Free Republic

Less than two months before he died from a neurological disease, Paul Stimson threw a big party for himself — a bit like having your own funeral while you’re still alive — and invited all his friends to come and celebrate his life with him. The April event at the Santa Rosa Veterans Memorial Building drew close to 200 people, a kind of who’s who of the Sonoma County bicycling community, including former pro cyclist Levi Leip-heimer. They came to honor Stimson, an accomplished amateur rider and racer, who was dying from ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s disease. Cycling was only...

A European court has issued a ruling that a disabled patient can be starved to death against his will.Vincent Lambert, a tetraplegic patient who has been in a state of minimal consciousness in hospital for six years following a car accident, is current receiving food and water via a feeding tube. The decision to cut his intravenous food and water supply has divided his family. LambertÂ’s doctors and wife wanted to starve him to death while his parents, who are vehemently opposed to ending his life, took his case to court.In January 2014 a court in France ruled against starving...

May 29, 2015 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Around 20 percent of hospital patients condemned as "brain-dead" are misdiagnosed – that is, those patients could be conscious and likely to recover. In fact, they may be as likely to respond to questions as healthy patients – they just lack the ability to communicate with the outside world.Neurosurgeon Adrian Owen of the University of Western Ontario and his colleagues performed brain scans on hospital patients diagnosed as being in what some call a "persistent vegetative state" – i.e., completely unresponsive and lacking brain activity. They asked the patients questions, and a brain scan showed...

You blinked, you missed it. The pro-life community just switched positions; it now supports assisted suicide! In their vital fight to save Florida’s Terri Schiavo from being starved to death by judicial decree, they foolishly hinged their position on the absence of a “written directive.” If the Hemlock Society had tried to pass a federal law legitimizing assisted suicide, pro-lifers would have stopped them. But pro-life leaders have so often compromised on “Thou shall not murder,” they no longer realize when they’re making concessions. They tried desperately to pass the Incapacitated Persons Legal Protection Act which, for the first time...

On April 17, 2004 Dr. Kenneth Stevens, the President of Physicians for Compassionate Care (PCC) and a cancer specialist spoke to the provincial pro-life conference in Hamilton. Physicians for Compassionate Care is an organization which was founded in 1995 in response to the legalization of assisted suicide in the State of Oregon. Dr. Kenneth Stevens understands the issue of physician-assisted suicide both personally and professionally. In 1982 his terminally ill wife was told by her doctor that "Nothing more can be done." The doctor then said: "I can write an "extra-large" prescription." Dr. Stevens wife told him that: "he wants...

The attorney general takes on Oregon. WHEN OREGON VOTERS legalized assisted suicide in 1994, state regulators had a problem. They wanted to authorize doctors to prescribe barbiturates as killing agents. But the federal government regulates the use of these drugs under the Controlled Substances Act, and federal law did not permit their use to intentionally kill. Ordinarily, that would have been that. The feds, not the states, have the final say about what would and would not be a proper use of drugs governed by the Controlled Substances Act. Unfortunately, Oregon's assisted suicide law went into effect during the Clinton ...

Although the chaos in Baltimore has seemingly come to an end, the damage is done. Buildings are in shambles, and owners have to rebuild their businesses with nothing left of their livelihood except some garbage and burnt pieces of plastic. There are so many heartbreaking stories of individuals affected by the riots, but this one takes the cake. This mom is trying to figure out what steps to take after the “peaceful protestors” destroyed her severely disabled son’s medical equipment, leaving him with nothing. According to the Washington Post, Laporsha Lawson grabbed her disabled son Khai’Lee Sampson and fled to...

Last week I delivered a guest lecture at a Christian liberal arts college entitled “Each Day Dies With Sleep: Literary and Theological Reflections upon Mortality.” As I thought through the topic over the previous weeks, two superficially disparate questions puzzled me. Why is it that the people most vocally committed to causes connected to death (abortion, assisted suicide, euthanasia) are often the same who are committed to progressive sexual causes? And why do abortion advocates frequently see it not as a necessary evil but as a positive good? As to the first question, that the same people often, though not...

April 28, 2015 (LifeSiteNews.com) -- More than half of all Dutch physicians specialized in euthanasia would consider approving euthanasia for a demented patient, according to a survey carried out last year and made public last week at an academic symposium held at the VUmc Free University in Amsterdam.“SCEN” doctors – as they are known – form the Support Consultation Euthanasia Network Netherlands whose members can be called upon by family doctors who face a euthanasia request and who need help with the procedure, specialized and independent advice as to whether their patient should “benefit” according to the requirements for “careful”...

