From Time Magazine:

The questions that drove the Terri Schiavo debate were universal: life and death; man, God and science. But the battle to remove Schiavo’s feeding tube after 15 years in a vegetative state — her husband Michael made that decision against the wishes of Schiavo’s deeply religious parents — was also a uniquely American drama of fiery Florida preachers, New York talk show hosts and Washington judges and politicians.

Now Italy is embroiled in its own version of the Schiavo saga after a judicial panel ruled in favor of a father who wants to cut off life-support to his daughter, who has been in a coma since suffering irreversible brain damage in a 1992 car accident when she was 20. Though there is no intra-family battle over Eluana Englaro’s fate, the case contains the same mix of legal appeals, religious activism and philosophical ponderings. Local newspapers have been filled in recent days with smiling photographs of the now comatose patient before the car crash, and details of her current condition: she breathes on her own, and opens her eyes each morning, but is unconscious and immobile.

Read the rest of the report at Time.

by Carrie Gordon Earll, Focus on the Family

I never met Terri Schiavo but in some ways, she changed my life. I never heard her speak a word but her living and dying clarified truth for me in unexpected ways. Her life and death impacted how I view life and death, and decisions that are made in the crossing.

Terri’s journey confirmed previous beliefs and provoked new ones:

• That the dehumanizing word “vegetable” should never be applied to a human being, regardless of her condition.

• That such dehumanizing language precedes the killing of the weak and vulnerable.

• That making general statements about “pulling the plug” are not helpful for your family if you cannot make your own medical decisions.

• That the phrase, “quality of life,” often reflects the values of others rather than the view of the patient.

Terri’s life and death also demonstrated to me:

• That the fear of overusing medical technology has pushed us over the moral cliff.

• That judges can, in one instance, dismantle the sanctity of marriage and then in another, uphold it when it no longer exists.

• That when in doubt, we must err on the side of life because when it comes to death, there are no “do-overs.”

Terri’s life and death raised questions for all of us; tough questions we must ask and answer:

• Is the provision of food and water — even though a simple feeding tube — medical treatment or ordinary humane care?

• Should our laws presume a patient wants to die when she can no longer feed herself and swallow?

• Is a life surrounded by people who love you and want to care for you necessarily a bad life?

• And, in a society that allows and even applauds the intentional death of a disabled woman, whose life will be the next “life unworthy to be lived?”

Terri Schiavo never spoke a word to me but her life and death spoke volumes to all who will listen. And, her legacy depends on how we will respond to that message.

SACRAMENTO, May 29, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) – An assisted-suicide bill that allows doctors and nurses to suggest death by unconscious dehydration has barely passed the California State Assembly.

AB 2747 would authorize total sedation without nutrition and hydration for depressed and confused patients, whether or not their natural death was imminent. The bill would also allow family members to order the death of a mentally disabled person when a nurse opines they have less than a year to live, similar to Terry Schindler Schiavo’s death at the hands of her husband.

AB 2747 passed the Democrat-controlled Assembly Wednesday afternoon on a 41-32 vote, a one-vote margin of victory in the 80-member lower house. The vote was virtually party line, Democrats for, Republicans against. AB 2747 is authored by the same Democrats who unsuccessfully carried physician-assisted suicide bills for the last three years.

“This deceptive bill will cause death and shorten life, despite its claims,” said Randy Thomasson, president of Campaign for Children and Families, a leading California-based pro-life, pro-family organization. “Drying up and shriveling to death through dehydration is a fate worse than lethal injection. By transforming palliative sedation into a vehicle for assisted suicide, AB 2747 would transform doctors and nurses from healers and comforters into killers like Dr. Jack Kevorkian.”

AB 2747 would allow a doctor or a nurse to opine that a patient has “less than one year to live,” and then ask depressed patients if they would like to be totally sedated into unconsciousness. Total sedation is usually an irreversible procedure that does not include nutrition and hydration. If patients or decision-making family members fall prey to suggestions of total sedation, death from dehydration will usually occur within five days.

