Recent News

The Globe and Mail 9 April 2018
Family First Comment: Excellent article from Canada where old age is being considered as justification for euthanasia…
“Good treatment addresses our fears, it does not embrace them. It helps people through and past crisis points. That won’t happen when age is considered a terminal diagnosis, however, when physician-assisted death is the go-to answer. Ever since Jack Kevorkian, physicians in this line of work have had termination as their reflexive response. If you need help living, see someone else. We want to grow old but are afraid of aging. We want to be healthy and in control and so we fear any kind of disability. Thinking of age as a terminal condition easily ended plays to our fears, not the potential of our lives. The simple truth is circumstances may change at any age; we can’t control that, only our response to them.”
www.protect.org.nz

Age is a chronic, not a terminal, condition. And yet, as Canadians live longer, we often do not celebrate our longevity, but worry about its continuance. Suddenly, the idea of a long life is seen as something fearful and worth ending.

A current example is the recent Globe and Mail report of the March 27 shared death by lethal medical injection of George and Shirley Brickenden, both in their 90s, in their Toronto retirement home. They were, by all reports, an engaging, intelligent and relatively healthy couple.

The story raises real concerns about the grey-zone of medical ethics, targeting the end zone of what today is being promoted as a reasonable basis to end life. The question is: Who is fragile and how do we respond to their needs and fears?

For more than 30 years, I have worked with fragile seniors and their families, including my own. For 25 years, I’ve also worked with and written about adults living with a range of chronic conditions. The thing I learned from, and with, them all is that while death is inevitable, there is no clear past-due date for any of us.

In the medical assessment required before physician termination, one doctor wrote that Mr. Brickenden “has a serious and incurable illness, which is age-related frailty. It is end stage.” This was a way of fitting Mr. Brickenden into the legal standard requiring a patient’s death be “reasonably foreseeable” and inevitable.
READ MORE: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-old-age-alone-shouldnt-be-considered-a-justification-for-physician/

BioEdge 8 April 2018
Hawaii has become the seventh American jurisdiction where assisted-suicide is legal. The “Our Care, Our Choice Act” passed  the Hawaii House of Representatives on a 39-12 vote on March 6, and cleared the Senate on a vote of 23-2 this week. Governor David Inge signed the bill on Thursday. “It is time for terminally ill, mentally competent Hawaii residents who are suffering to make their own end-of-life choices with dignity, grace and peace,” he said.

Under the provisions of the new law, the terminally ill may get a prescription for a lethal drug so long as two doctors agree that the patient has no more than six months to live and is mentally competent. He would also need to undergo a mental health evaluation; two separate requests should be made to an attending provider (who could be a nurse, not a doctor); and two witnesses must attest to the patient’s wish to die. Although a doctor could dispense the medication, patients would be required to take it on their own. The patient’s family need not be informed of his decision.

Since 1997, the legislatures of Hawaii, Oregon, Washington state, California, Colorado, Vermont and the District of Columbia have passed laws permitting assisted suicide. In Montana, a court decision found that it was legal, but there has been no legislation.

In the same time ten states have passed laws explicitly banning assisted suicide. The latest was Utah, where the criminal code was clarified to include assisted suicide. It was prompted by a gruesome case in which 18-year-old Tyerell Przybycien helped 16-year-old Jchandra Brown to hang herself and filmed her last moments.
https://www.bioedge.org/bioethics/hawaii-legalises-assisted-suicide/12646?utm_source=BioEdge&utm_campaign=5017a47ef9-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2018_04_08&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_76ab23e62c-5017a47ef9-124728267

The Globe and Mail 1 April 2018
Family First Comment: Canada is the Niagara Falls of euthanasia! Very disturbing.
www.protect.org.nz

The Brickendens are one of the few couples in Canada to receive a doctor-assisted death together, and the first to speak about it publicly.

On March 27, George and Shirley died holding hands in their own bed in a Toronto retirement home.

Their children, who watched from the foot of the bed, say the couple drew their last breaths at almost the same moment.

Mrs. Brickenden’s body was wracked by rheumatoid arthritis, an inflammatory condition that turned her hands into swollen purple claws.

Her heart was failing. She nearly died during an operation after she suffered a heart attack in 2016.

That was enough for two doctors – as required by the law – to conclude in early 2017 that Mrs. Brickenden was eligible for an assisted death.

Around the same time, two different physicians assessed Mr. Brickenden. The first felt that Mr. Brickenden’s advanced age and frailty made him a candidate for an assisted death, but the second disagreed because Mr. Brickenden did not have a specific underlying illness that made his death reasonably foreseeable, the standard set out in the legislation.
READ MORE: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-medically-assisted-death-allows-couple-married-almost-73-years-to-die/ 

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NZ Herald 3 April 2018
Family First Comment: A perfect example of why euthanasia is so dangerous – not only for adults but also for children. Don’t let the politicians go near it!
www.protect.org.nz

A two-year-old boy in the UK woke up from a coma right after his family agreed to switch him off life support.

Dylan Askin, from Shelton Lock, Derbyshire, suffered from a very rare type of lung cancer. He received the one-in-ten-million diagnosis of Pulmonary Langerhans cell histiocytosis (PLCH).

On Good Friday of 2016, Dylan’s outlook was so tragic the parents made the heartbreaking decision to turn off his life support the following day.

Little Dylan fought through and, by Easter Sunday, was deemed to be in “stable” condition.

Two years on, Dylan has beaten cancer.
READ MORE: http://www.nzherald.co.nz/index.cfm?objectid=12025125&ref=twitter

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