March 2018

NewsTalk ZB 26 March 2018
Family First Comment: “It follows warnings from the Human Rights Commission about the large number of older Kiwis in facilities where “lived experience is being locked within a building with no exit”.”
Add euthanasia (and the culture of coercion) to the mix, and you have a recipe for disaster!
www.rejectassistedsuicide.nz

Rest home residents have been strapped to chairs all day with minimal movement or repositioning, documents show.

The Herald can also reveal Justice Minister Andrew Little is set to sign off on a major shake-up of the monitoring of locked aged-care and disability facilities – a move Grey Power says could help avoid rare “horror stories”.

It follows warnings from the Human Rights Commission about the large number of older Kiwis in facilities where “lived experience is being locked within a building with no exit”.

Physical restraint restricts a patient’s voluntary movement, including through belts and railing. Because of a high risk of trauma and injury it must only be used if a resident is at serious risk to themselves or others.

A Herald review of rest home audit reports published since 2016 has found 27 homes have had “moderate” or “high” risk shortcomings related to restraint.

In one of the worst, a resident was restrained to a chair and instructions to move them twice each morning and afternoon shift weren’t carried out. Auditors saw the resident in the same sitting position for more than four hours, and records showed the lap belt was on for up to six hours at a time.
READ MORE: http://www.newstalkzb.co.nz/news/national/shocking-report-elderly-restrained-in-chairs-all-day-at-rest-homes/

Rest homes investigation: bedsore deaths, expired medication, hungry residents
NZ Herald 24 March 2018
Rest home residents are dying from bed sores. Nicholas Jones finds the preventable tragedies reflect wider problems in a sector trusted with our most vulnerable.
Issues uncovered through Official Information Act requests and a review of more than 1000 audit reports include:

• Residents claiming intimidating caregivers would withhold medication or give it late as punishment. A resident at another facility was overheard saying, “please don’t hit me” to a staffer.

• A Dunedin chef went to authorities, claiming his budget worked out to just $1.60 per resident, per meal. Residents were asking relatives to bring bread and fruit. Another facility repeated its menu over two days.

• Life-threatening shortfalls, including a dementia resident wandering away from a facility – next to a busy road and stream – six times in four weeks.

• Amid feedback on meals and activities in one facility’s annual satisfaction survey, a resident with previous suicidal ideology wrote down that they wanted to die. “No care plan to manage this risk was documented,” auditors recorded in 2016. “And no follow-up had occurred.”

• Communication with families was also a problem. In one case, auditors couldn’t find evidence a “not for resuscitation” status on a resident’s file was discussed with family. Documentation relating to resuscitation wishes was confusing or incomplete at other facilities.
READ MORE: http://www.nzherald.co.nz/index.cfm?objectid=12016995&ref=twitter

NewsTalk ZB 24 March 2018
Family First Comment: Superb response. Thank you to the 1,000’s of Family First supporters who submitted!

Many people are having their say about the End of Life Choice Bill.

The Justice Committee had already processed 30,411 submissions on Friday, with several thousand more to go.

Justice Committee chairman Raymond Huo said it was already the highest number of submissions a select committee had received in recent parliamentary history.

“I am determined to present the committee as balanced, even-handed and open- minded as we prepare to hear from the many thousands of New Zealanders who have taken the time to share their views on this complicated and contentious bill,” he said.

National MP Maggie Barry has joined the committee as deputy chairperson.

The bill passed its first reading in parliament last year. It was drafted by David Seymour, the ACT Party leader, and submitted as a member’s bill.

The first reading debate drew stark differences in MPs’ attitudes and beliefs.

NZ First’s nine MPs voted for the bill on condition that it won’t become law unless it gains majority support in a referendum.

Parliament will decide during the bill’s committee stage whether a referendum clause should be inserted.

The bill gives people with a terminal illness or a “grievous and irremediable” medical condition the right to request assisted dying.

It defines those eligible and details a comprehensive set of provisions to ensure it is a free choice made without coercion.

