"At the risk of being repetitious, I would remind the group that we have found the highest frequency of induced abortion in the group which, in general, most frequently uses contraceptives."
-- Dr. A. Kinsey, 1995 Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA) Conference
"More than 3 million unplanned pregnancies occur each year to American women; two-thirds of these are due to contraceptive failure."
-- Dr. Louise Tyrer, Medical Director of PPFA, Letter to Editor Wall Street Journal, 26Apr91
Feb-March 2007: End Of Life Issues
End of Life Websites
Word Games in the Battle Over Physician-Assisted Suicide
Swiss Federal Court Affirms Right of Mentally Ill to Euthanasia
Brain Death Definition...
END OF LIFE WEBSITES
Prenatal Partners For Life – support for parents of babies with severe problems www.prenatalpartnersforlife.org
PVS & AMBIEN. Several studies are being conducted worldwide on patients thought to be in PVS, using zolpidem (Ambien) which actually wakes many of these patients! For more info, check our homepage, www.physiciansforlife.org.
When Killing Yourself Isn’t Suicide: Word games in the battle of physician-assisted suicide. The Vermont legislature has fast-tracked a bill to legalize physician-assisted suicide, and California may not be far behind. If the legislatures in these states do vote to redefine physician-assisted suicide as a legitimate and legal “medical treatment,” a large part of the blame, strange though it may sound, can be laid at the feet of postmodernism.
The deconstruction of language, with disregard for facts and accurate definitions, is infecting medical and health-care ethics and policies. Case in point: In order to further the legitimization of assisted suicide, the American Public Health Association (APHA) embraced the political advocacy of assisted-suicide supporters in November when it decided that “physician-assisted suicide”an accurate and descriptive termshould be replaced with the euphemistic advocacy-phrase “aid in dying.” At its annual meeting, the organization approved an interim policy:
Urges health educators, policy-makers, journalists and health care providers to recognize that the choice of a mentally competent, terminally ill person to choose to self-administer medications to bring about a peaceful death is not "suicide," nor is the prescribing of such medication by a physician "assisted suicide." Urges terms such as "aid-in-dying" or "patient-directed dying" be used to describe such a choice.
This policy will become permanent if confirmed by the APHA’s governing council in 2007.
The stakes in this semantics game are high. At issueand indeed, the whole point of this postmodernist exerciseis whether activists will be able to convince other states to join Oregon in redefining the crime of assisted suicide as a legitimate “medical treatment.” If that happens, funding of assisted suicide would soon follow, just as it has in Oregon, where the act of facilitating suicide is now deemed a state-funded form of “comfort care.”
In one sense, the opening of this new front in the assisted-suicide debate reveals that the movement, thought to be unstoppable when Oregon passed the nation’s first assisted-suicide law, understands that it has failed to convince America that suicide should be part of medicine’s armamentarium. In the more than ten years since the passage of the Oregon law, state after state has considered legalizing assisted suicide. Each time, there was early support for the measure. Yet, in each instance, when the official vote was taken, support had evaporated and the proposal went down in defeat. This left assisted-suicide proponents, particularly Compassion & Choices (C & C) (formerly the Hemlock Society), which spearheaded most of these legislative proposals, searching for some way to improve their position.
So C & C commissioned research and polling. They found that people have a negative impression of the term “assisted suicide,” but, if euphemistic slogans like “death with dignity” or “end of life choices” were used to describe the same action, response was relatively positive. Likewise, poll respondents were more apt to approve letting doctors “end a patient’s life” than they were to approve giving doctors the right to “assist the patient to commit suicide.” According to one polling firm, the apparent conflict was a “consequence of mentioning, or not mentioning, the word ‘suicide.’”
As a result, assisted-suicide advocates concluded that the accurate word “suicide” had to go. They embarked on a crusade to erase and replace it with kinder, gentler language that masked the harsh reality of what was being discussed.
Their line of attack aimed at three target groups: the media, the state of Oregon, and major public-policy organizations. If those groups could be persuaded to adopt new language, opposition would supposedly disappear.
Accordingly, they issued press releases claiming that use of the term “assisted suicide” demonstrated insensitivity to dying patients and to the physicians who assisted them. In one C & C press release, Dr. Peter Goodwin, who has presided over a number of assisted-suicide deaths, said, “As a physician, I resent the term ‘physician-assisted suicide.’ I never felt I was assisting a suicidal patient, but rather aiding a patient with his or her end of life choice.”
