More on the symposium in Toronto from LifeSiteNews...
.....................................
TORONTO, December 4, 2007 (LifeSiteNews.com) - This past weekend's International Symposium on Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide hosted by the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition of Canada (EPCC) hosted in Toronto, brought together over three hundred participants from around the world. By far the largest symposium of its kind ever, the event drew to Toronto key experts in the area of law, medicine, political activism and the rights of people with disabilities.
Key players in the movement spoke to the role of broad coalitions of people who successfully halted attempts at pro-euthanasia legislation in England and Wales, California and Vermont. Speakers from the state of Oregon and the Netherlands spoke to the increasingly corrosive effects of legalized euthanasia and physician assisted suicide in those jurisdictions upon the integrity of the medical profession and the failure of safeguards to protect vulnerable people.
Disability rights leaders expressed their growing fears about the corrosive effects of a favourable attitude towards euthanasia upon their basic civil rights, as well as their particularly effective role in fending off such legislation.
Alison Davis, who runs the "No Less Human," a group for people with disabilities from the UK, gave a compelling account of her struggles to overcome her disabling condition. She emphasized that she likely would not have been speaking at the conference had the laws in the United Kingdom allowed for euthanasia or doctor assisted suicide back when she suffering from severe depression that she has since learned to overcome.
Bobby Schindler, the brother of Terri Schiavo, Henk Reitsma from the Netherlands, and Mrs Barbara Farlow, a resident of Mississauga, Ontario, shared their real life experiences of having to deal with the deaths of relatives that were hastened as a consequence of medical practices determined by current dangerous attitudes towards the elderly, disabled and terminally ill.......................................
New, Evolving Tactics of Pro-Euthanasia Movement Highlighted at Symposium
8mm