It also outlines a stringent series of steps to ensure the person is mentally capable of understanding the consequences of their decision.
http://www.newstalkzb.co.nz/news/politics/record-submissions-for-euthanasia-bill/

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NZ Herald 20 March 2018
Family First Comment: “Doctors believed she would not live to see her first birthday has died at the age of 11.”

A Rongotea girl who doctors believed would not live to see her first birthday has died at the age of 11.

Rongotea girl Brennagh McKay lived through numerous illnesses and major surgeries until she chose her moment to die on Saturday, mum Kathleen McKay said.

Brennagh was diagnosed with a rare genetic disorder called Trisomy 18 at nine months old.

Since then she has been in and out of hospital, had countless treatments and about seven major surgeries, including having three quarters of her bowel removed when she was seven. The procedure left her on life support.

Brennagh gained hundreds of supporters from around the world as her mother shared her story on social media. She seemed to be improving before her death on March 17.
READ MORE: http://www.nzherald.co.nz/index.cfm?objectid=12016557&ref=twitter

 

Bruce Logan – Board Member, Family First NZ
Like so many advocates for the End of Life Choice Bill, Labour MP Louisa Wall, while appealing to compassion, is infected by a confidence that she understands the mystery of human suffering (As on 9/11, choosing way you go is no sin – NZ Herald 13 Mar 2018).

Louisa Wall quotes the American academic Margaret Battin to defend her case. However, one wonders if Wall has carefully read the American academic’s complex and inconclusive work.

Louisa Wall’s reference to the 9/11 jumpers is no help at all. People were jumping to avoid being burnt to death. That they chose to jump is hardly surprising. Confronting certain death in a burning building and jumping to avoid one kind of immediate death for another is profoundly different from suffering in hospital with a terminal illness. The comparison is bizarre. This looks like a confused attempt to transfer sympathy for the jumpers to suicide generally and assisted suicide specifically. It’s beside the point.

Even if we accept the argument made by Battin and replicated by Wall, that we have a fundamental right to kill ourselves akin to the right to life, it does not follow that we should endorse the legalisation of physician assisted suicide, which is what the Bill demands.

Implicit in all the arguments for the End of Life Choice Bill is the befuddled human rights ideology informed by utilitarianism.
Life, according to this ideology, is about human usefulness, a usefulness that can be understood and circumscribed by legislation. Reference to “quality of life” turns up ad nauseam. The phrase is used with unqualified confidence as though the users know what it means. But they don’t. Unless they have insight into the mystery of life not available to the rest of us.

Louisa Wall says she believes “…we need to create a state authorised mechanism to enable death for those who have been diagnosed with an incurable medical condition that becomes terminal when all state treatments have been exhausted, and the person, based on medical knowledge, has less than 12 months to live.” That sounds like something out of Huxley’s Brave New World or George Orwell’s 1984.

It is this kind of faith in a clinical diagnosis that can readily encourage a duty to die. Age rationing, a “just” distribution of health care income is likely to become a compulsory consideration. Spending money on the elderly is inefficient. The young will benefit more.

The logic of physician assisted suicide must lead to doctors, and worse, corporate administrators deciding which lives are worth saving, caring for, and those who would be better off dead. The administrators’ decisions will not be based on compassion. They will be made by the strong over the weak. In passing, Stephen Hawking was diagnosed with Motor Neurone disease and given 2 years to live. Had assisted suicide been legal we might not have had him.

By legalising assisted suicide we undermine the outworking of compassion. Compassion is a virtue and it comes at a cost. To suffer alongside someone we love is painful. But both the sufferer and the comforter know they are doing something of great value. It enriches the life of both. Compassion reinforces trust and encourages hope. The value and mystery of the human journey is less likely to be devalued.

