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

By: Wesley J. Smith

According to a UK study, the concerted drive to prenatally detect Down syndrome or other anomalies through genetic testing aimed at eugenic abortion is also causing the deaths of babies who have no disabling condition through miscarriage. From the story:

Two healthy babies are miscarried for every three Down's Syndrome babies that are detected and prevented from being born, research has suggested...

DSEI chief executive Frank Buckley and Professor Sue Buckley, who conducted their research using a database at London's Bart's Hospital, also point out that 95 per cent of women deemed to be high risk by the blood test will not be carrying a baby with the disorder, yet most go on to have the tests.

"The screening for Down's syndrome has consequences for every pregnant woman," they said. "You cannot look at it as just a search-and-destroy mission focused on babies with Down's alone."

Although they admit that their ratio is only an estimate, they are backed by a number of independent experts who fear inexperienced practitioners may also be to blame. Professor Kypros Nicolaides, head of the Harris Birthright Centre at King's College Hospital in south London, said the loss of healthy babies was "completely unacceptable"

"Search and destroy," yup that's a good description of an ugly process, with the unaffected babies apparently the collateral damage.

Here's an idea: How about not trying to destroy these babies in the first place and then the others will be safe, too.

By Rita L. Marker

Oregon seems to have found a surefire way to lower health care costs: Tell the patient you'll pay for drugs that will end her life, but not those that would extend her life.  Here's how it works:

• The oral requests, which must be separated by fifteen days, do not need to be witnessed. In fact, they don't even have to be made in person. They could be made by phone - even left on the physician's answering device. The written request must be witnessed, but it could be mailed or faxed to the doctor.

• The law states that the physician is to "recommend that the patient notify next of kin," but family notification is not required. It is entirely possible that the first time family members find out that a loved one was contemplating suicide could be after the death has occurred.

• Doctors can facilitate the suicides of mentally-ill or depressed patients without any prior counseling being provided. A psychiatric evaluation is required only if the physician believes that the mental illness or depression is causing impaired judgment. According to Oregon's latest official report, not one patient who died after taking the lethal drugs was referred for counseling prior to being given the prescription.

When all is said and done, it is not the intent of assisted-suicide supporters that matters.   Instead, it is the law's deadly content and the inevitable price that we would all pay for health care cost containment - Oregon style.

From the Daily Telegraph,

18 July 2008

A nurse has been cautioned but allowed to continue practising after she gave a chemical abortion to the wrong woman.

Ann Downer, 44, gave the drugs to a woman who had only gone into the clinic for an initial consultation following a mix-up over patient names.

She had not decided to have a termination when Downer gave her a dose of Misoprostol at the Calthorpe Clinic in Edgbaston, Birmingham.

Downer failed to check the patient's personal details to verify her identity before she administered the drug.

An NMC spokesman said the committee was told that the clinic's usual practice was to only call out first names of patients to protect their confidentiality while in the waiting room.

Once the patient was in a private room, other details, like their full name, date of birth and address, were checked to make sure they were the person the nurse was expecting.

The patient was only due to have an initial consultation, which would have involved a consultation with a doctor, blood tests and a scan.

The second stage - in which Misoprostol was administered - would only follow if the patient and doctor gave consent.

When staff realised what had happened the distraught woman, referred to as Patient A in the hearing, was called back to the clinic "in pain".

Doctors subsequently advised her to undergo a surgical abortion.

Downer should have given the drugs to a second patient, Patient B, who was in the later stages of a termination.

Patient A attended the clinic on October 13, 2006.

Patient B, who had the same first name, was due to have the drugs for the second stage of her medical abortion - only undertaken on women who have been pregnant for less than nine weeks.

Patients at the first stage are given a tablet of Mifepristone to swallow, which stops the growth of the foetus.

At the second stage, women are given Misoprostol to complete the abortion.

Nailah Mears, for the NMC, told the panel Downer was in charge of treating patients at the second stage when the mix-up was made.

She said: "During the course of the morning, it was discovered Miss Downer had mistakenly administered the second visit treatment to Patient A instead of Patient B.

"The registrant failed to carry out proper identity checks, and as such did not realise the treatment was being given to the wrong patient."

Miss Mears also told the panel that Patient A was over the nine week gestation period limit for giving such early abortion tablets.

She said: "Once the mistake came to light, Patient A was asked to return to the clinic and was later transferred to Birmingham Women's Hospital.

"She was given an ultrasound, and that ultrasound showed that Patient A was over the nine week gestation period.

