Another one-sided report on euthanasia, this time in the Australian state of Victoria By Paul Russell The Legal and Social Issues Committee of the Victorian Parliament handed down its long-awaited Report into End-of-Life Choices today. It makes some valuable comments and recommendations in respect to improvement in palliative care. It acknowledges that access to palliative …
Continue reading "A sugar coated poison pill for Victoria"By Wesley J. Smith I think the drive to get us all talking about dying may be getting a little out of hand. A new 500 page report funded to the tune of $1.5 million by an anonymous donor–would love to know who that was–has recommended that end-of-life medical care be discussed with teenagers. …
Continue reading "Should Teenagers Plan End-of-Life Care?"Living with Dignity denounces the adoption of Bill 52 on “end-of-life care” Montreal– Dramatic day for Quebec Thursday: by a vote of 94 to 22, the Members of the National Assembly have adopted Bill 52, “An Act respecting end-of-life care.” The citizen network Living with Dignity (LWD) denounces the new law, which allows anyone …
Continue reading "Quebec’s elected officials have lifted a vitally important ban"By Margaret Somerville So, you call your pet duck, which lives with you, a dog, because the law prohibits keeping a duck in your apartment, but allows dogs. A court will convict you for breaking the law. Now you are the Quebec provincial government and you table a bill in which you call euthanasia, which …
Continue reading "Quebec is trying to legalize euthanasia by calling it something else. It’s still wrong"By Michael Cook End-of-life care is a phrase associated with gurgling tubes, beeping monitors and flashing lights. But a fledging subspecialty of archaeology is examining how early humans cared for the disabled in their communities. An article in the New York Times [last] week highlighted the life of a young man in northern Vietnam between …
Continue reading "The ethics of care in the Neolithic Age"By Wesley J. Smith Articles like this are ubiquitous these days: First, purportedly write about one thing that is entirely reasonable–but which, beneath that patina, is really about centralizing health care decisions and/or restricting expensive treatments, e.g., rationing. Yesterday I deconstructed a New York Times opinion column that supposedly was about how we don’t know …
Continue reading "Pushing One-Way-Streets in End-of-Life Care"By Wesley J. Smith The current medical resource crisis has placed people in extremis in the cross hairs of rationing or abandonment. We spend too much on end-of-life care, we are told. Often we pour money into treatment and the patient dies anyway, “wasting” the resources. Why pour good money into patients who can’t give …
Continue reading "Pushing Centralized Control Over Which Patients Receive Life-Saving Treatment"