April 20, 2015 (NationalReview.com) -- Medical martyrdom is coming, a term I coined to describe doctors, nurses, pharmacists, and other such professionals being forced (soon) to choose between their callings and participating in the intentional taking of human life.That is already the law of Victoria, Australia, where doctors must perform abortions when asked or refer to a colleague they know will do the deed. Some doctors I met there moved across the country to escape the Draconian diktat.Canada’s Supreme Court recently imposed euthanasia across the country, including for “psychological pain” caused by a diagnosable medical condition. The question now posed is whether doctors...

Looking back 10 years later, Jeb Bush said Friday he would not have handled the Terri Schiavo saga any differently. “I don’t think I would have changed anything,” the former Florida governor told a woman who asked him about the case at a “Politics and Eggs” event put on by Saint Anselm College’s Institute of Politics. Bush, gearing up for his presidential campaign, has faced renewed scrutiny over his role in the prolonged controversy from 2003 to 2005, during which a brain-dead woman from the Tampa Bay area became the subject of a contentious legal fight between her parents and...

Part 1 Materialism focuses attention on material security and quality of life in this world, yet the continued consistent application of the ideal of a high quality of life finally results in a devaluing and loss of life. That was the message of speakers at the L'Abri Fellowship conference on Life and Liberty, held Feb. 13-14 in Rochester, Minnesota, in two presentations that focused particularly on euthanasia and the history of the American eugenics movement. Henk Reitsma of the L'Abri Fellowship's Dutch facility discussed the deterioration of respect for life in the Netherlands under the impact of the legalization and...

The assisted-suicide movement is the rare self-proclaimed civil rights movement that exists to cater to the wishes of affluent Americans. On Tuesday, the California Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing on SB 128, a bill to legalize assisted suicide in the state. (Proponents don't like the word suicide, so they call the measure the "End of Life Option Act.") Supporters talk of their fear of medical personnel's prolonging their lives, of pain and lack of autonomy; opponents fear that the bill's passage would represent a callous act of cultural abandonment of the sick and disabled. I don't mean to suggest...

McDonald’s announced that over 90,000 employees will receive a pay raise effective July 1, 2015. After recent employee protests and slow sales, McDonald’s appears to be raising salaries to solve employee relation problems and improve it’s image with consumers.

A New Hampshire state representative exasperated by budget cuts to programs serving disabled people has mockingly suggested the next step would be euthanasia. NH1 reports that the comment by Democratic Rep. Michael Cahill of Newmarket came during Wednesday’s budget debate. Cahill said since budget writers “are refusing to raise revenues” to fund programs for the disabled, “have you looked at euthanasia?” …

More voters say their family is worse off than better off under ObamaCare. In addition, most of those who had to change their insurance coverage because of the health care law say it cost them money. That’s according to a Fox News poll released Thursday. Overall, 42 percent say the country is worse off under the 2010 health care law. Some 44 percent felt that way last year (June 2014). […] Clearly partisanship plays a role: 73 percent of Republicans say the country is worse off under Obamacare, while just 12 percent of Democrats feel that way. Has the law...

On March 30, 2005, Terri Schiavo had her last full day of life on this earth and both her family and Father Frank Pavone of Priests for Life will never forget the last moments they shared with the woman whose former husband won a court order to take her life.Terri was killed on March 31, 2005 when her former husband won a protracted legal battle against the Schindler family for the right to disconnect her feeding tube. Doctors who examined Terri say she was not in a persistent vegetative state and that her condition could have been improved has she...

March 30, 2015 (BreakPoint.org) -- In 1997, the Supreme Court ruled in Vacco v. Quill that there was no constitutional right to physician-assisted suicide. Those of us here at BreakPoint recall how Chuck Colson and others breathed a sigh of relief.But a lot has changed in 18 years. What was legally unthinkable then is oh so thinkable today. And even if the Court doesn’t reverse itself, at least eighteen states and the District of Columbia are contemplating following the lead of Oregon and several European countries, most notably the Netherlands and Belgium.That’s why a vitally important Heritage Foundation paper by Ryan T....

On March 18, 2005, my sister, Terri Schiavo, began her thirteen day agonizing death after the feeding tube – supplying her food and water – was removed. Terri was cognitively disabled and had difficulty swallowing and therefore needed a feeding tube. Terri was not on any “life support”, nor was she sick or dying. Nonetheless, she received her death sentence ordered by Circuit Court Judge, George W. Greer of Pinellas County Florida. Greer’s order to remove Terri’s feeding tube was in response to her estranged husband and guardian, Michael Schiavo, requesting permission from the court to kill his disabled wife....

Raissa Maritain, the philosopher and spiritual writer, died some months after suffering a stroke. During those months she lay in a hospital bed, unable to speak. After her death, her husband, the renowned philosopher, Jacques Maritain, in preparing her journals for publication, wrote these words: “At a moment when everything collapsed for both of us, and which as followed by four agonising months, Raissa was walled in herself by a sudden attack of aphasia. Whatever progress she made during several weeks by sheer force of intelligence and will, all deep communication remained cut off. And subsequently, after a relapse, she...