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Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel: 75 is the ideal age to die Posted on Sep 26, 2014 at 10:02 AM in Politics By The Right Scoop VIDEO Steve Doocy talks to physician Mark Segal about old age and why Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel’s ‘I want to die at 75′ rhetoric is so dangerous:

According to research reviewed by board-certified medical geneticist and Co-Director of the Down Syndrome Program at Massachusetts General Hospital, Dr. Skotko, it is estimated that 92 percent of all women who receive a prenatal diagnosis of Down syndrome abort their baby.World famous atheist proselytizer, Oxford Professor, Richard Dawkins, made headlines when he called it “immoral” not to “abort” down babies “and try again”.Belgium has legalized euthanasia (with no age limits) for children who have been diagnosed as terminal and with death expected to occur “within a brief period.” If this criteria is met, then the parents—and child!—are to ask in...

Sometimes I get emotional whiplash. On one hand, we see very prominent bioethicists say that we should starve Alzheimer’s patients to death if they asked to be killed in an advance directive.Compassion and Choices teaches oldsters how to commit suicide by self-starvation.People like Peter Singer claim we should be allowed to lethally inject Alzheimer’s patients non-persons even if they never asked–despite having cared very well for his so afflicted mother.Then, there is the story of the man who gave his beloved wife, dying of Alzheimer’s, his last breath. Literally. From the KFOR story: An elderly couple, who had been together...

As regular readers of this blog know, I loathe the V-word used for human beings instead of peas.So, why did I deploy it in my headline? Because another case of a supposedly unconscious man, found to be actually aware, has apparently been discovered–and many would have denigrated him as nothing but a V before he went into the scanning machine.From the Nature News story: A dozen volunteers watched Alfred Hitchcock for science while lying motionless in a magnetic-resonance scanner. Another participant, a man who has lived in a vegetative state for 16 years, showed brain activity remarkably similar to that...

Frank Van Den Bleeken, a Belgian man in prison for multiple rapes and a rape-murder, has decided he wants to die and authorities have decided they can grant that request. Van Den Bleeken, 50, has been in prison for nearly 30 years and has declined to seek parole because he believes his uncontrollable urges make him a danger to society, but he says he can no longer bear prison conditions and his own "unbearable psychic suffering," AFP reports. "I am a human being, and regardless of what I've done, I remain a human being," he told Belgian TV. "So, yes,...

BRUSSELS (AP) — A Belgian official says a convicted rapist and murderer who has been imprisoned for almost three decades has been granted the right to die after doctors agreed his psychological condition was incurable.

Two recent articles on euthanasia and assisted suicide in the Australian press serve to highlight the dilemma of the form of any legislation that might be proposed as well as the reality of what crossing the Rubicon of the prohibition on killing or assisting in suicide will mean for a society like ours.Senator David Leyonhjelm (Assisted Suicide. OnLine Opinion, Sept 8) poses the classical libertarian view (that ‘permission from government should not be required’) while The Age writer, Julia Medew, records the view of one of the doctors she interviews as seeking legislative control (Don’t-tell doctors supporting secret euthanasia deaths...

After the governor of the state of Maine stepped up to the plate to go to bat for a little girl whose life was in peril, bureaucratic officials have backed off an attempt to end the life of a baby victimized by her own father.Last week, Gov. Paul LePage vowed to protect a little baby whose life is at stake and who state officials wanted to kill by putting a DNR order in place without her parents’ consent.Alliance Defending Freedom attorneys filed a friend-of-the-court brief with the Maine Supreme Judicial Court in support of a mother pleading with the state...

How often have we heard our elderly brothers and sisters say they don’t want to be “a burden.” Who made them think such a thing? We did!A great column in the Daily Mail by Stephen Glover indicts the UK culture for its blatant ageism–a condemnation that applies equally to the USA. From, “Why Today’s Elderly are Old Age Pariahs:” It can scarcely be disputed that people in their 70s, 80s and 90s are increasingly made to feel they are part of a burdensome minority which is more or less surplus to requirement. What is particularly disturbing is that the kind...

Alliance Defending Freedom filed an application with the European Court of Human Rights Wednesday on behalf of Tom Mortier, who is challenging Belgium’s laws that allow euthanasia. Mortier’s mother was put to death by a doctor for “untreatable depression” even though she was not terminally ill. Mortier did not find out what had happened until he received a telephone call the day after her death. “The government has an obligation to protect life, not assist in promoting death,” said ADF Litigation Staff Counsel Robert Clarke. “A person can claim that she should be able to do whatever she pleases, but...

It wasn’t “the Nazis” that caused the mass euthanasia deaths of disabled infants and adults. It was the eugenics ideology of the era that denied human exceptionalism.We are heading in the same direction–although certainly not mass murder of the kind that happened in Germany circa 1939-1945.But we too have accepted the idea that there is such a thing as an unlivable life. Indeed, in the Netherlands, babies born with serious or terminal disabilities are killed in their cribs by doctors.In Belgium and the Netherlands, people with serious mental illnesses are euthanized–to widespread applause.All of this reminds me of the words...

p>This is how the culture of death advances. A clueless, or cowardly–or both–authority figure says he or she is against assisted suicide except as a very last resort when everything else has been tried. Never mind that medicalized killing has never been so limited anywhere assisted suicide/euthanasia is legal. Never. Ever. Nowhere. Not Oregon. Not Washington. Not the Netherlands. Not Belgium. Not anywhere on planet earth. But saying that it is OK, if limited to a very last resort when everything that can be conjured by the minds of medical science has failed allows a surrender with seeming principle. That’s the kind of abjection now pushed by the head of...

Nazi euthanasia memorial A memorial to the victims of the Nazi T-4 euthanasia program will open on Tuesday September 2 in Berlin near the central Tiergarten park. The Times of Israel reported that a memorial to the approximate 300,000 physically and mentally disabled people who were murdered by the German regime between 1939 - 45, was approved in November 2011 and will open on September 2. The article stated that: “The murder of tens of thousands of patients and residents of care homes was the first systematic mass crime of the National Socialist regime,” said Uwe Neumaerker, director of the...

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...