Thus far, however, the press has, for the most part, not jumped on the name-change bandwagon. For example, the Associated Press bureau chief in Portland, Oregon, said, “We have thought about it and we feel ‘suicide’ describes the act of taking one’s life, so we’ll stick with it for the time being.” Likewise, the Register-Guard (Eugene, Oregon) will continue to use the terms “doctor- or physician-assisted suicide,” since they have chosen “to err on the side of plain English.”
The government of Oregon, however, is another story. The Oregon Department of Human Services (DHS) is the entity charged with compiling annual assisted-suicide statistics, and, since those statistics are inevitably part of any debate or discussion about new assisted-suicide measures, C & C needed the DHS to replace the offending “s-word” in the reports. To accomplish this, C & C first sent a formal request to the state agency, suggesting that the terms “aid-in-dying,” “directed dying,” or “assisted dying” be used in official state reports. Then the group upped the ante when it brought lawyers to a meeting with the DHS to discuss the language substitution and implied that, if it were not made, litigation might follow.
Rather than risk a legal wrangle (or, perhaps, out of sympathy for the cause), the state acquiesced. On October 16, state officials announced that, in the future, physician-assisted suicides in Oregon would be listed as “physician-assisted death.” However, this label was changed after a number of Oregonians objected to its ambiguity, since it could refer to anything from plumping a pillow or wiping a brow to intentionally giving an overdose of a lethal drug.
The state agency finally settled on the phrase it would use instead of “physician-assisted suicide.” In all future official communication, the state of Oregon will refer to patients who die from physician-assisted suicide as “persons who use the Oregon Death with Dignity Act.”
Assisted-suicide activists were ecstatic. According to Kathryn Tucker, C & C’s director of legal affairs, “This will be a sea change because how you speak of things strongly influences how you think of them.”
The victory in Oregon was equaled when the APHA announced that it would embrace the misleading language. With over 50,000 members from over 50 occupations in the public-health field, APHA has a long arm. According to its web site, “APHA has been influencing policies and setting priorities in public health for over 125 years.” Now it will give the media an excuse to shift from precise and accurate descriptive language about assisted suicide to the words of pure political advocacy. Clearly, the APHA’s adoption of a policy intended to mask the reality of suicide and to legitimize its facilitation by describing it in innocuous terms constitutes thinly veiled support for passage of laws permitting physician-assisted suicide.
This is a big shift from 1999, when then-U.S. Surgeon General David Satcher declared, “Suicide is a serious public health problem,” and urged implementation of a comprehensive national strategy for suicide prevention. At the time, he did not recommend that those who had been diagnosed (or misdiagnosed) with a terminal illness be exempt from efforts at suicide prevention. But Satcher himself has now caught assisted-suicide fever. In 2006 (when he was no longer the surgeon general), he wrote a letter supporting a California bill that was identical to Oregon’s law. (The California bill failed.) In his letter, he referred to assisted suicide in Oregon as “legal aid in dying in Oregon.” Apparently, suicide is no longer a problem if it isn’t called “suicide.”
Let’s think about how this works: Take a patient who has been diagnosed with a terminal condition. If that patient asks her doctor for sleeping pills so she can sleep comfortably at night, and if the doctor prescribes them, but she takes all of the pills at once and dies, her death is called “suicide.”
But, if that same patient asks her doctor for sleeping pills so she can die, and if the doctor prescribes them for that purpose, and she takes all of the pills as directed and dies, her death is not called “physician-assisted suicide.”
Assisted-suicide advocates say that that’s proper, but really it’s just political correctness. By bringing postmodernism to health-care public-policy, they hope to drive their agenda to victory.
[Rita L. Marker is an attorney and executive director of the International Task Force on Euthanasia & Assisted Suicide. Wesley J. Smith is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, an attorney for the International Task Force on Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide, and a special consultant to the Center for Bioethics and Culture. Rita L. Marker & Wesley J. Smith http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=NGYwNWM4Y2EwODRjOTViZjI4ZTJjZTQ0M2Q4NWRhZjI =]
BRAIN DEATH DEFINITION. In September 2006, 20 neurology experts from all over the world met to discuss the prevailing definition of brain death, that human death occurs when there is "the complete and irreversible cessation of all brain activity including the brain stem". After 2 days of discussion, they again accepted the current definition stating: "There is no reason to again go over the criteria accepted by the overwhelming majority of the world's scientists." [Cincinnati Rt to Life Ed Fdn Inc, 1/07, www. cincinnatirighttolife.org]
SWISS FEDERAL COURT AFFIRMS RIGHT OF MENTALLY ILL TO EUTHANASIA.
The following article is a media release from the Dignitas suicide clinic in Switzerland. The release explains that a person who was denied a prescription for Sodium Pentobarbital because of that persons mental illness has now been granted the right to have the prescription. This means that a decision to end one's own life is not limited to people with physical illness but now based on whether a person believes that their life is "not worth living anymore."
