Right to Life New Zealand

Upholding the sanctity of Human life and Standing Up for the Vulnerable

The real story about safeguards around assisted suicide in Oregon

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Image result for assisted suicide in oregonThe following is a re-post of an article by Diane Coleman, from the MercatorNet website published 11th October 2016. Coleman is President and CEO of Not Dead Yet USA ,   Reads…

One of the most frequently repeated claims by proponents of assisted suicide laws is that there is “no evidence or data” to support any claim that these laws are subject to abuse, and that there has not been “a single documented case of abuse or misuse” in the 18 reported years. These claims are demonstrably false.

Regarding documented cases, please refer to a compilation of individual cases and source materials pulled together by the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund entitled Oregon and Washington State Abuses and Complications.

(For an in-depth analysis of several cases by Dr. Herbert Hendin and Dr. Kathleen Foley, please read Physician-Assisted Suicide in Oregon: A Medical Perspective.)

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Euthanasia: learn from Canada’s mistakes – Medically Assisted Murder in Canada

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This article is a re-post from the Mercatornet website 5th October 2016  Reads…

Now that doctors may kill, will people become terrified of palliative care?

The Carter decision to allow assisted suicide and euthanasia claimed that Canada could avoid abuses through careful guidelines and screening. Medically facilitated elder abuse by greedy relatives and medicalized suicide for the depressed — a grim reality where this practice is legal — were supposed to be avoidable, said the judge,because of a superior medical culture in Canada. The abuses of Belgium? Not for us.

Experience proves otherwise.

According to the new law, it will be five years before Canada’s assisted suicide and euthanasia regime has to report back to the nation. Two stories offer reasons why that report will fail to reveal those depressed patients, far from death, who are steered to suicide by others and by their untreated mental illness.

A friend, herself dealing with advanced ovarian cancer, heard from a neighbour that his wife was going to get assisted suicide. The neighbour said they would be going to a doctor in Vancouver to get this done. This baffled my friend, who had seen the woman outside her home, gardening. The husband made other comments suggesting that his wife would be dead soon. She had heart trouble.

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Everyone needs to see this new film exposing the ‘euthanasia deception’

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Featured ImageThis article is a re-post from the LifesiteNews website and is by Alex Schadenberg published September 27, 2016. Reads…

Belgium is “Ground Zero” for euthanasia: It is a country in which “death is considered the solution for everyone who suffers.”

That warning by physician Marnix Coelmont’s is among the testimonies out of Belgium in Euthanasia Deception, a 53-minute documentary produced by the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition and Dunn Media.

“We started this documentary last year to undo the lies, the misconceptions, the ideas that have been sold to the culture about euthanasia and assisted suicide,” said Alex Schadenberg, executive director of EPC.

“There is pressure in every jurisdiction in the world to legalize doctors killing their patients,” he said. “Our goal is that people show Euthanasia Deception in their communities, do a screening, whether it be a church community, the local community,” as part of the resistance to that pressure.

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“Once we got going, we realized … we have to go to Belgium and the Netherlands to talk to people who are directly affected by it,” Schadenberg told LifeSiteNews. “This is the first film of many that will be going down the same sort of line, telling the stories of actual people, getting the news out that, no, this is not what you think it is, this is a deception and a lie.”

Among the lies are that euthanasia is compassionate, that it respects individual autonomy, and safeguards will protect the vulnerable. [Read more…]

Leading Australian journalist decries push for euthanasia

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This article by Paul Russell of HOPE Australia, a re-post from MercatorNet on Oct 3 2016, really encapsulates the arguments as to why legalising Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide are in fact very bad ideas indeed.  Let’s forget the emotional handwringers who try to make a case for doctors killing or assisting in the killing of their patients and get down to the real hard facts of what decriminalisation would actually mean for us as a society. Reads…

One of Australia’s most respected journalists, Paul Kelly, has kicked back against what some of his journalistic colleagues have been treating as a rising tide in favour of euthanasia. Kelly is a former editor of The Australian, a television pundit and the author of eight books on Australian politics. Politicians will listen carefully to what he says.

“Legalise euthanasia and compassionate society dies too”, published in The Weekend Australian, is a serious look at euthanasia in the places where it has been made legal. Kelly concludes that society is irrevocably damaged by the introduction of the practice of doctors killing people.

He opens with an emotional plea:

“If you love your parents, respect your children, care for your society and think compassionately about your world then it is time to open your hearts when a jurisdiction legalises killing or, as it is called, euthanasia.”