Total sedation (TS) — called by some “terminal sedation,” “palliative sedation,” or “slow euthanasia” — is a protocol recently added to the lexicon of contemporary medical interventions and is a construct actively promulgated by the National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization (NHPCO). It is defined as “the application of pharmacotherapy to induce a state of decreased or absent awareness (unconsciousness) in order to relieve the burden of otherwise intractable suffering.” With only this much said, there may seem to be no ethical objection to TS — a patient who is terminally ill, imminently dying, and suffering overwhelming physical pain may simply request temporary TS to get some sleep today with the hope that the pain will be endurable tomorrow. However, any quick acceptance of TS would be ill-advised because of the many “devils in the details.”

TS is not limited to patients with terminal illness who are imminently dying. The NHPCO’s policy explains that TS can be used “in the last day or two of life,” but it can also be used “at multiple points” in a “patient’s trajectory toward death,” when the patient is not imminently dying. Thus, TS is not limited by standard clinical criteria as put forth in the AMA’s policy on forgoing life-sustaining treatment (FLST) — i.e., that the patient be terminally ill and imminently dying.

Read the entire article at Lifesite News.

Wesley Smith, attorney and author, wrote an excellent article on how palliative care and physician assisted suicide have become synonymous.

For the past two decades, euthanasia/assisted-suicide ideologues have worked overtime to conflate palliative care—the medical alleviation of pain and other distressing symptoms of serious illness—with intentionally ending the life of the patient. The movement’s first target was the hospice, a specialized form of care for the dying created forty years ago in the United Kingdom by the late, great medical humanitarian Dame Cicely Saunders. Determined to treat what she called the “total pain” of dying patients, Saunders’ great innovation was to bring a multidisciplinary team to the task of ensuring that their physical pain, existential suffering, spiritual needs, and mental health are all properly attended.

…assisted-suicide advocates wish to transform hospice into “hemlock” (as one advocate once put it), a facilitator of suicide rather than a preventer. They believe that access to lethal prescriptions should be considered merely another menu item available for dying patients (and ultimately others) “to control the timing and manner of their deaths.”

The entire article can be read here.

World Net Daily published the following article on Lauren Richardson, a 23 year old woman who may face a court-ordered death by starvation. Her father wishes to take care of Lauren, but his ex-wife persuaded a judge that Lauren would rather die.

Pro-life advocates are launching an e-mail campaign in an attempt to save the life of a young woman injured by a drug overdose who now is facing the possibility of a court-ordered death by dehydration and starvation.

WND previously has reported on the case involving Randy Richardson, who is fighting his ex-wife, the medical establishment and the court system for the life of his 23-year-old daughter, Lauren Marie Richardson.

“She’s committed no crime and doesn’t deserve to have this death imposed on her,” he told the Wilmington, Del., News Journal earlier, citing the case that carries striking parallels to the 2005 death of Terri Schiavo in Florida.

The woman was injured by a drug overdose in 2006 and never has recovered fully from the brain damage she suffered, he said. Court records reveal she was pregnant at the time and was kept on feeding tubes and a breathing machine in Christiana Hospital until her baby girl was born in February 2007.

But she no longer needs a breathing machine and earlier this year a court order was issued – and appealed – that could allow the removal of her feeding tube, and her resulting death, the newspaper reported.

Watch Lauren Richardson on You Tube with her father.

Read the rest of the article.

May 9, 2008

The dark history of the shameful movement underpinning the biggest human atrocities of the 20th century was powerfully outlined by Ben Stein in his important documentary which is a must-see for anyone serious about science, about faith, and about freedom. Did I leave anybody out?

Stein followed the scientific community’s lockstep loyalty to Darwinism backwards in time, and ended up at the Nazi gas chambers, which first killed disabled people. They were just practicing Darwinism, by speeding up the process of natural selection, formerly called survival of the fittest, by eliminating “useless eaters”. Society bought into this toxic mentality because it came from doctors and scientists.

He followed their trail to Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger, who was a dedicated eugenicist, working overtime to rid the world of people like my immigrant grandparents. While she was ostensibly offering women choice, secretly she was seeking to rid American society of the ‘unfit’. More Darwinism in action. We are still in the midst of the nightmare of Sanger’s legacy; 46 million Americans have died of abortion, far surpassing the darkest dreams of Hitler and Stalin together.