Conversely physician assisted suicide diminishes trust between the patient, relatives and friends, and in the profession generally. Suffering is not resolved, but potentially transferred to the lives of the relatives and even the physician. Whoever participates in assisted suicide assumes a unique responsibility for the act of ending a person’s life. He or she will never be sure that they had done the right thing. Guilt will remain a possible, even likely accuser.

When a loved one is dying, resolution, forgiveness and shared declarations of love and hope between the comforter and sufferer is deeply human. Trust is essential. Such trust becomes very difficult to achieve if legalised assisted suicide is lurking in the wings. Sure, pain is a serious problem in some cases, but it is frequently inconsistent and can cause us to make decisions we later regret.

Those who demand the legalisation of assisted suicide fail to understand the critical difference between pity and compassion. It is pity that demands the end of pain as quickly as possible. Compassion weeps with pity but sees further. Pity believes that suffering is the greatest evil. Compassion understands suffering’s terror as it tries to come to grips with the death of a loved one.

The legalisation of assisted suicide solves no problems at all. It does nothing to reduce pain or help us confront the reality of death. Indeed, it is more likely to turn dying into what the utilitarians have always wanted, disposal of the useless.

CTV News 15 March 2018
Family First Comment: Another example – this time from Canada – of why ‘safeguards’ are an illusion.
“A landmark lawsuit has been filed by an Ontario man suffering from an incurable neurological disease. He alleges that health officials will not provide him with an assisted home care team of his choosing, instead offering, among other things, medically assisted death. “My condition is grievous and irremediable,” 42-year-old Roger Foley said from his bed. “But the solution is assisted life with self-directed funding.”
www.protect.org.nz

A landmark lawsuit has been filed by an Ontario man suffering from an incurable neurological disease. He alleges that health officials will not provide him with an assisted home care team of his choosing, instead offering, among other things, medically assisted death.

“My condition is grievous and irremediable,” 42-year-old Roger Foley said from his bed at the London Health Science Centre’s Victoria Hospital in a video that was recently posted online. “But the solution is assisted life with self-directed funding.”

According to Foley, a government-selected home care provider had previously left him in ill health with injuries and food poisoning. Unwilling to continue living at home with the help of that home care provider, and eager to leave the London hospital where he’s been cloistered for two years, Foley is suing the hospital, several health agencies and the attorneys general of Ontario and Canada in the hopes of being given the opportunity to set up a health care team to help him live at home again — a request he claims he has previously been denied. “I have no desire to take up a valuable hospital bed,” Foley explained. “But at this point, it’s my only option.”

Foley suffers from cerebellar ataxia, a brain disorder that limits his ability to move his arms and legs. The condition leaves him unable to perform mundane tasks on his own, like feeding himself. He also has trouble holding himself upright. Because of the condition, he even has difficulty speaking.

“Unfortunately, my life story is narrated through the horrible prism of a progressive neurodegenerative disease,” Foley said with an audible tremor in his voice. “I have gone from being an active person to, on some days, not even being able to get out of bed.”

Because Foley suffers from a terminal and incurable disorder, he qualifies for medically assisted death. But Foley does not want to die — he simply wants to live at home.
READ MORE & VIEW VIDEO: https://www.ctvnews.ca/health/the-solution-is-assisted-life-offered-death-terminally-ill-ont-man-files-lawsuit-1.3845190

National Review – Wesley J Smith 5 March 2018
Family First Comment: “It’s a very big deal that a respected Dutch medical journal such as Pediatrics hosted a debate on the ethical propriety of child euthanasia without international criticism. It means that among the medical intelligentsia, child euthanasia has become a respectable proposition.”
“(US ethicist Margaret) Battin lists several propositions (for child euthanasia), including: ‘That parents aren’t harmed by seeing their children suffer.’ In other words, children should be put out of the parents’ misery.
Shocking.

The U.S. assisted-suicide movement pretends to want a limited legalization of assisted suicide to competent adults with a terminal illness.

That’s not true. It’s just the expedient to persuade us to accept the premise that suicide or killing is an acceptable solution to human suffering.

