Posted on 03/15/2007 8:57:11 PM PDT by NormsRevenge
PERIGUEUX, France - A French court convicted a doctor Thursday in the poisoning death of a terminally ill cancer patient, in a trial that has raised the issue of euthanasia in France's presidential race.
The court in southwestern Perigueux gave Dr. Laurence Tramois a one-year suspended prison sentence in the Aug. 25, 2003 death of Paulette Druais in the nearby town of Saint-Astier.
Euthanasia is illegal in France. But as the trial opened earlier in the week, the Socialist Party said its presidential candidate, Segolene Royal, will push for a law to allow euthanasia under certain conditions if she is elected in May.
Nicolas Sarkozy, the candidate for the ruling conservative party, suggested he might favor a law permitting euthanasia, saying recently: "Faced with suffering, we can't just sit there doing nothing."
Francois Bayrou, a center-right candidate who narrowly trails Sarkozy and Royal in polls before the two-round vote on April 22 and May 6, said Monday that such medical cases are for doctors and patients — not the law — to decide.
Last week, 2,000 doctors and other medical personnel signed a petition urging the decriminalization of euthanasia and saying they had helped patients die.
In Thursday's verdict, co-defendant Chantal Chanel, a nurse who delivered the fatal dose of potassium prescribed by the doctor, was acquitted.
The case had a family connection: Tramois, 35, is the sister of a daughter-in-law of Druais. In the trial, Tramois expressed regret that science was unable to help the patient.
During the proceedings, Chanel, 40, said she "didn't have the impression of killing, but of helping (Druais) through the passage ... It was the cancer that killed her."
WOW!!! The French doing something moral, right, and conservative.
...To please no one will I prescribe a deadly drug nor give advice which may cause his death...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippocratic_Oath
I am greatly conflicted with these stories, but
An Oath is an Oath
Breaking one's Oath, once freely given,
causes one's own self to fracture
I cannot assist in death,
nor may I teach another how to do it
First I read yesterday that the French High Court ruled against Gay Marriages and now I read that they rule against killing sick people against their will!!
Hey maybe we can import a few of those judges to the USA or did a few of our judges emigrated to over there?
And the sentence is ..... euthenasia
Well. Just when you think the French are utterly insane, they prove that they are only nearly completely insane. They gave the guy only one year of a suspended sentence. On the other hand, they didn't give him a medal. I guess that's something.
Honestly though, I'm very conflicted on euthanasia. Having seen so much horror and suffering, up close, with all the endless moaning of unstoppable pain, when all hope is gone, is very compelling.
On the other hand, I refuse to grant the state the right to decide such an important issue, lest we end up with more Kevorkian-like killings of the clinically depressed, and the misdiagnosed.
In spite of all I've seen in my decades of working in health-care (I'm an RN), I will never stop fighting the fools who would give the state the power to kill the innocent.
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If French judges can get it so right there is hope.
He didn't follow protocol. Take the month of August off and the problem solves itself.
The good doctor won't even have this in her record, and can continue doing what she does to more patients.
Did we ever really stop the Holocaust?
They did something moral, right and conservative when they convicted the doctor, but everything else they did was right out of the Nazi playbook.
The patient said she didn't want to die in filth. The doctor's response to this should have been to keep the patient clean. Instead, she ordered her murder. The family, apparently not wishing to take on the obligation of keeping her clean, agreed to the murder. The nurse carried out the murder.
The nurse who carried out the murder was aquitted. The doctor who ordered the murder got a one year suspended sentence, gets to keep her license, and the conviction will not even go on her record. The family who knew of the murder plans and did nothing to stop it, (going so far as to give their consent to it), were not even charged with their crime.
The only one who received any "punishment" was the doctor. Her "punishment" pales in comparison to the annoying task of making sure her patient's butt got wiped once in a while.
To preface, we lived in the French countryside for the better part of the '90's so when I tell this mini-tale, I tell of a prevailing attitude of that venue.
The atmosphere and attitude we experienced with friends and family was that those who were in bad shape would wind up in medical facilities and simply die earlier than expected. Our friends were resigned to it as if inevitable. This was less than ten years ago. None I know of would have dared to question the almighty doctors and state. None appreciate or comprehend the freedoms we have here and are losing.
I posted it before but here it is again. A few years back in France, Niort area, we were with an older lady who had a "drinking problem" and who had damaged her liver. She went to the hospital. We visited with her with our friend, a French doctor. She was in bad shape and was non-Christian so we baptized her on her wishes. Our doctor friend mentioned the morphine drip and indicated it was dripping out an unusually high dose. We went to lunch at a restaurant nearby and came back afterward to visit more. She was already in the fridge. They had a free bed, no fanfare.
She didn't have "quality" life so far as the doctors there were concerned. There was nothing to do anymore and they would have been shocked and bewildered at any further reaction from us. She was dying and they simply needed to free up the bed. We were really naive. It was over before we realized it was for real.
8mm
I didn't throw Mama from the train, I just left the door unlatched.
We're beginning to see that attitude here. What is wrong with these people? I recently read that about 10% of our population is sociopathic. That has to be the same people who advocate (or participate in) the extermination of people whose existence doesn't provide them with anything they value. These sociopaths generally have the same lack of caring toward their own families even. There is a total disconnect from reality. It's as if the sociopaths are alive, and everyone else is just a figment of their five basic senses, existing only for the sociopath's purposes, no more alive or autonomous than any other object they are able to sense.
That is fascinating, your comment about the number of sociopaths. I was starting to question myself on being unreasonable in judging so many we know as either sociopath or borderline. So many we know appear otherwise normal but unblinking when it comes to tragedies befalling those who do not have some sort of value to them. I noted this particularly after a career spent amongst the bureaucrats of Washington, D.C., started thinking the whole world has gone to seed.
Happily, away from those pockets, those with sociopathic traits are fewer in number. I like it fine in the countryside.
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