Posted on 03/14/2006 11:28:51 AM PST by KevinNuPac
Head boy's parents to turn off life support
Oh wait, that's not a race horse. It's a rugby player.
By Ben Russell, Political Correspondent
THE INDEPENDENTMay 13, 2006
Peers voted last night to wreck a Bill aimed at giving terminally ill patients the right to die.
They backed an amendment delaying debate on the assisted-dying Bill for six months by 148 to 100, effectively preventing the private member's Bill sponsored by Lord Joffe becoming law in this session of Parliament.
But Lord Joffe told peers he would reintroduce his Bill in the next parliamentary year, raising the prospect of another full-scale debate on the issue.
The symbolic vote came after an impassioned eight-hour debate in which more than 90 peers spoke. Peers, led by the Archbishop of Canterbury, attacked Lord Joffe's Assisted Dying for the Terminally Ill Bill which would give doctors the power to prescribe a lethal dose of medication to allow terminally ill people to take their own lives.
The Bill, based on a law in the American state of Oregon, had little chance of becoming law but the debate and vote became a test of public opinion over the first moves towards legal euthanasia in Britain.
Opening the marathon debate, Lord Joffe insisted that his private member's Bill would give patients extra choice over the end of their lives. But critics said the terminally ill would come under pressure to die rather than use expensive pain-relieving care.
Lord Joffe said: "We can move forward on this sensitive matter with confidence, secure in the knowledge that the Bill would not impose anything on anybody and only provides an additional end-of-life option for terminally ill patients which they are free to accept or reject as they and only they decide."
But Lord Carlile of Berriew, the Liberal Democrat peer and proposer of the amendment designed to halt progress of the Bill, warned: "Despite protestations to the contrary, everyone in this House knows that those who are moving this Bill have the clear intention of it leading to voluntary euthanasia."
The Archbishop of Canterbury, the Most Rev Rowan Williams, launched an offensive against the Bill in an unprecedented joint letter with the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor.
Dr Williams told peers: "Whether or not you believe that God enters into the consideration, it remains true that to specify even in the fairly broad terms of this Bill conditions under which it would be both reasonable and legal to end your life, is to say that certain kinds of life are not worth living.
"We would also jeopardise the security of the vulnerable by radically changing the relationship between patient and physician."
He was backed by the former archbishop of Canterbury Lord Carey of Clifton. Lord Carey warned: "If introduced, assisted suicide might be treated as casually as abortion is today, after a few years."
Lord St John of Fawsley, a Conservative peer and Roman Catholic, said: "The deadly sin of our time is not sexual promiscuity, about which the Church goes on too much. The evil of our time is greed. It goes throughout society and at every level. This Bill would open the way to abuse by the greedy and acquisitive, bringing pressure on those who are at their most vulnerable."
But Baroness Jay of Paddington, the former Labour leader of the Lords, backed the measure. She said: "However much we respect the opposition to this Bill in principle, we live today in a very diverse and predominantly secular society in which the importance of human rights is increasingly valued.
"We have to recognise some terminally ill people would prefer to end their lives in a controlled and dignified manner, rather than receive care until a so-called natural death."
Lord Gilmour of Craigmillar, a Tory, said: "Terminally ill patients are allowed to stop taking life-preserving drugs and thus probably face many days of pain before they die; and doctors are allowed to give pain-killing drugs, even though they know it will speed up the death of the patient."
He added: "This Bill is not a Rubicon and because I think the opponents of this Bill are being illogical and because public opinion is strongly in favour, I strongly support it."
END
It would seem he didn't. He wants the impossible. He wants everyone to pat him on the head and tell him he did the right thing. He wants exoneration.
That's a lot to ask after fifteen years of cruelty to his wife, hatred toward her family, ransacking her estate and putting her to death by torture. Now he says, "Aren't I a good boy?" He is guilt-ridden. He thinks he will find peace by getting people to approve what he did. Wrong, Mikey, wrong.
I wonder how long before his new friends on the Left get sick of his whining. In fact, I wonder if any of them will start to see through his bovine scat and wonder how Terri ended up on the floor, almost lifeless. Healthy young women almost never "collapse." It is almost always an attack by their boy friend or husband.
What really happened that night in 1990? Michael Schiavo knows. His new friends should ask him some hard questions about that.
They were wrong.
Need help in NJ with Dr. Kevorkian clones
8mm
Terri on the road to recovery before the second stage began.
.....................
Probe boot-camp teen's death, and jumpstart real fix for Florida juvenile justice
What must also be ascertained:
|
8mm
Prayers for your dear friend.
We really need to help the Schindlers begin founding medical safe houses!!
The pace with which this death train is racing down the track is
frightening.
If we can't fund safe houses yet, we need to put our heads together and
locate hospitals which uphold the Hippocratic Oath so that patients can
be removed from organ harvesting mills and be sent to faith based,
care giving medical facilities.
Thanks, Les. I would guess a great number of us could count similar stories, perhaps ones they glossed over in the past and figured to be just fate.