If we ever do that — the jury is still out — then, the killing license thereby granted will not only expand way beyond the terminally ill, but will eventually also include children and the incompetent.

The evidence of this isn’t hard to find. Case in point. Pediatrics asked Dutch and American bioethicists whether they would support repealing all age limits for euthanasia in the Netherlands — as the Belgians already have. (Currently, euthanasia in the Netherlands is legal starting at age 12.)

If American advocates were serious about their espoused limits, they would be appalled by the existing Dutch law, and even more so by the Pediatrics hypothetical proposal.

But at least one prominent U.S. proponent — Margaret P. Battin, a favored source on the issue for the New York Times and other mainstream media outlets — is enthusiastically in favor of the Dutch doing away with all euthanasia age limits.

From her comment:
I generally support [the] change in Dutch law governing eligibility for euthanasia.‍ Given that euthanasia is currently legal for infants <1 year of age and children and adults >12 years of age, I believe that opponents would have to show evidence that at least 1 and perhaps many of the following propositions are true if they are to persuade you [a hypothetical Dutch health minister] not to support the change in the law:

Battin lists several propositions, including:
That parents aren’t harmed by seeing their children suffer.
In other words, children should be put out of the parents’ misery:
That pediatricians can’t understand the difference between killing a healthy, curable child and hastening a bad death that is already in progress.
READ MORE: https://www.nationalreview.com/blog/corner/child-euthanasia-us-bioethicist-supports/?utm_campaign=trueanthem&utm_content=5a9e210504d301725e661104&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter

NZ Herald 7 March 2018
Family First Comment: “The 31-year-old suffers from Ehlers Danlos Syndrome [EDS], a genetic connective-tissue disorder that is progressive and incurable. But Black does not want to die. And she does not want doctors suggesting death as an option to her, especially on her darkest days. “I personally have seen over 20 specialists through my local district health board. If I was asked to consider my options as things progress by even a handful of these, I would certainly feel very pressured to consider euthanasia.””
Yep – vulnerable people can live without euthanasia

Kylee Black has already had end of life conversations with doctors.

The 31-year-old suffers from Ehlers Danlos Syndrome [EDS], a genetic connective-tissue disorder that is progressive and incurable.

But Black does not want to die. And she does not want doctors suggesting death as an option to her, especially on her darkest days.

“I personally have seen over 20 specialists through my local district health board. If I was asked to consider my options as things progress by even a handful of these, I would certainly feel very pressured to consider euthanasia.”

Black is talking about the End of Life Choice Bill, currently before Parliament, which if passed into law would make her eligible to choose to die legally.

A video campaign dubbed #MyLifeMyChoice, launched last month to support Act Party leader David Seymour’s bill, focuses on people with terminal illnesses.

However Black wants to highlight how the bill could affect a disabled person.

Of greatest alarm to Black and the disability sector is the inclusion in the bill of people with grievous and irremediable medical conditions.

Black is not alone when she says this term is ambiguous and vague, and opens disabled people up to pressure and even coercion to end their lives early.
READ MORE: http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=12008219

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NewsHub 9 March 2018
Family First Comment: An excellent commentary – and a rebuke to the recent comments of ACT’s David Seymour…
“Mr Seymour calls this a progressive bill, but progressive to what end? Progress is, in one sense, just a direction. And the direction of this bill emerges out of, and plays to, people’s fears: fear of a bad death; fear of becoming a burden; fear of losing physical and mental capabilities and social relationships.
Worse, it implicitly affirms that people are right to be afraid. It emerges out of compassion, but it is a misguided compassion that has surrendered to counsels of despair. It is within our power to overcome these challenges if we devote sufficient leadership and resources to them.”

OPINION: Three days after the submissions process for the EOLC Bill has closed, the numbers have already exceeded 25,000. Many thousands will express deep opposition to what David Seymour is proposing.

