British Section of the World Federation of Doctors Who Respect Human Life

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From Care Not Killing Alliance.

The Care Not Killing Alliance has warned Parliament, the public and the media not to be misled by a report published today that downplays the risk to vulnerable people posed by the legalisation of euthanasia. The warning comes amidst fears that fresh attempts will shortly be made to legalise the practice in Britain, most likely beginning with Scotland, which is seen as a soft target by pro-euthanasia advocates. Dr Peter Saunders, Campaign Director of Care Not Killing, warned:

People should be aware that the prominence being given to this new review is part of a deliberate campaign to soften up the British public for the legalisation of euthanasia. In the Netherlands healthcare is covered by insurance, but in the UK most people rely on the State. In a cash-strapped NHS, where hospitals are being closed and elder abuse is on the rise, there is growing prejudice against the chronically ill and disabled who are seen as disproportionate consumers of limited resources. Legalising euthanasia would place vulnerable lives at risk. And the Dutch statistics, when properly examined, actually raise great cause for concern.

DAILY MAIL (London)

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25 September 2007

By Jill Parkin

None of us likes to imagine such a terrible fate, but this much I do know: If I am ever in a coma I would like to be treated by Muslim or Catholic doctors, because if they're in charge, at least I know I will not be starved to death.

How extraordinary to think that in doing so - in the simple act of keeping me alive - they could be breaking the law.

From the beginning of October, the Mental Capacity Act comes into force, making criminals out of doctors if they insist on feeding coma patients who have earlier said they'd rather die.

It will be a black Monday for healthcare in the UK.

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Tuesday September 25, 2007

500 Centre for Bioethical Reform explicit abortion billboards had powerful effect

BRATISLAVA, Slovakia, September 25, 2007 (LifeSiteNews.com) - "Right to Life" defenders won an impressive victory in Slovakia with the Health Ministry rescinding a law that forced all hospitals to provide abortions. Even the Slovak branch of Planned Parenthood attributed the graphic abortion truth campaign of Pravo Na Zivot for the Ministry's retreat over the abortion requirement.

DAILY MAIL (London)

September 24, 2007 Monday

BY Simon Caldwell and Daniel Martin

MUSLIM MEDICS SAY THEY WILL REFUSE TO LET PATIENTS WITH 'LIVING WILLS' DIE

MUSLIM doctors warned yesterday that they would rather go to jail than allow patients to die in accordance with 'living wills'.

The new Mental Capacity Act allows patients to write the wills, instructing doctors not to try to save them if they become incapacitated.

It also allows patients to give 'lasting powers of attorney' to a friend or relative who would be able to instruct doctors to starve to death a patient who becomes incapacitated.

Doctors who refuse to carry out such instructions risk prosecution for assault and a possible jail term.

However, the Islamic Medical Association is urging its members to defy the Act, which comes into force next Monday. It fears the law will compel Muslim doctors to stop life-preserving treatment or remove tubes providing food and water.

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By Simon Caldwell

9/19/2007

Catholic News Service

LONDON (CNS) – Medical ethicists in Britain said a Vatican document reiterating that it is a moral obligation to provide food and water to patients in a vegetative state will encourage doctors to defy living wills.

Anthony Ozimic, political director of the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children, said the document released Sept. 14 by the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith was "highly significant" for England and Wales, where the Mental Capacity Act will take effect Oct. 1.

The act "runs directly contrary to the (Vatican) statement's principles," he said in a written statement Sept. 18.

"The Mental Capacity Act allows, and in some cases requires, food and water to be denied to mentally incapacitated, nondying persons," Ozimic said.

"This will place conscientious health workers in a serious dilemma," he added. "They may be forced to choose between continuing to feed patients and participating in a regime of starvation and dehydration."

Commentary

Michael Potts

Philosophy, Ethics, and Humanities in Medicine 2007, 2:17

Published: 24 August 2007

Abstract (provisional)

The current practice of organ transplantation has been criticized on several fronts. The philosophical and scientific foundations for brain death criteria have been crumbling. In addition, donation after cardiac death, or non-heartbeating-organ donation (NHBD) has been attacked on grounds that it mistreats the dying patient and uses that patient only as a means to an end for someone else's benefit. Verheijde, Rady, and McGregor attack the deception involved in NHBD, arguing that the donors are not dead and that potential donors and their families should be told that is the case. Thus, they propose abandoning the dead donor rule and allowing NHBD with strict rules concerning adequate informed consent. Such honesty about NHBD should be welcomed. However, NHBD violates a fundamental end of medicine, nonmal eficience, "do no harm." Physicians should not be harming or killing patients, even if it is for the benefit of others. Thus, although Verheijde and his colleages should be congratulated for calling for truthfulness about NHBD, they do not go far enough and call for an elimination of such an unethical procedure from the practice of medicine.

Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith

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First question: Is the administration of food and water (whether by natural or artificial means) to a patient in a “vegetative state” morally obligatory except when they cannot be assimilated by the patient’s body or cannot be administered to the patient without causing significant physical discomfort?

Response: Yes. The administration of food and water even by artificial means is, in principle, an ordinary and proportionate means of preserving life. It is therefore obligatory to the extent to which, and for as long as, it is shown to accomplish its proper finality, which is the hydration and nourishment of the patient. In this way suffering and death by starvation and dehydration are prevented.

Second question: When nutrition and hydration are being supplied by artificial means to a patient in a “permanent vegetative state”, may they be discontinued when competent physicians judge with moral certainty that the patient will never recover consciousness?

Response: No. A patient in a “permanent vegetative state” is a person with fundamental human dignity and must, therefore, receive ordinary and proportionate care which includes, in principle, the administration of water and food even by artificial means.

The Supreme Pontiff Benedict XVI, at the Audience granted to the undersigned Cardinal Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, approved these Responses, adopted in the Ordinary Session of the Congregation, and ordered their publication.

Rome, from the Offices of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, August 1, 2007.

William Cardinal Levada
Prefect

by Our Correspondent, South Wales Echo

DO doctors, carers and families realise that in October 2007 resulting from the passing of the new Mental Capacity Act, that euthanasia will effectively become legalised in the UK?

From telegraph.co.uk.  Read the original here.

By Jonathan Petre, Religion Correspondent Last Updated: 2:03am BST 27/06/2007

Human-animal hybrid embryos conceived in the laboratory - so-called “chimeras” - should be regarded as human and their mothers should be allowed to give birth to them, the Roman Catholic Church said yesterday.

Under draft Government legislation to be debated by Parliament later this year, scientists will be given permission for the first time to create such embryosfor research as long as they destroy them within two weeks.

By Samantha Singson

(NEW YORK — C-FAM) British Member of the European Parliament (MEP) Nirj Deva has slammed a new EU report on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Speaking in the European Parliament this week, Deva acknowledged the need for a progress report for achieving the largely non-controversial MDGs of reducing poverty and disease, and increasing access to education. Where Deva diverged from the report, which was later passed by the European Parliament, was the attempt by the authors to “insert a covert agenda of abortion promotion” within the text.

The introduction to the "MDGs at the Midway Point" report states that “saving women's lives means ensuring that they have universal to access to sexual reproductive health care and family planning” and that the EU “should continue to lead the way on sexual and reproductive health rights by maintaining levels of funding for the full range of (sexual and reproductive health and rights) services.”

Deva took issue with two paragraphs of the report and urged his fellow parliamentarians to vote against them. Paragraph 41 of the report urges the EU “to continue to be the vanguard of efforts to support sexual and reproductive health rights” and links maternal mortality, low contraceptive prevalence and high rates of unsafe abortion in sub-Saharan Africa. Paragraph 42 of the report states the UN intends to adopt a new global target on “universal access to sexual and reproductive health.”

UN experts point out several problems with the two controversial paragraphs. First, the term “sexual and reproductive health rights” has never been included in any negotiated UN document. Even so, they point out that such “rights” language related to "reproductive health" has been misinterpreted by UN committees to include abortion. Second, according to a 2004 report issued by the pro-abortion UN Population Fund (UNFPA) the most important means of reducing maternal mortality is not access to contraceptives and legal abortion but the presence of skilled birth attendants and access to emergency obstetric care.

Paragraph 41, which says the UN is about to adopt a new global goal on reproductive health, contradicts the repeated assertions of UN radicals like UNFPA chief Thoraya Obaid that such a goal already exists. Contrary to Obaid’s statements, no such target currently exists and delegations such as the United States have spoken out in the General Assembly against any new targets, particularly in regards to reproductive health. Moreover, against the content of the new EU resolution, the UN General Assembly has no plans to initiate a new global goal in this area.

Speaking to the Friday Fax, Mr. Deva said, “This report in the European Parliament has very little to do with 'a woman's right to choose', and a lot to do with controlling population figures in the third world within what the 'West' feels is a manageable amount. It is clear that certain UN-backed and EU-backed non-governmental organizations which are heavily promoting abortion in the third world are more interested in culling people than in reducing the relatively far smaller figure of deaths through unsafe and illegal abortions."

From the New York Times.

June 6, 2007

By NICHOLAS WADE

In a surprising advance that could sidestep the ethical debates surrounding stem cell biology, researchers have come much closer to a major goal of regenerative medicine, the conversion of a patient’s cells into specialized tissues that might replace those lost to disease.

