Good news (for a change)

 The UK parliament has rejected the legalization of euthanasia.

Legalized Child Murder in the Netherlands & Anglican Liturgy for Euthanasia

Netherlands does the unthinkable: euthanize a young child

Anglican Church of Canada to offer special liturgy for euthanasia deaths

This is demonic. 

HT: Dr. Tighe

Canada Offers Assisted Suicide to Patient they Would Not Treat

Canada’s healthcare system used to be a source of pride for my country. It was regarded as one of the world’s best examples of a publicly-funded insurance system, free at the point of use, ranking highly for accessibility, care, compassion and the treatment of major and minor illnesses.

No longer. In 2024, the influential Commonwealth Fund survey placed Canada in seventh place out of ten developed countries, with a particularly poor score for access to care. In January, the Canada-based CD Howe Institute gave the country’s healthcare system an even gloomier diagnosis: it was placed ninth out of 10 countries, with all provinces and territories falling below the international average for overall healthcare performance.

Now the world has begun to notice. Story after story has emerged of patients failing to receive the treatment they require. But none is quite so chilling as that of Jolene Van Alstine.

Van Alstine, who lives in Regina, Saskatchewan, was diagnosed with a rare form of parathyroid disease eight years ago. She has dealt with many health-related problems, including abdominal pain and extreme bone pain and fractures. “It has been horrific,” she told reporters on Nov 25. “Every day I get up and I’m sick to my stomach and I throw up and I throw up. And then it takes me hours to cool off. I overheat. We have to turn the temperature down to 14 degrees when I get up in the morning.”

Her condition is treatable – said to involve complex surgery to remove her remaining parathyroid gland. But no doctors in Saskatchewan are able to perform it. Her case could have been moved on to a surgeon in a different Canadian province, but she needed to get a referral from an endocrinologist – and none of them are reportedly taking new patients.

This is where the story takes a truly sinister turn. Van Alistine sought approval for MAID, or medical assistance in dying. Worse, she was actually approved for medically-assisted suicide. Her husband, Miles Sundeen, told Global News that “she doesn’t want to die. She’s expressed that”, but he understands her position “after watching her suffer for this length of time”.

Read the rest here.

Terminally ill children in the Netherlands can now be euthanized against their will

On February 1, a Dutch law allowing the euthanasia of terminally ill children went into effect. The law legalizes the killing of children ages one through 12 who are deemed to be “suffering hopelessly and unbearably.”

Previously, the country allowed euthanasia of children older than 12, along with infants under age one who could be killed if their parents and doctors agreed and they faced an illness labeled as terminal or faced serious suffering. In 2023, lawmakers passed a controversial expansion of the eligibility guidelines to include children of all ages.

According to reports, the new guidelines state that “the child’s opinion should be sought as far as possible in a way appropriate to the child’s understanding and age,” though parents can decide to have their child euthanized in conjunction with a doctor even if the child is unwilling or unable to consent.

Read the rest here.

HT: Dr. Tighe

ROSS DOUTHAT: What Euthanasia Has Done to Canada

La Maison Simons, commonly known as Simons, is a prominent Canadian fashion retailer. In late October it released a three-minute film: a moody, watery, mystical tribute. Its subject was the suicide of a 37-year-old British Columbia woman, Jennyfer Hatch, who was approved for what Canadian law calls “Medical Assistance in Dying” amid suffering associated with Ehlers Danlos syndrome, a group of disorders that affect the body’s connective tissues.

In an interview quoted in Canada’s National Post, the chief merchant of Simons stated that the film was “obviously not a commercial campaign.” Instead it was a signifier of a public-spirited desire to “build the communities that we want to live in tomorrow, and leave to our children.”

For those communities and children, the video’s message is clear: They should believe in the holiness of euthanasia.

In recent years, Canada has established some of the world’s most permissive euthanasia laws, allowing adults to seek either physician-assisted suicide or direct euthanasia for many different forms of serious suffering, not just terminal disease. In 2021, over 10,000 people ended their lives this way, just over 3 percent of all deaths in Canada. A further expansion, allowing euthanasia for mental-health conditions, will go into effect in March 2023; permitting euthanasia for “mature” minors is also being considered.

In the era of populism there is a lively debate about when a democracy ceases to be liberal. But the advance of euthanasia presents a different question: What if a society remains liberal but ceases to be civilized?

