A one year old boy, who could have a tracheotomy, be taken home from the hospital and live his life, may have his ventilator removed at the wishes of his mother and the HOSPITAL TRUST PAYING FOR HIS CARE, because his severe physical disability has been deemed 'intolerable suffering'. His father disagrees and is fighting for his son's life.
'Quality of life'. Brothers and sisters, can we think about that phrase for a moment? Can we think about what we are saying when we are using it? Can we, as Christians, really use that phrase?
HELENA, Mont. (AP) — A Montana judge has ruled that doctor-assisted suicides are legal in the state, a decision likely to be appealed as the state argues that the Legislature, not the court, should decide whether terminally ill patients have the right to take their own life.So, apparently, a judge can go a make a decision like this all by herself... How? It's unbelievable.
Judge Dorothy McCarter issued the ruling late Friday in the case of a Billings man with terminal cancer, who had sued the state with four physicians that treat terminally ill patients and a
nonprofit patients' rights group.
"The Montana constitutional rights of individual privacy and human dignity, taken together, encompass the right of a
competent terminally (ill) patient to die with dignity," McCarter said in the ruling.
It also said that those patients had the right to obtain
self-administered medications to hasten death if they find their suffering to be unbearable, and that physicians can prescribe such medication without fear of prosecution.
"The patient's right to die with dignity includes protection of
the patient's physician from liability under the state's homicide statutes," the judge wrote.
Attorney General Mike McGrath said Saturday that attorneys in
his office would discuss the ruling next week and expected the state will appeal the ruling......The state attorney general's office had argued that intentionally taking a life was illegal, and that the issue was the responsibility of the state Legislature.
Assistant Attorney General Jennifer Anders had argued the state has no evaluation process, safeguards or regulations to provide guidance or oversight for doctor-assisted suicide. The state also said it was premature to declare constitutional rights for a competent, terminally ill patient because the terms
"competent" or "terminally ill" had yet to be defined.
The ruling noted that doctors are often asked to "determine the
competency of their patients for the purposes of guardianship and other legal proceedings."
"Whether a patient is terminally ill can also be determined by the physician as an integral component of the physician-patient relationship," McCarter wrote.
McCarter's ruling makes Montana the third state after Oregon and Washington to allow doctor-assisted suicides. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1997 that terminally ill patients have no constitutional right to doctor-assisted suicide but did nothing to prevent states from legalizing the process.
On this episode of What It Means to Be Human, Wesley J. Smith takes a look at the media’s fawning treatment of suicide advocates. What does a reporter see when he visits the home of a suicide facilitator? Strangely and sadly, he often sees a hero.
Listen in as bioethicist Wesley J. Smith shows how journalism has become a prime mover in the culture of death, to the point that its terminal nonjudgmentalism cannot be trusted.
On this episode of What It Means to Be Human, bioethicist and Discovery Institute senior fellow Wesley J. Smith takes a look at our culture’s "terminal nonjudgmentalism." How far have we come as a society when we lose the will to save suicidal people's lives? Smith examines two outrageous cases from the UK,
one where doctors refused to save a dying girl and another where a disabled man’s parents helped took him to Switzerland to commit suicide. What does the advocacy of death culture turn us into? Tune in and find out.
Medical providers say they won't assist with suicides
While Washington voters made it legal for doctors to help terminally ill residents end their lives, opponents of the assisted suicide measure indicated Wednesday they will continue to resist the practice.
Initiative 1000 won with strong support Tuesday, but doctors don't have to help their patients make that final act, says the Washington State Medical Association.
Furthermore, Eastern Washington's largest hospital system, Providence Health and Services, will forbid physicians from helping patients die at its hospitals, nursing homes and assisted care centers.
"Providence will not support physician-assisted suicide within its ministries," the owner of Sacred Heart Medical Center and Holy Family Hospital said in a prepared statement. "This position is grounded in our basic values of respect for the sacredness of life, compassionate care of dying and vulnerable persons, and respect for the integrity of medical, nursing and allied health professions. We do not believe health care providers should ever be put in a position of aiding a patient in taking his or her own life."
The new Washington law is set to take effect in July 2009 after state regulators write rules to guide the practice.
Olympia, WA (LifeNews.com) -- The state of Washington has joined Oregon to
become the second state in the nation to legalize the grisly practice of
assisted suicide. Voters in the northwestern state approved I-1000 despite
strong opposition from pro-life groups, doctors organizations, disability rights
activists and Catholic voters.
With 42 percent of the vote counted in
the state, I-1000 carried with the support of 58 percent of voters compared with
42 percent who opposed assisted suicide.
Opponents of assisted suicide
had a hard time competing with the money thrown at them from the pro-euthanasia
groups that outspent them as
much as 12-1 thanks to out-of-state money.
Anyone who still says "it can't happen here," isn't paying attention. It is
happening here, and it will happen here increasingly unless there is a greater
commitment shown by those with means who oppose these agendas to reversing the
current course.
Fear of disability typically underlies assisted suicide... The advocates play on that horror of "dependency." ...If needing help is undignified and death is better than dependency, there is no reason to deny assisted suicide to people who will have to put up with it for six or sixteen years, rather than just six months. Not that we favor assisted suicide if it is limited to terminally ill people. We simply want to ask, has this country gotten to the point that we will abet suicide because people can't wipe their own behinds?
"Pressure for improved palliative care appears to have evaporated [in the Netherlands]," according to Herbert Hendin, M.D. Dr. Hendin is a Director of Suicide Prevention International and was formerly the Medical Director of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention.
"Over the past two decades," Hendin continued, "the Netherlands has moved from assisted suicide to euthanasia, from euthanasia for the terminally ill to euthanasia for the chronically ill, from euthanasia for physical illness to euthanasia for psychological distress and from voluntary euthanasia to nonvoluntary and involuntary euthanasia.
"Once the Dutch accepted assisted suicide it was not possible legally or morally to deny more active medical (assistance to die), i.e. euthanasia, to those who could not effect their own deaths. Nor could they deny assisted suicide or euthanasia to the chronically ill who have longer to suffer than the terminally ill or to those who have psychological pain not associated with physical disease. To do so would be a form of discrimination.
Involuntary euthanasia has been justified as necessitated by the need to make decisions for patients not [medically] competent to choose for themselves."
