This article was published by Mercatornet on September 22, 2021

German monument to the euthanasia victims

By Mark Sutherland

“Your son was released from a severe and incurable disease.”

“He died quickly and without pain. Considering his serious and incurable illness, death meant relief for him.”

“Considering her severe and incurable illness, life was agony for the deceased. You must therefore understand her death as deliverance.” [1]

These short sentences contrast with the enormity of the suffering of the incurably sick. They are typical of a narrative which makes it hard to understand why anyone could oppose the euthanasia bill to be tabled in the New South Wales Parliament later this year, a narrative which damns its opponents as lacking in compassion.

Alex Schadenberg
Executive Director, Euthanasia Prevention Coalition

A California federal judge has rejected a preliminary injunction asking the court to permit euthanasia within the state assisted suicide act. Link to the court decision (Link).

On August 30 I wrote an article about the California court case to permit euthanasia within the state assisted suicide act. The case argued that some people with disabilities, who are approved for assisted suicide, are unable to self-administer the lethal drugs. Therefore, based on the Americans with Disabilities Act, the court must permit euthanasia (doctor administered death) in these cases.

On September 13 I wrote that the California court must reject the challenge to the state assisted suicide act based on (among other reasons): 

1. There is no right to assisted suicide, therefore there is no legal requirement to amend the perceived inequality within the state assisted suicide law.

Alex Schadenberg
Executive Director – Euthanasia Prevention Coalition

The Citizens Commission on Human Rights sent a media release today urging that assisted suicide for psychiatric patients be rejected in the US and other countries. The watchdog group pointed out that assisted suicide has now been legalized in several US states, the CCHR warned that extending assisted suicide to mental patients is dangerous. The CCHR stated that:

While the U.S. limits this to terminally ill individuals, … it’s a quick jump from this to killing patients who do not have terminal illnesses but are suffering emotional, not physical disabilities after failed psychiatric treatments.

The Treasure of Palliative Care – a video series Link to the PDF English version.

Press Release

The Treasure of Palliative Care – a video series

There is always a better option than euthanasia

A Quebec perspective for a better understanding of palliative care

Montréal, CANADA – September 9, 2021 – The Living with Dignity citizen network (LWD), founded in 2010 in advance of the debate on the issue of “dying with dignity” in Quebec, is officially launching The Treasure of Palliative Care video series today.

Alex Schadenberg
Executive Director, Euthanasia Prevention Coalition

An article by Ed Susman published on September 9 in Medpage Today reports on a presentation to the World Conference on Lung Cancer by Dr Sara Moore, a  University of Ottawa medical oncologist. Moore examined 45 euthanasia (MAiD) deaths of people with lung cancer living in the Ottawa region. She concludes that people with lung cancer who died by euthanasia were less likely to consult with a radiation or medical oncologist and less likely to undergo effective treatments.

According to Susman, Moore’s research found that 20% of those who died by euthanasia did not consult a radiation oncologist and 22% did not consult a medical oncologist.

This article was published by Bioedge on August 29, 2021.

Michael Cook

By Michael Cook, Editor of Bioedge

The debate in Canada over euthanasia and assisted suicide – or, as it is called there, Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) – will have a huge impact upon developments elsewhere in the Anglosphere. As two of Canada’s stalwart defenders of MAiD, Jocelyn Downie and Udo Schuklenk, pointed out in a recent article in the Journal of Medical Ethics, “other countries will confront the same questions if they contemplate changing their assisted dying law”.

This makes their pushback against critics of MAiD even more interesting.

“May I give my heart away?“

This article was published by National Review on August 21, 2021.

By Wesley Smith

We have entered the era of what I call “do harm medicine,” in which the concept of what constitutes harming the patient has become entirely malleable and subjective. I even wrote a book covering that subject.

Here’s an example: When organ transplant medicine began, the “dead donor rule” was instituted to assure a wary public that people’s vital organs would only be procured after the person was dead. A corollary to that rule assures the public that people will not be killed for their body parts.

We received this email from Margaret titled: No Euthanasia for Mental Health Reasons. She gave us permission to publish it.

As I am now approaching 70 years of age, I would like to share my experience

Ever since I was twelve years old, I have been treated by psychiatrists, and many other people in the mental health system.

For over thirty-eight years, I considered myself to have active suicidal intentions.

Alex Schadenberg
Executive Director, Euthanasia Prevention Coalition

In response to attacks against the Care Not Killing Alliance in the UK, Jamie Gillies, in spiked-online focuses on the eugenics roots of the assisted dying movement. Gillies writes about Killick Millard who founded the leading assisted dying group in the UK. Gillies states:

Scotland’s media class seems quite happy to spare prominent groups on the other side of the assisted-suicide debate from scrutiny. The Record, for instance, has failed to mention that Dignity in Dying, the group leading the charge for assisted suicide in the UK, was founded and funded by eugenicist politician Killick Millard.

Most people become organ donors because the organs will be removed after they have died and shared with someone who needs the healthy organs.

A case study published in the American Journal of Case Reports titled: Pronounced dead twice: What should an attending physician do in between? concerns a homicide death of a 39-year-old woman that was caused by Acute Fentanyl toxicity due to a Fentanyl injection in the hospital.

The woman was being prepared as an organ donor. She was pronounced dead based on cardiac death. A minute after being pronounced dead the doctors noticed that her aortic and renal arteries were pumping and pulsing.

This article was originally published by Mercatornet on June 7, 2021.

Margaret Somerville

By Margaret Somerville

The Covid-19 virus pandemic is a threat to our physical and mental health and wellbeing, as both individuals and societies.

The euthanasia “virus” pandemic is, likewise, a threat to our physical and mental health and wellbeing, as both individuals and societies. Most seriously, it is a threat to our “human spirit”, the intangible, invisible, immeasurable reality that all of us need to find meaning in life and to make life worth living, that deeply intuitive sense of relatedness or connectedness to all life, especially other people.

Many people have asked why the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition uses the white rose as its symbol. You may have heard about the White Rose campaign composed mainly of students in Munich who resisted the Nazi regime and whose leaders were killed on February 22, 1943.

Most of you will not be aware that opposition to the Nazi T-4 euthanasia program influenced the formation of the White Rose campaign

Hans & Sophie Scholl

Some research suggests that Hans and Sophie Scholl heard the sermon by Bishop von Galen, the Bishop of Muenster, who on August 3, 1941, challenged the killing of people with disabilities by euthanasia.

Alex Schadenberg
Executive Director, Euthanasia Prevention Coalition

Dr Chris Perry

Daniel Tang, reported for the Epoch Times that Dr Chris Perry, the President of the Queensland Australia Medical Association warned Queensland legislators who are debating euthanasia that terminally ill patients choose to “take poison” and die out of hopelessness or abandonment.

Tang reporting on a press conference stated:

Dr. Chris Perry said the euthanasia experience in Victoria, Canada, and Oregon in the United States—one of the earliest jurisdictions to legalise the practice—saw many candidates choose euthanasia because they felt trapped or incapacitated.

Perry stated that killing people who feel hopeless and neglected is not right:

“So, it’s not the right way to treat human beings; we should be treating human beings as we’d like to be treated with dignity and respect,”

“You don’t want people being feeling hopeless, and being neglected, not being well cared for, and ending up taking a drink which will result in them dying in 20 to 30 minutes,”

The Queensland government will likely vote on a bill to legalize euthanasia this week.