Free Republic

The BMA’s [British Medical Association’s] new VSED (Voluntary Stop Eating and Drinking) guidance is not a British story. Canada ran this experiment years ago, and we already know how it ends. Every time one of these documents lands, the same thing happens. A medical body publishes something careful and administrative, the language is so smooth you could skate on it, and the people who object are told they’ve misread it. Nobody is being killed. Nobody is being pushed. This is only guidance, only clarification, only doctors being given the information they need to care for their patients well. I have...

Immoral bioethical policies and practices advance toward implementation through discourse–first in professional journals, and then in elite popular media columns.That process is now gearing up regarding what I call “VSED-by-Proxy.”VSED stands for “voluntary stopping eating and drinking”–suicide by self-starvation–pushed for the elderly and others by those compaaaaa–ssssss–ionate death zealots at the Hemlock Society Compassion and Choices.But what about mentally incompetent residents of nursing homes who willingly eat, but who years previously stated in an advance medical directive that they wanted to be made dead by starvation under such circumstances?We see increasing advocacy in bioethics that nursing homes be required to...