The rules of civilization necessarily include gray areas. It is not barbaric for the law to acknowledge hard choices in end-of-life care, about when to withdraw life support or how aggressively to manage agonizing pain.

It is barbaric, however, to establish a bureaucratic system that offers death as a reliable treatment for suffering and enlists the healing profession in delivering this “cure.” And while there may be worse evils ahead, this isn’t a slippery slope argument: When 10,000 people are availing themselves of your euthanasia system every year, you have already entered the dystopia.

Read the rest here.

Belgian Brothers of Charity defy Vatican over euthanasia

The Belgian Brothers of Charity have defied the Pope and announced they will continue offering euthanasia at their hospitals despite being ordered to stop.

The group said in a statement that it “continues to stand by its vision statement on euthanasia for mental suffering in a non-terminal situation” and that they “emphatically believe” the practice is compatible with Catholic teaching.

The group also claimed the decision had “come about starting from the Christian frame of thought” and that they “always take into account the shifts and evolutions within society”.

Last month, Pope Francis approved a Vatican demand that Brothers must stop offering euthanasia by the end of August.

Read the rest here.

Killing babies no different from abortion, experts say

Parents should be allowed to have their newborn babies killed because they are “morally irrelevant” and ending their lives is no different to abortion, a group of medical ethicists linked to Oxford University has argued.

The article, published in the Journal of Medical Ethics, says newborn babies are not “actual persons” and do not have a “moral right to life”. The academics also argue that parents should be able to have their baby killed if it turns out to be disabled when it is born.

Read the rest here.

Words fail me.

Netherlands: All Doctors Must be Complicit in Euthanasia Killing

I have been fighting the international campaign to legalize and normalize doctor-prescribed/administered death since 1993, and this much I know: Once euthanasia is let in the door, ultimately, enough is never, ever enough.

Par exemple: Euthanasia activists often assure that no doctor will be forced to participate in medicalized killing. But I have been warning that this right of conscience is really an expedient, intended to give false assurance while the euthanasia consciousness gestates and matures.

And now the very pro euthanasia Dutch Medical Association (KNMG) has stated that all doctors have a professional duty to be complicit in euthanasia–either by killing legally qualified patients directly who ask, or if they don’t want to do the deed personally, by referring suicidal patients to a death doctor who they know will kill.

Read the rest here.

Hospital to 'kill' sick woman?

An ill woman in Houston could die within days because a hospital ethics committee has voted to take her off life support – this despite the fact the 54-year-old is not in a coma, is not brain dead and wants to go on living, her family says.

On April 30, Andrea Clark is scheduled to be on the receiving end of a Texas law that allows a hospital ethics committee to terminate care with 10 days' notice, giving the patient's family that length of time to find a different facility.

"They just say, 'Well she's miserable.' Well, to me that's a quality of life decision that is up to her and her family," Lanore Dixon told KHOU-TV. "That is not a medical decision."

Dixon recently protested at the St. Luke's Hospital on behalf of Clark, her sister, who has been hospitalized there since November.

In January, Clark underwent open-heart surgery and later developed bleeding on the brain. A ventilator, which the committee voted to remove Sunday, helps her breathe.

Talking about the Texas law, Dixon told KHOU: ""If their ethics committee makes a decision, it doesn't matter what the patient wants. It doesn't even apparently matter what the patient's condition is, because our sister is not in a coma; she's not brain dead."

Clark's family says though she cannot speak, they are able to communicate with her by moving her lips and blinking her eyes.

Columnist and attorney Wesley J. Smith, who wrote extensively on the Terri Schiavo case in Florida, chimed in on his blog:

"Note that the treatment is apparently being removed because it works, not because it doesn't – which means, in effect, that the hospital ethics committee has declared the patient's life to be futile."

Noting that the family wants Clark to live, Smith noted, "It is as if Michael Schiavo and the Schindlers wanted Terri's care continued but the hospital said no."

Smith described the Texas law as allowing "private decision-making that will result in death without even the right to a public hearing, to cross examine witnesses or a formal appeal."

Some have charged the law is meant to benefit insurance companies who want hospitals to get critical patients "off the books."

According to the TV station report, Clark's family is doing all it can to find another facility that will treat Andrea.

WorldNetDaily.com