Read the rest at The history of eugenics in Expelled.

New University published a report that questions the validity of living wills.

A new study co-authored by UC Irvine professors Peter Ditto and Elizabeth Loftus shows that living wills may not be as effective in honoring individual’s final wishes as previously thought. To carry out this research, Ditto and Loftus selected over 400 individuals above the age of 65 for the group’s project.

“We got people that we knew and actually asked them three times to speak their wishes for different kinds of life-extending treatment,” Ditto said. “We would do that and … ask them to come back a year later and ask the same questions … then we looked to see … how accurate they were in sensing that [their answers] changed.”

Roughly one-third of the group changed their decisions in regards to such treatments as cardiopulmonary resuscitation and being dependent on a feeding tube used to extend their lives. Of these individuals, 75 percent falsely remembered that their new views were consistent with their original choices.

“There were many, many people that came on TV and said, ‘If you just take 15 minutes, you can fill out a living will and you’ll avoid all the problems that happened with Terri Schiavo,’” Ditto explained. “I think that’s a dramatic oversimplification of what’s true. I mean just having a living will doesn’t necessarily solve those problems. It doesn’t mean that everybody will agree [and] it doesn’t mean that people will be clear about your wishes,” Ditto said.

Read New University’s entire report.

The Boston Globe reported on a young girl, Haleigh Poutre, who was declared to be in a “persistent vegetative state” by the Massachusetts Dept of Social Services in 2005. Haleigh recently gave testimony about the intense physical abuse she endured at the hands of her adoptive mother and step-father. Haleigh is now communicating.

Haleigh Poutre, a 14-year-old girl once diagnosed as being in an “irreversible vegetative state,” has provided police with dramatic testimony about frequent use of corporal punishment during her childhood, but she has not given any specifics about what caused her to suffer a near-fatal head injury more than two years ago, according to two people with direct knowledge of her statements.

Haleigh, who has spent the last two years at a pediatric rehabilitation hospital in Brighton, communicated with simple words and hand gestures in an interview last December. She also spelled out full sentences by pointing to letters of the alphabet on a board, reflecting the remarkable recovery of a girl who nearly was removed from life support by the state after doctors had declared her condition hopeless. She began to breathe on her own just as the state’s highest court ruled that she should be allowed to die.

Read the entire report at The Boston Globe.

Author and attorney Wesley Smith writes in his blog about the alarming increase in euthanasia in the Netherlands. Wesley Smith wrote numerous articles on the Terri Schiavo case.

Smith wrote, “The latest Dutch euthanasia statistics are in, and the number of cases reported have gone up.

From the story:

The number of cases of euthanasia reported by doctors last year rose to 2,120 from 1,923 in 2006, according to official figures published this week, reports ANP news service.

In three cases the regional committees responsible for ensuring the criteria for euthanasia are adhered to, ruled that doctors had not acted in accordance with regulations. The three dossiers have been sent to the justice department and health inspectorate.

Yea, and I’ll bet there will be a strong letter to follow about those three cases. What a travesty.

By the way, these 2120 legalized murders do not include the about 900 “termination without request or consent” non voluntary euthanasia deaths that Dutch studies have reported doctors commit each year with nary a significant legal or professional consequence to the death doctors, and which are not counted as official cases of euthanasia in Dutch death bean counting. And, if the manner of keeping statistics is consistent with previous years, they don’t include assisted suicides, which generally number about 500 per year. And they also don’t include intentional overdosing with pain control with the intent to kill–rather than palliate–which the Dutch Government’s “Remmelink Report” showed” to be above 4,000 in 1990. Nor do they include the increasing numbers of terminal sedations, which I reported earlier are on the rise in the Netherlands and are an abuse of a proper palliative procedure. And, they don’t include eugenic infanticides, which number about 90 per year according to two reports in The Lancet. And while we are on the subject, it doesn’t by definition include the cases not reported, which studies have indicated total about 40 percent or more each year, meaning that there were probably another 1000 or so that the authorities don’t know about.

But other than that, I am sure it is an accurate statistic.”