Free Republic

France’s president wants to allow doctors to keep terminally ill patients sedated until death comes, amid a national debate about whether to legalize euthanasia. François Hollande stopped short of recommending lethal injections and avoided the terms euthanasia and assisted suicide, highly sensitive issues in this majority-Catholic country. […] Doctors are divided about the idea. Hollande did not outline details of his proposal, but so-called terminal or palliative sedation can involve medicating patients until they die naturally of their illnesses, or until they starve. …

... While the national health coverage debate has been roiled by questions of whether the government should be paying for end-of-life counseling, physicians [...], in consultations with patients or their families, are routinely making tough decisions about the best way to die. Among those choices is terminal sedation, a treatment that is already widely used, even as it vexes families and a profession whose paramount rule is to do no harm. Doctors who perform it say it is based on carefully thought-out ethical principles in which the goal is never to end someone’s life, but only to make the patient...

Some doctors believe their moral or religious beliefs give them the right to withhold information about treatment they find objectionable - and to refuse to refer patients to other practitioners to receive such treatment - according to a University of Chicago survey of doctors nationwide published in the New England of Medicine.University of Chicago bioethicist Farr A. Curlin and his colleagues mailed 12-page questionnaires to 2,000 physicians asking their opinions of three controversial practices - sedating dying patients to the point of unconsciousness; prescribing birth control to teenagers without parental consent; and performing abortions after failed contraception.Of the 1,144 respondents,...

Editor's Note: This is the fifth in a series of columns first posted on the Illinois Right to Life Committee's (IRLC) website [http://www.illinoisrighttolife.org/] written by Bill Beckman, IRLC's executive director. The RFFM.org re-posting of the column discusses hospice care and gives individuals and families the tools they need to choose a good hospice care provider. This series warns readers about end of life issues and the need to monitor the care given to loved ones. The IRLC director also describes what readers can do to protect themselves from the looming culture of death which permeates the thinking of many medical...