The advance is an easy-to-use technique for reprogramming a skin cell of a mouse back to the embryonic state. Embryonic cells can be induced in the laboratory to develop into many of the body’s major tissues.

Euthanasia

De Volkskrant leads with a report on euthanasia and palliative care, which states that palliative sedation is being used on patients too early. Palliative sedation is supposed to be applied to terminally ill patients who are expected to die naturally within two weeks. They are given medication which makes them sleep during the final phase of their lives.

WASHINGTON, May 21 — For many years, the political struggle over abortion was often framed as a starkly binary choice: the interest of the woman, advocated by supporters of abortion rights, versus the interest of the fetus, advocated by opponents of abortion.

But last month’s Supreme Court decision upholding the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act marked a milestone for a different argument advanced by anti-abortion leaders, one they are increasingly making in state legislatures around the country. They say that abortion, as a rule, is not in the best interest of the woman; that women are often misled or ill-informed about its risks to their own physical or emotional health; and that the interests of the pregnant woman and the fetus are, in fact, the same.

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The Washington Post

By Andrew J. Imparato and Anne C. Sommers
Sunday, May 20, 2007; B07

In its preamble, the recently unveiled U.N. Convention on the Rights of Persons With Disabilities recognizes "the inherent dignity and worth and equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family as the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world."

We wonder what Oliver Wendell Holmes would have said about that.

This month marked the 80th anniversary of the disgraceful Supreme Court decision in Buck v. Bell, which upheld Virginia's involuntary sterilization laws. In his majority opinion, Holmes declared: "It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind . . . Three generations of imbeciles is enough."

DAILY MAIL (London)

May 15, 2007 Tuesday

YOU CAN'T CALL THIS MERCY KILLING -- IT'S LEGALISED MURDER IN ITS CRUELLEST FORM

By A. N. Wilson

WHEN October comes, euthanasia will have become legal in this country. If that comes as a shock to you, it came as a surprise to me too.

Only when reading the report in yesterday's Daily Mail did I realise that legislation -- at present passing through Parliament -- is precisely a licence for families to kill their sick relations by the slow death of thirst and starvation.

Astonishingly, this radical departure from the existing state of the law is being brought in under the 'negative resolution procedure'. This means that the measure will pass into law automatically, and without any debate whatsoever, unless an MP chooses to put a spanner in the works and demand such a debate.

Let us hope that there is at least one backbencher in the House of Commons who does bring this urgent matter to debate, so that, even if the deplorable new measure is eventually carried, it has at least been discussed before passing into statute.

Daily Mail (London)
April 17, 2007 Tuesday

INCREASING numbers of doctors are refusing to carry out abortions, forcing the NHS to pay private hospitals for the procedures. Here, Dr Robert Hardie, a former GP, explains why he resigned rather than refer women for terminations.

NO GP should go against their conscience. So says the General Medical Council. If only the Department of Health understood this ethical stance, the droves of young doctors now refusing to perform abortions would not have to worry about losing their jobs for sticking to their principles.

By Wesley J. Smith

From The Weekly Standard.

SENATORS DIANNE FEINSTEIN and Orrin Hatch have just introduced Senate Bill 812, which explicitly legalizes human cloning and--since a shortage of human eggs is currently impeding human cloning research (one egg is needed for each attempt at cloning)--the bill also authorizes researchers to pay women to undergo egg procurement.

And if the purpose of the legislation wasn't bad enough, there's its name: Feinstein and Hatch mendaciously named S. 812 the "Human Cloning Ban and Stem Cell Protection Act of 2007."

How can a bill to legalize human cloning be instead called a ban? Through the time-tested method of disingenuous legislating--the bogus definition. Here's a rarely discussed truth: Key words and terms in legislation mean only what a bill's authors say they mean, rather than their actual definitions. If a dung beetle was defined in legislation as a butterfly, for the purposes of that bill, the dung beetle would be a butterfly. Which is essentially what S. 812 does. It defines the term "human cloning" inaccurately and unscientifically so that Feinstein and Hatch can pretend their bill will outlaw human cloning.

The European Court of Human Rights on Tuesday awarded a 36-year-old Polish woman 25,000 euros, about $33,000, in damages after doctors refused to grant her permission to terminate her pregnancy despite serious risk to her eyesight.

After her delivery, her eyesight deteriorated considerably, and she has been declared significantly disabled.

The court ruled that Poland had no effective legal framework for pregnant women to assert their right to abortion on medical grounds.

The ruling means that Poland will have to introduce clearer guidelines on abortion on medical grounds. As a member of the Council of Europe, Poland is obliged to abide by the court's judgments.

The Polish government has three months to appeal the verdict.