Looking from that perspective, the death culture hovers all around us in shadows, just awaiting the time to strike.
Indeed, we hope safe houses would be found and established and hope the Schindlers can do something in that direction. One would think the facilities which were Catholic or similar faith would be safe in themselves, like St. Luke's. Well, maybe not.
The friends we mentioned recently promised they would take care of us if anything incapacitated us. Knowing their tendency to blind faith in doctors, we figured they would be swayed by the Kervorkian doctors to pull the plug on us if we fell into those straits.
Now, maybe they would give serious thought first and understand what we have said.
Just damn : (
Prayers sent up for your friends uncle, and your friends. You wouldn't happen to know the medication used to sedate him? Back in '93, my mom had a masectomy, and complained that the nursing staff was screaming at her. They obviously gave her too much anesthetic, but her mind went south soon after that.
Sedation shouldn't shut down your organs. It's too bad they couldn't have gotten a blood sample, but like the rest of us, they trust the hospital : (
FROM ANDREA CLARK'S SISTER
UPDATE ON MS VO:
I was in Austin this weekend and asked Jerri Ward (the lawyer who represented my sister, Andrea Clark, and who is also representing Mrs. Vo) if I could go see Mrs. Vo. She thought it was a good idea and she met me up there Sunday morning. We were escorted to Mrs. Vo's room by her husband, Mr. Tran.
Before I was allowed in the room, a nurse stopped us at the door and demanded to know who I was. I told her I was a friend of the family. She wanted to know what "kind" of friend I was. I told her I was an "important"
friend of the family. She said if I was media she couldn't let me in. This didn't seem right to me, but I didn't argue the point since I wasn't media. I assured her I was not media. We washed and gowned and went in to see Mrs. Vo. The nurse hovered in the room and about the door for most of the visit.
We weren't there five minutes and another hospital official along with a security guard came into the room and handed me a business card. She told me I'd have to call the administrator on the card and identify myself. Is it just
me or is this sounding Gestapo to you too? I asked her if she was telling me I couldn't visit the patient if unless I called this person. She started crabwalking a bit..."I'm just saying you are to call..." I demanded to know if she was telling me I couldn't visit the patient. Then the security guard interrupted and said he thought there was some kind of misunderstanding and he drew the woman back out into the hall to talk in low tones--after a few minutes they disappeared down the hall.
By this time I was fairly livid. I wanted to visit with Mrs. Vo and they kept interrupting. After another five minutes, here comes ANOTHER hospital official to verify that I was not
media. I don't know what's wrong with those people. Are they stupid or something? Are they calling me a liar? How many times do they have to be told I am not media? And even if I were, it's none of their business if the family wants me there! I mean, is Mrs. Vo a patient or a prisoner?
Mr. Tran loves his wife so much. The entire time we were there he rubbed her skin with oil, did range of motion exercises on her, cleaned her mouth, suctioned her mouth and vent. Oh...the nurse was mad about that...she was so rude.
Mrs. Vo is much healthier than Andrea. She's nice and fat and her skin is beautiful--not all broken down like Andrea's. She watches you with her eyes--despite the nurse telling us that "she can't track." Nonsense. She
probably is uncooperative with the hospital because she knows they don't care about her. She was "tracking" her husband, me, and Jerri just fine. The nurse got mad when Mr. Tran swabbed out his wife's mouth. The nurse
said, "I just did that." He ignored her and continued to care for his wife, so the nurse started complaining to us about it. Jerri asked the nurse if it would hurt if he cleaned out his wife's mouth. She hesitated, then she said, "Well, she doesn't like it." Sure enough, Mrs. Vo was making an ugly
face as her husband swabbed her mouth. Well, apparently, the patient has preferences about having her mouth cleaned. To me, this says she is responding to her environment. And even the nurse admitted that.
No one can convince me that Mr. Tran isn't experiencing a feeling of love as he cares for his wife or that Mrs. Vo isn't experiencing the feeling of being loved as he takes care of her. Those are the most exquisite of all human experiences--if Mrs. Vo still has access to the best of all human experiences, how can it be anything other than pure murder for them to remove her life support?
This is all becoming very surreal to me...how is it that hospitals seem to feel a sense of entitlement when it comes to killing off patients? How is it that they have so much resentment towards those who believe in a patient's right to life? Are they so comfortable with the God-like power attributed to them by the law and families that they become apoplectic at the very notion that someone might question their authority?
That kind of power is very dangerous to anyone who could possibly become a patient. Texas isn't the only state with medical futility laws. We all need to be fighting this battle.
Thanks for posting this,
Lanore Dixon
Anyone who can read that with dry eyes needs professional help.
Thanks.
Thanks.
It looks as if we need a strong light on the shadowy practices of institutional medicine. We need a sunshine law like FOIA -- a "Freedom of Medical Information" Act. The Death Cult has taken root behind the closed doors. It needs to be exposed.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.