The Swiss Federal Court has now granted all people in Europe the right to die based on a principle of radical personal autonomy. This philosophy holds that someone not only has a right to commit suicide but the state has the obligation to assist that suicide, if the person wishes.
There are no safeguards or concerns for people with disabilities and other vulnerable people. The only caveat is that the person must be able to: form his/her will freely and act thereafter.
The Swiss have now opened the door to a free-fall into the abyss of the culture of death. The end of this free-fall is the societal pressure and culture that demands an obligation to die for the weakest members of society who are seen as lacking the quality of life or too stupid to recognize that their life is not worth living.
Alex Schadenberg
Euthanasia Prevention Coalition
toll free: 1-877-439-3348
Dignitas in Switzerland issued this bulletin on 1 February 2007:
The Swiss Federal Court acknowledges the right to an accompanied suicide as a human right. Also mentally ill are entitled, if they have capacity of discernment.
Uster/Wetzikon, February 1st ) The Swiss Federal Court has acknowledged the right of a person to determine the way and the point in time of his/hers end of life as a guaranteed European human right and at the same time basically granted mentally ill this right just like everyone else, if they have capacity of discernment.
At the same time it dismissed a request for the removal of the obligation to present a prescription for the lethal drug necessary for an accompanied suicide. The decision has been announced by the lawyers of the appellant in Uster and Wetzikon ZH.
The decision by the Federal Court has been procured through the complaint of a mentally ill man, a member of Dignitas, for whom - due to legal insecurity - no physician would have written the prescription for the drug Sodium Pentobarbital necessary for a risk-free suicide. The reason for this refusal was the always somehow vague threat by the Zurich Cantonal Physician to withdraw the permission to work of those physicians who would write such a prescription. For this reason, the appellant addressed himself to the Federal Council, the Director of the Federal Department of Health, the Zurich Cantonal Physician and the Zurich Cantonal Pharmacist, claiming the right to have direct access to the necessary drug.
To justify his claim, he referred to the European Convention of Human Rights, which in article 8 secures that all contracting states shall respect the private life of everyone within their jurisdiction. Private life would also include the decision on one's own end of life.
All of the contacted authorities either explained to be incompetent or dismissed the request. With one complaint against the federal and another one against the cantonal authorities - which had both dismissed his request in the appeal process - he appealed to the Federal Court. This court also heard him personally in due course.
The Federal Court stated as follows:
· «The right of self-determination in the sense of article 8 § 1 ECHR includes the right to decide on the way and the point in time of ending ones own life; providing the affected person is able to form his/her will freely and act thereafter.»
· «It cannot be denied that an incurable, long-lasting, severe mental impairment similar to a somatic one can create a suffering out of which a patient would find his/her life in the long run not worth living anymore.
Based on more recent ethical, juridical and medical statements, a possible prescription of Sodium-Pentobarbital is not necessarily contra-indicated and thus no longer generally a violation of medical duty of care...
However, utmost restraint needs to be exercised: It has to be distinguished between the wish to die that is expression of a curable psychic distortion and which calls for treatment, and the wish to die that bases on a self-determined, carefully considered and lasting decision of a lucid person ("balance suicide") which possibly needs to be respected. If the wish to die bases on an autonomous, the general situation comprising decision, under certain circumstances even mentally ill may be prescribed Sodium Pentobarbital and thus be granted help to commit suicide.»
· «Whether the prerequisites for this are given, cannot be judged on separated from medical - especially psychiatric - special knowledge and proves to be difficult in practice; therefore, the appropriate assessment requires the presentation of a special in-depth psychiatric opinion.»
On Thursday, the General Secretary of DIGNITAS, Ludwig A. Minelli, explained that with the acknowledgement of the right to an accompanied suicide as an ECHR-right all intentions to prevent with special "rules" people from other countries to come to Switzerland for an accompanied suicide to have no more grounds.
Article 14 of the Convention on Human Rights does not allow for discrimination. Furthermore, the legal security gained out this decision offers the basis that in the future physicians may help mentally ill who have capacity of judgment without the risk of a prohibition to practise their profession, because upon presentation of a psychiatric expertise they may prescribe Sodium-Pentobarbital.
Minelli is convinced that after some time, in other European countries, especially Germany, Great Britain and France, this decision will lead to a reconsideration of the dried up political position and enable a more liberal regime. This would reduce the demand for this service in Switzerland significantly which certainly would be desirable.
[N Valko, 2Feb07; Euthanasia Prevention Coalition; 1Feb07, Dignitas Press Release]
End of Life / Euthanasia 