Can we be clear about Mr Seymour’s approach here: he is a master of spin, and is already stating that the numbers against euthanasia are not important. Nevertheless, contrast this: Mr Seymour says “Parliament’s Finance and Expenditure Committee has received 220 submissions on the Government’s Bill that bans foreigners from buying houses and most of them strongly oppose it.”
So 220 opposition numbers are crucial for the foreign ownership bill, while thousands of opposition submissions are irrelevant when it comes to euthanasia? To dismiss serious opposition to this Bill, just because it doesn’t suit Mr Seymour’s case, is arrogant and patronising.

Mr Seymour says that it is the quality of argument that matters, implying that the submissions in opposition are poorly argued, but not the pro-euthanasia ones. His presumption is staggering. Submissions to the Health Select Committee in 2016 were 80% opposed to euthanasia. They included people from all walks of life and levels of education.

The key elements of this complex and difficult discussion were presented: the question of autonomy; our societal responses to suffering; the outworkings of true compassion; negative implications for disability; to name a few. Some of it came from highly educated people, with nuanced and compelling engagement (including the New Zealand Medical Association and the Australia and New Zealand Society of Palliative Medicine, both of whom are opposed).

Some of it was expressed simply and plainly. People who have worked at the coalface of palliative care for decades were included, as were ordinary concerned citizens with no professional involvement. It is simply unacceptable to dismiss out of hand the views of a vast range of New Zealanders, some of whom have more personal involvement with the intricacies of this issue than he has ever had.

Mr Seymour: deciding on a bill that will fundamentally alter the relationships between doctors, patients, family, and the State is no small matter. At the very least, take the complexity and democratic process seriously. The many thousands of people who have made submissions do.

Mr Seymour calls this a progressive bill, but progressive to what end? Progress is, in one sense, just a direction. And the direction of this bill emerges out of, and plays to, people’s fears: fear of a bad death; fear of becoming a burden; fear of losing physical and mental capabilities and social relationships.

Worse, it implicitly affirms that people are right to be afraid. It emerges out of compassion, but it is a misguided compassion that has surrendered to counsels of despair. It is within our power to overcome these challenges if we devote sufficient leadership and resources to them.

Peter Thirkell is the Secretary of Care Alliance, an advocacy group aiming to “nurture better conversations about dying in Aoteroa.”
READ MORE: http://www.newshub.co.nz/home/shows/2018/03/peter-thirkell-david-seymour-needs-to-listen-to-nz-about-euthanasia.html

Scoop News 6 March 2018
Family First Comment: “Fundamentally, New Zealanders need accessible, good quality palliative care. The Government should strengthen these services, so we can all experience a dignified, comfortable death.”
Exactly!

College of GPs does not endorse euthanasia or physician-assisted suicide: response to call for submissions on End of Life Choice Bill.

The Royal New Zealand College of General Practitioners has submitted its response to the Justice Committee of Parliament today (6 March 2018). The submission is clear that the College does not endorse euthanasia or physician-assisted suicide, which it considers a matter for individual members’ consciences, within the law.

The submission makes 17 recommendations to the Justice Committee, in light of the state of palliative care in New Zealand, the effect legislation may have on vulnerable people, and the effect euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide has on the doctor-patient relationship. The submission also goes into detail to recommend changes to specific challenges the Bill, as drafted, poses. That includes criteria for assisted dying, conscientious objection, and the role of the medical practitioner.

Dr Tim Malloy, President of the Royal New Zealand College of General Practitioners, said: “Whether for or against euthanasia, the College’s members are motivated by compassion – this is a key tenet of the profession. We believe that each general practitioner in New Zealand will have their own ethical view on whether euthanasia or physician-assisted suicide is right.

“However, whether or not this Bill goes ahead, there are significant challenges that must be addressed. Fundamentally, New Zealanders need accessible, good quality palliative care. The Government should strengthen these services, so we can all experience a dignified, comfortable death.
READ MORE: http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/PO1803/S00074/college-of-gps-does-not-endorse-euthanasia.htm