to $1,230,585,161. The money was given to groups which either ‘provided abortions themselves...

No line in bioethics is ever fixed. Rather, the push to eradicate the boundaries that keep medical professionalism tied to Hippocratic values (sniffed at as “paternalism” by many in the field) continues unabated, with new boundary lines created, consolidated, and then moved again into ever-more extreme territory.Some call this, the “slippery slope.” Case in point: Suicide by starvation, known as VSED (voluntary stop eating and drinking). Not only do bioethicists say doctors should participate in this method of suicide by palliating the pain starvation and dehydration causes, but also DO IT FOR THE PATIENT if they stated they wanted to...

BEAUMONT, TX -- A Texas judge has bought some time for a man whose estranged wife is attempting to have him removed from life support over the objections of his brother and sister-in-law. Terry Martin Terry Dean Martin, 54, is on a ventilator and receiving nutrition and hydration care at the Baptist Hospital of Southeast Texas in Beaumont after being admitted June 13 with complications of diabetes and kidney failure.  He suffered cardiac arrest on June 15, but doctors were able to resuscitate him.  He has not fully regained consciousness since, but his brother Gary Martin says he is able...

When a person has a disease that cannot be cured, do you think doctors should be allowed by law to end the patient’s life by some painless means if the patient and his or her family request it? At first blush, the idea that a euthanasia should be allowed seems to follow a logic. If a person is suffering and wishes to end that suffering then who has the right to tell them no? It is their life, right? Only some troglodyte Bible thumper could possibly deny a person the simple mercy of ending their suffering. In this way it...