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LONDON — Policy leaning toward euthanasia is on the advance in England, fueled by some powerful officials.
First it was the nation’s leading doctors’ group telling a bioethics council that severely disabled newborns ought to be killed. Now a leading government minister says that physicians who refuse to take part in withdrawing food and treatment from incapacitated patients may face criminal charges.
Lord Charles Falconer, the Lord Chancellor of England, has warned doctors in a recent statement that they may receive prison sentences if they refuse to nix treatments, nutrition and fluids when requested.
He said physicians who don’t “allow patients to die” by denying them food and water, as was the case with Terri Schiavo in Florida, could be charged.
British government officials aiding euthanasia’s advance
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Liberals and libertarians may find more overlap in some aspects of policy, particularly on social issues. Philosophical libertarians may be as appalled as many liberals by government intervention in the Terri Schiavo case, in the push to create laws against gay marriage, in the movement to build a wall to reduce Mexican immigration, and in the increasing push to regulate and ban abortion. But if we look carefully at these four examples, the underlying principles at work differ as often as they overlap. William Saletan’s excellent book on the evolution of the abortion debate, for example, shows that liberal advocates who had initially framed their support for abortion as part of a feminist struggle for equal rights over time moved to adopt a libertarian “keep the government out of my bedroom” approach in order to win over conservative and male voters. That strategy was quite effective in protecting efforts to curtail abortion rights, but, according to Saletan, it also made it more difficulty to argue for public funding of abortion for poor women...
A Liberal-Libertarian Coalition?
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