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A healthy retired British nurse who had worked with the elderly has ended her life in a Swiss clinic because she was afraid of getting old and being unable to to kill herself, a British newspaper reported Monday. Gill Pharoah, 75, who suffered no serious debilitating illness and was still active, was given a lethal injection and was in good enough spirits to joke with a doctor before she died, the London Times newspaper reported. Pharoah was afraid of suffering a stroke as happened to one of her friends, who then lived on for many years with a poor quality...

July 27, 2015 (LifeSiteNews) - A fresh “coup de théâtre” has taken place in the dramatic story of Vincent Lambert – France’s Terri Schiavo – whose wife and doctors want to see dead by dehydration and starvation. Meanwhile his parents and several of his siblings have been fighting for his life for more than two years.Last Thursday, Daniela Simon, the young man’s attending physician, was expected to formally signify her decision to place him in an “end-of-life procedure” which would have involved removal of his feeding tube (his only form of life support), together with deep sedation until he...

July 21, 2015 (BreakPoint) -- A few weeks ago, I told you that the Supreme Court’s decision in Obergefell v. Hodges, which legalized same-sex marriage, had placed our culture on a well-greased slope. All that was lacking, I said, was for someone to give it a push.Well, the pushing has begun in earnest.Earlier this month, the Washington, D.C., City Council held hearings on the “Death With Dignity Act,” which was introduced by Council member Mary Cheh. Despite the positive-sounding title, the bill would make assisted suicide legal in the nation’s capital.Under the bill, a person with a terminal diagnosis of six...

Join the Movement – Help us Oppose Physician Assisted Suicide Msgr. Charles Pope • July 8, 2015 • 1 Comment Here in Washington D.C., the City Council has before it a bill modeled after Oregon’s physician-assisted suicide law. Listed as the “Death with Dignity Act of 2015,” a public hearing will take place this Friday, July 10th at 11:00 AM in the District building.Experience thus far with legalized assisted suicide should alarm anyone who looks seriously into how it has played out. The “safeguards” of the Oregon law, so highly praised by its supporters, seem to be mere window dressings than actual safeguards. In Oregon,...

In a blow to the right-to-die movement, California lawmakers on Tuesday dropped one of the strongest legislative efforts in the U.S. to allow terminally ill patients to legally end their lives. The move came despite pleas involving the case of Brittany Maynard, who moved from the San Francisco Bay Area to Oregon, which has a right-to-die law, when she was 29 so she could die on her own terms after a brain cancer diagnosis. Aid-in-dying advocates had hoped the nationally publicized case would prompt a wave of new right-to-die laws. But no state has passed such legislation this year, with...

The California Medical Association has withdrawn its opposition to the End of Life Option Act, SB 128. Disability rights advocates such as state Sen. Jim Beall voted for the bill in June after protections for the disabled were strengthened. And now the California-Pacific Conference of the United Methodist Church has come out in support of the law, similar to Oregon's, which would give Californians facing an imminent, excruciating death the right to end their lives peacefully if they choose. The Methodist conference joins other Protestant communities of faith representing 1.5 million members from 21 denominations in support of the law.

BELGIUM (Christian Examiner) -- A 24-year-old woman in Belgium is set to die by euthanasia later this summer simply because she has felt since childhood that she wanted to die. According to LifeSite News, euthanasia for psychological reasons is allowed in Belgium when a psychiatrist says a person's psychological pain cannot be relieved in a manner acceptable to the individual. "That means Laura (last name unknown) may be treatable, but Laura has decided that the only acceptable 'treatment' is death," the pro-life news service reports.

The Belgian euthanasia insanity continues with the case of a 24-year-old healthy woman (Laura) who will die by euthanasia this summer for psychological reasons. The June 19 DeMorgen article by Simone Maas explains (google translated): She has good friends, loves good coffee and theater. And she has felt that she wanted to die ever since childhood. Laura (24): “Life, that’s not for me.” This summer, euthanasia will end her life full of inner conflict, depression and self-destruction. I met the West Flemish Laura at the presentation of the book ‘Libera me’ euthanasia for psychological reasons. Writer Lieve Thienpont is one...

June 22, 2015 (LifeSiteNews) -- The Dutch Pediatric Association says that allowing teenagers to ask for euthanasia discriminates against younger children and is asking that the age limit for doctor-assisted death be removed.Current Dutch law permits children 12 and older to ask for euthanasia with parental approval while 18-year-olds fall under the regulations governing adults."We feel that an arbitrary age limit such as 12 should be changed and that each child's ability to ask to die should be evaluated on a case-by-case basis. If a child under 12 satisfies the same conditions, pediatricians are currently powerless. It's time to address...

Belgium passed its Euthanasia Act in 2002. A study published in this month’s Journal of Medical Ethics by Raphael Cohen-Almagor revealed that despite the law’s requirement that patients voluntarily give their consent to the procedure, many are euthanized without giving consent. The decision to euthanize was not discussed with the patient in nearly 80% of the cases of patients over 80 years old. Dr. Pierre Tueur estimated that “I have probably performed more than 300 of these procedures on patients incapable of giving informed consent. In cases where the patient is unconscious, demented, or unreasonably frightened of death, I feel...

A study published this month in the Journal of Medical Ethics examined the “deliberate” euthanasia of patients in Belgium without their explicit, voluntary consent as required by law. The study’s author, Raphael Cohen-Almagor, a professor of philosophy and ethics at the United Kingdom’s Hull University, found that life-ending drugs were used “with the intention to shorten life and without explicit request” in 1.7 percent of all deaths in Belgium in 2013. In 52.7 percent of these cases, the patients were 80 years of age or older. The decision to euthanize was not discussed with the patient in 77.9 percent of...

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”...