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An elderly woman's journey to be euthanised after suffering unbearable grief has been chronicled in a raw and emotional television documentary. Simona De Moor's daughter suddenly passed away after routine surgery. Within five minutes, the 85-year-old had decided on assisted suicide as the only way to escape her grief. In an episode of Australian show Dateline, which will air on SBS on Tuesday night, Brett Mason followed the Belgian woman's journey to end her life.

In a CNN essay published last October, Brittany Maynard, a 29-year-old with terminal brain cancer, explained why she and her husband moved from California to Oregon: so she could legally obtain the barbiturates she would use to kill herself on November 1. "I would not tell anyone else that he or she should choose death with dignity," she wrote. "My question is: Who has the right to tell me that I don't deserve this choice?" There was no good answer to that question, and Maynard's moving story helps explain why California legislators last week approved a bill legalizing physician-assisted suicide,...

The California State Assembly passed a bill to legalize physician-assisted suicide on Wednesday. According to a report by Reuters, the bill is likely to be approved by the state Senate, but Gov. Jerry Brown, D-Calif., has not made his position on the bill known. The bill, ABX2-15, requires a patient seeking life-ending drugs to make a series of “oral and written requests for an aid-in-dying drug.” It stipulates that the patient must be physically capable of administering the drug him- or herself, and that the physician be provided “immunity” from assisting in the preparation of the drug and “civil or...

MPs have overwhelmingly rejected the legalization of assisted dying in England and Wales after an impassioned four-and-a-half hour debate in which party lines were set aside. Members voted by three to one against giving second reading to a bill tabled by the Labour backbencher Rob Marris, to allow terminally ill patients to be supplied with a lethal dose of drugs. It was the first ever serious attempt to change Britain’s assisted suicide laws through the House of Commons, and saw calls for the issue to be put to a referendum amid polling suggesting public support running at around 80 percent....

The ghost of Brittany Maynard came back for yet another haunting Wednesday when the California Assembly voted to allow physician-assisted suicide by a vote of 43-34. After having lost in the California Senate back in June due to efforts largely from the Roman Catholic Church, the merchants of death simply regrouped and returned to the lower house of the legislature to approve the End of Life Option Act. With Wednesday's vote locked up, the bill will now move on to the state Senate once again, where it must pass two committees before advancing to the Senate floor for a vote....

The state Assembly on Wednesday approved a measure that would allow California physicians to prescribe life-ending drugs to terminally ill patients, sending the proposal to the Senate, which had previously approved a similar bill. Modeled on a law in Oregon, the measure by Assemblywoman Susan Talamantes Eggman (D-Stockton) sparked an emotional debate, with many Republicans saying that it is immoral to assist in a suicide, but with supporters arguing that terminally ill Californians should have a choice to die peacefully without pain. [Snip] Opponents of the bill, including the Catholic Church and advocates for the disabled, voiced concern that the...

A recent decision by the Québec government to authorize fraudulent death certificates that hide the true cause of death in cases of euthanasia represents a serious threat to transparency and accountability in the application of the Québec euthanasia regime. Acts of euthanasia carried out pursuant to Québec law are public acts funded by the state and carried out by state actors. The notion that doctors should be permitted to falsify death certificates so as to hide the true cause of death in cases of euthanasia is a troubling affront to medical ethics, transparency and accountability, says Toronto Health and Constitutional...

QUEBEC, September 2, 2015 (LifeSiteNews) -- Quebec’s professional body regulating doctors, the College des Medecins, has published a how-to manual for doctors wanting to euthanize their patients, along with contents of a death kit to be issued them by pharmacists. These follow closely on the provincial government’s release of draft regulations for doctors, which defenders of the disabled have quickly condemned as inadequate. “This is sensational,” Amy Hasbrouck of Not Dead Yet, a disabled persons’ rights group opposed to euthanasia, told LifeSiteNews, adding that the Quebec College des Medecins (QCM) has finally got down to grim details. “You can call...

“Of all the arguments against voluntary euthanasia, the most influential is the ‘slippery slope’: once we allow doctors to kill patients, we will not be able to limit the killing to those who want to die. There is no evidence for this claim.”  [Italics added.] So wrote one of the world's leading defenders of euthanasia, Australian philosopher Peter Singer, in 2009.Some more recent reports agree. A group in the UK which called itself the Commission on Assisted Dying declared in 2010 that there was no evidence of a slippery slope. Earlier this year the Supreme Court of Canada explicitly rejected the...

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...