[OT] Dutch Gov't Considers Euthanasia Questions
FACE
Grabbed from another article:
" ... An able-bodied person may look at Terri Schiavo and think: I
wouldn't want to live like that. Someone with a severe disability is
probably more apt to hear the talk of Mrs. Schiavo's "poor quality of
life" and think: I don't want to be killed like that."
http://apnews.myway.com/article/20050330/D8959DCO0.html
Dutch Gov't Considers Euthanasia Questions
Mar 30, 7:08 AM (ET)
By TOBY STERLING
AMSTERDAM, Netherlands (AP) - The Dutch government, the first to
legalize euthanasia for some terminally ill people, will tackle an
even thornier ethical dilemma: what to do when doctors say it is best
to end the lives of infants, the mentally handicapped or the demented.
Euthanasia opponents view the idea with horror, but The Royal Dutch
Medical Association believes guidelines and a panel of experts should
be created to vet such cases.
Health Secretary Clemence Ross, who has opposed expanding the current
euthanasia rules, will send an opinion to Parliament in three or four
weeks, said her spokesman, Richard Lancee.
If Ross approves, doctors acting with the families' permission would
not be punished for administering lethal sedatives to "people with no
free will," in cases that pass review.
Under current law, euthanasia is restricted to terminal patients
suffering unbearable pain with no hope of improvement, and who request
to die when they are of sound mind. Each case is reviewed by a panel
of medical experts.
The new proposal calls for a similar panel for patients who cannot
express themselves, with the addition of a judge or court official,
giving a legal veneer to a practice that technically would remain
illegal.
For advocates, the issue is one of transparency: Past studies have
shown that doctors already carry out a handful of such euthanasia
cases each year.
In the best known example, the Groningen Medical Center announced last
year it euthanized four severely ill newborns in 2004, under
guidelines known as "the Groningen Protocol" - a list of standards for
performing and reporting euthanasia of newborns with serious,
incurable deformities.
Examples include extremely premature births, where children suffer
brain damage from bleeding and convulsions, and diseases where a child
could only survive on life support for the rest of its life, such as
severe cases of spina bifida.
Euthanasia opponents say formalizing such practice would be another
step in the Netherlands' slide down an ethical slope. Bert P.
Dorenbos, director of Cry for Life, said the move would be a
preliminary step to legalizing involuntary euthanasia.
"This is the most important moment, when we can still fight it," he
said.
A similar proposal was stricken from the euthanasia bill that was
passed in 2001 and took effect in 2002, making the Netherlands the
first country to legalize a practice it says is common but unstated in
most Western countries.
Since then, Belgium has also legalized euthanasia, while in France,
legislation to allow doctor-assisted suicide is currently under
debate. In the United States, the state of Oregon is alone in
allowing physician-assisted suicide, but its law is under constant
challenge.
The Terri Schiavo case would not fall under Dutch euthanasia law,
because courts have held that withdrawing life support or a feeding
tube is a decision left up to doctors.
Peter Holland, the director of the Royal Dutch Medical Association,
said doctors support the creation of a vetting panel for "extreme
cases." The Dutch Society for Voluntary Euthanasia has no official
position on the latest proposal, but Chief Executive Rob Jonquiere
said the organization generally supports it.
"The best argument for the review boards is the success of the
existing system" in the Netherlands, he said.
There were 1,815 euthanasia cases reported to regional review boards
in 2003, a slight decline from previous years. In eight cases,
doctors were deemed not to have followed the rules properly and were
referred to prosecutors.
According to a study published in the Netherlands Journal of Medicine
in January, 22 cases of newborns being euthanized were reported to
prosecutors since 1997. Prosecutors found that the Groningen
guidelines were followed in all of them, so they recommended to
superiors the cases not be pursued further though they were
technically murder.
~~~~
FACE
FACE
Patrick Buchanan
The culture of death advances
Posted: March 30, 2005
1:00 a.m. Eastern
On Good Friday, as Terri Schiavo lay dying of thirst in Woodside
Hospice, Gabriel Keys took her a cup of water. Gabriel was arrested,
handcuffed and taken away.