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Euthanasia Will Not Give People Dignity Any More Than Abortion Gave People Equality

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https://i0.wp.com/lifenews.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/picassistedsuicide18.jpg?resize=484%2C346The following article is a re-post of an opinion piece by Mike Schouten on the LifeNews.com website published on 21st July 2016.

Being pro-life means, by definition, being for life. The same groups that recognize the value of children in the womb are those who recognize the value of the elderly, the terminally ill, the mentally ill, and all human life. With euthanasia and assisted suicide now accepted in Canada as additional ways to eliminate inconvenience and suffering, it is worth considering how interconnected the issues of abortion and euthanasia are.

Assisted suicide can be paralleled to drug-induced abortions, where a doctor prescribes pills that the patient ingests to accomplish their own goal of ending life. Euthanasia, on the other hand, can be compared to surgical abortion, where a doctor is called upon to take active measures to end a life.  In cases of both assisted suicide and drug-induced abortion, if a patients’ self-administered attempt fails, a doctor may be called upon the finish the job.

In both abortion and euthanasia, we see debates dominated by the word “choice”.

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Dissecting the age of ‘do harm’ medicine

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The following is a re-post of an article on the BioEdge website which featured an interview with Wesley J Smith.

Wesley J. Smith is one of America’s leading commentators on bioethical issues, especially assisted suicide and euthanasia. His columns are published in the National Review and he is the author of 14 books. BioEdge interviewed him about his latest, Culture of Death: The Age of “Do Harm” Medicine.

BioEdge: This is a thoroughly revised edition of a book you published 16 years ago. In your view, is there less respect for life in American medical culture now? Are there any bright spots?

Wesley J. Smith: There is less respect for human equality and the sanctity of life in healthcare generally, I fear, and not only in the U.S. Indeed, I changed the subtitle of the book to “The Age of ‘Do Harm’ Medicine” because it now grapples with developments outside the United States as well as in my own country. We are all connected, so that what happens in Canada impacts Australia, what happens in the USA can have a pull on South Africa. [Read more…]

Victorian Parliament Asked to Change Law to Allow Doctors to Kill their Patients

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Media Release Monday 13th June 2016

The New Zealand Parliamentary Health Select Committee would be prudent to ensure that it is not influenced by the unwise and dangerous recommendation of the Victorian Parliamentary Committee which has asked the State Parliament to give consideration to changing the Crimes Act to allow doctors to kill their patients or assist in their suicide. Right to Life hopes that this new threat to life will be rejected just like all thirty previous proposals in Australian State Parliaments.

The recommendation required the amendment of their Crimes Act which prohibits assisted suicide and homicide; these are serious crimes under that act which provide for terms of lengthy imprisonment.

The report of the Victorian Parliamentary Committee of Enquiry into End of Life Choices  was released last week. It  included 49 recommendations, 48 of which were protective of life. Recommendation 49 is a threat to the lives of the most vulnerable Victorians; the aged, the disabled and the sick. It recommended that the law be changed to regulate assisted dying, which in the vast majority of cases would involve a doctor prescribing a lethal drug which the patient may then take without further assistance. The singular exception would be where people are physically unable to take a lethal drug themselves. In this case, a doctor would be able to assist the person to die by administering the drug.

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Pfizer – Execution Drugs No. Abortion & Euthanasia Drugs YES

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Media Release 22nd May 2016

Pfizer announced on 15th May that it would join twenty-five international drug companies in refusing to supply their products for executions.  Pfizer is joining other drug companies from the US and Europe in this stance. The New York-based global pharmaceutical corporation implemented restrictions on its drugs that could possibly be used for state executions. The company cited both moral and business reasons.
Pfizer in a Global Policy statement on 14 May 2016 stated:

“Pfizer makes its products to enhance and save the lives of the patients we serve. Consistent with these values, Pfizer strongly objects to the use of its products as lethal injections for capital punishment”.

Pfizer’s in a Global Policy statement in October 2015, reaffirmed that its drugs could be used for euthanasia. Right to Life commends Pfizer for refusing to be involved in capital punishment but we ask why is Pfizer still providing drugs to doctors in Holland and Belgium to kill their patients or assist in their suicide? [Read more…]

Death with real dignity – Doctors cannot promise patients absolute control over their dying moments

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The following article is a re-post of an article from the Careful section of the MercatorNet website and is by Sydney intensive Care Specialist Martin Cullen,  published on May 9th 2016. Reads…

 Back in November I was part of the TV audience of Q & A, the ABC’s flagship live debate program on current issues. Generally it’s a program with strong left-wing or liberal views peppered with a mild or unappealing opposition.