Apparently, no one taught Gabriel that you do not disobey a judge's
order, even to bring water to someone dying of thirst. As he is 10
years old, he is probably not yet conversant with the new morality,
where a corporal work of mercy can be a crime. Perhaps his parents
filled his mind with such subversive texts as, "Whoever shall give to
drink to one of these little ones, a cup of cold water" shall not lose
eternal life.
Before this column appears, Terri Schiavo may well be dead. If so,
another milestone will have been passed in the long retreat of Western
Civilization from a Christian-rooted culture of life to the pagan
culture of death of pre-Christian Rome.
For Terri Schiavo will not have died a natural death. She will have
been put to death by the state. The coroner's report should read:
This was a state-sanctioned killing of a woman because she was
brain-damaged, and the method of execution was by starvation and
denial of water. These are methods most of us would protest if
imposed on the Beltway snipers.
Why did Florida put Terri Schiavo to death? Because that was the
demand of a husband who refused to divorce her and denied her medical
care, while he lived with another woman. Michael Schiavo is the ACLU
poster boy for family values.
In the Old Testament, King Solomon ruled that the mother who had been
willing to give up her baby to the woman who had kidnapped the child
rather than see the baby cut in half should have the child. Our
Florida Solomon ruled that the husband who wanted Terri dead should
have custody of her, not the parents who wanted her alive.
"Should Congress have intervened?" is an issue that has divided
conservatives. But conservatives are constitutionalists. Under the
Constitution, no person may be deprived of life without due process of
law. This has traditionally meant a trial of one's peers, proof
beyond a reasonable doubt of a heinous crime and no cruel or unusual
punishment. Though she committed no crime, Terri was put to death in
a manner most decent men and women would not use to put a suffering
animal out of its misery.
Most conservatives believe in a God who is the Author of Life and has
given us the laws by which we must live. Among the first of these is
that we must not shed innocent blood. For that is forbidden by the
teachings of Christianity, Judaism and Islam, and the laws of all the
civilizations erected on these faiths. In all nations, killing of the
innocent is the most despicable of crimes. Done on a vast scale,
these are what were called at the Nuremberg trials, "crimes against
humanity."
Americans must face a hard truth. The state of Florida put Terri
Schiavo to death. Before Holy Week, she was neither dead nor dying.
For 15 years, she had been cared for by nurses and visited by loving
parents. She was not dying until the judge ordered her dead, by
ordering her feeding tube removed. Then it has taken her nearly two
weeks to die, as he blocked the reinsertion of the feeding tube and
ordered police to prevent anyone from giving her water.
When the courts failed Terri, and Congress and the Florida Legislature
failed Terri, the governor of Florida, who took an oath to defend the
constitutional rights of Florida's citizens, should have taken custody
of Terri, ordered the tube reinserted and let the federal courts
proceed with the de novo hearing of the evidence, while Terri was
still alive.
When Gov. John Peter Altgeld of Illinois came to believe that those
convicted of murder in the infamous Haymarket Massacre of 1886 were
innocent, that a judicial outrage had been committed, he pardoned
them. "I am a dead man politically," he told Clarence Darrow.
Jeb Bush should have done the same thing, the right thing. He should
have rescued Terri from the death sentence unjustly imposed upon her.
If the court held him in contempt, so what? Who does not hold that
Florida court in contempt?
From abortion on demand in 1973, to a right to die in Oregon, to a
right to suicide in Holland, to involuntary euthanasia in the old
folks homes on the old and dying continent of Europe, to America's
death sentence for Terri Schiavo, the West advances steadily toward
its own death.
As we find more and more justifications for ending life, we also find
that not one Western nation has a native-born population that is
growing. All are dying. Before century's end, the West ends, as T.S.
Eliot wrote, "Not with a bang, but a whimper."
~~~~
FACE