The topic of this episode was “Facing Death”: euthanasia and assisted suicide. As an intensive care physician I’ve had a long-standing interest in this. It is not a topic for the fainthearted. Indeed the atmosphere  was tense in the studio. The ABC even needed a pre-program “clown/comedian” to relax the audience. He didn’t succeed.

Ironically the studio management mentioned a number of times that if anyone in the audience was feeling suicidal or depressed a counsellor was on hand to talk! As responsible as their decision was, isn’t it self-evident that doing harm to yourself is not a healthy act? Did they implicitly understand that, yes, people who are thinking of self-harm are somewhat vulnerable?

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The Netherlands is Normalising Euthanasia

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The following article is  a re-post from the ‘Careful’ section of the  MercatorNet website and is by editor Michael Cook first published 30th March 2016.  It is essential reading for anyone concerned about the Euthanasia debate currently going on in New Zealand. It should be an ‘eye-opener’ as to what we can expect if we go down the route of letting euthanasia loose here.  Reads…

A former member of a euthanasia review board in the Netherlands has written a stinging attack on the policy he once formed part of.

Dr Theo de Boer, professor of health care ethics at the Theological University in Kampen and associate professor of ethics at the Protestant Theological University in Groningen, speaks from a unique perspective. Not only was he involved in the adminstration of legalised euthanasia, he is also intimately familiar with arguments put forward by some Christian theologians to justify it.

Writing in the American Protestant magazine Christian Century this week, Dr de Boer says that  from 2005 to 2014, he reviewed nearly 4,000 cases of assisted dying as a member of one of the five Dutch regional committees. He thought it was a “robust and humane system” and defended it at ecumenical gatherings.

However, in 2007, he says that the pace of euthanasia began to accelerate, rising by 15 percent each year. As the numbers soared, the criteria expanded. Even children became eligible. The biggest change was the reason for requesting death. Originally defenders of assisted dying described heart-breaking stories of tormented patients  who just wanted to die peacefully. But this changed. Nowadays, many people simply want to take an early exit from loneliness or bereavement or meaninglessness.

Although some patients still request assisted dying out of fear of ineffective palliative care, an increasing number see euthanasia as the form of a good death after a trajectory of good palliative care. The unbearable suffering that they refer to increasingly consists of meaningless waiting rather than physical suffering. The “burning truck” example no longer applies to most cases. The issue now is autonomy—the patient’s right to a swift death, brought about by a doctor.

Dr de Boer’s words are sobering. They suggest that once euthanasia has become established it becomes a normal treatment.

With overall mortality numbers remaining level, this means that today one in 25 deaths in the Netherlands is the consequence of assisted dying. On top of these voluntary deaths there are about 300 non-voluntary deaths (where the patient is not judged competent) annually. These are cases of illegal killing, extracted from anonymous surveys among physicians, and therefore almost impossible to prosecute. There are also a number of palliative sedation cases—the estimate is 17,000 cases yearly, or 12 percent of all deaths—some of which may involve shortening the life of a patient considerably. Furthermore, contrary to claims made by many, the Dutch law did not bring down the number of suicides; instead suicides went up by 35 percent over the past six years.

A shift has also taken place in the type of patients who seek assisted dying. Whereas in the first years the vast majority of patients—about 95 percent—were patients with a terminal disease who had their lives ended days or weeks before a natural death was expected, an increasing number of patients now seek assisted dying because of dementia, psychiatric illnesses, and accumulated age-related complaints. Terminal cancer now accounts for fewer than 75 percent of the cases. Many of the remaining 25 percent could have lived for months, years, or even decades.

In some reported cases, the suffering largely consists of being old, lonely, or bereaved. For a considerable number of Dutch citizens, euthanasia is fast becoming the preferred, if not the only acceptable, mode of dying for cancer patients. Although the law treats assisted dying as an exception, public opinion is beginning to interpret it as a right, with a corresponding duty for doctors to become involved in these deaths. A law now in draft form would oblige doctors who refuse to administer euthanasia to refer their patients to a willing colleague.

This is obligatory reading for anyone interested in the debate over euthanasia and assisted suicide.

Michael Cook is editor of MercatorNet.

– See more at: http://www.mercatornet.com/careful/view/the-netherlands-is-normalising-euthanasia/17830#sthash.PzxK99oy.dpuf

This is the website of Right to Life NZ Inc.
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