"That is very significant in determining whether the early medical abortion was appropriate. It was not appropriate in this case."

Nurse manager Evlyn Mike told the hearing: "They telephoned Patient A and asked her to return to the clinic. She did return. Apparently she was in pain, and obviously very upset."

Downer, from Browns Green, Birmingham, was not present at the hearing.

She had admitted giving the abortion drug to the wrong patient but had denied failing to obtain Patient A's consent to give her the drug.

Downer will have a caution on her record for the next three years.

The Conduct and Competence Committee, which met in London, said she can continue to practise but will have to declare the caution if she applies for a different job.

From the Daily Telegraph

14 July 2008

Sir- Sam Leith's article (Comment, July 12) is another depressing example of the absolutism of so-called liberals. They are liberal only with beliefs similar to theirs.

Surely, the point at issue in the case of the Islington registrar is that of respect for conscience. Such respect has for long been the hallmark of civilised nations and has especially characterised British society. Conscientious objection has a recognised place in the context of war. People cannot be forced, against their conscience, to participate in armed conflict, although, of course, they must contribute to society in other ways. Would Mr Leith remove this right, especially if it is, as it often is, based on religious belief?

I see the future for legislation very differently from Mr Leith. There must be more, not less, recognition of conscience in public law, whether that is on questions of adoption and of government support for the excellent work done by faith-based adoption agencies, or of participation in recent innovations such as civil partnership ceremonies, or, indeed, in carrying out certain kinds of medical research or procedures which are contrary to people's beliefs about the sanctity of the human person - and the public good.

It is such respect for conscience that should be at the heart of government policy regarding faith communities, rather than ill-conceived and misguided notions about the recognition of the religious law of particular communities in terms of the law of the land.

Michael Nazir-Ali, Bishop of Rochester

You can find this online at: http://www.c-fam.org/publications/id.650/pub_detail.asp

By Susan Yoshihara, Ph.D.

Part I: Power, Money, and Science Unite to Exterminate the World's Poor

(NEW YORK - C-FAM) A book recently published by Harvard University Press explains how eugenics united some of the richest and most powerful elites of the twentieth century into a movement "to remake humanity by controlling the population of the world," answering to no one and bringing untold misery upon the world's poor. The book, "Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population," was written by Columbia University historian Matthew Connelly and shows why today's reproductive rights advocates are "faithfully reciting a eugenic catechism without the faintest idea where it comes from or where it can lead."

In 1952, at a secret, invitation-only gathering in Colonial Williamsburg, John D. Rockefeller III brought together what would become the modern population control establishment. Setting the agenda for the following decades were the heads of the United States Atomic Energy Commission, National Academy of Sciences, and top scientists "from embryology to economics," including past and present Nobel Prize winners.

Catholic Medical Association spokesman says, "This would spell the death of the rights of conscience"

 By Hilary White
 
LONDON, July 4, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) - The British Medical Association's (BMA) policy-making body will consider a proposal to remove the rights of conscience that allow doctors to refuse to commit or refer women for abortions. The proposal will be considered at the BMA's upcoming Annual General Meeting, 7-10 July.
 
Dr. Tony Cole, of the Catholic Medical Association, said, "This would spell the death of the rights of conscience. This takes away the right of conscience already guaranteed by statute. This is open to legal challenge."
 
Dr. Cole's comments were supported by Dr. Majid Khatme of the Islamic Medical Association, who said Muslim doctors were "very unhappy" about the scheme. "You cannot force me, as a doctor, to do things against my conscience. Something very dangerous is going on," he said.
 
The motion was proposed for the BMA's forthcoming Annual General Meeting by Dr. Evan Harris, the Liberal Democrat MP and medical doctor who is known to colleagues as "Dr. Death" for his eager support of unlimited abortion and euthanasia. Dr. Harris is a member of the British Medical Association (BMA) Medical Ethics Committee.
 
Dr. Harris's motion proposes to change the rules so that doctors with conscientious objection to abortion may not see patients with unplanned pregnancies. The motion would force them to refer women wanting abortions to other doctors. To do this, it proposes to reinterpret the General Medical Council guidance on personal belief and clinical practice.
 
Catholic doctors said they will argue at the meeting that it would be unlawful to deny the right of conscientious objection that is enshrined in Section 4 of Britain's 1967 Abortion Act. Dr. Cole added, "A doctor whose conditions of service (were) affected by this might be able to seek redress through the courts."
 
Cardiff Archbishop Peter Smith, the head of the Department of Christian Responsibility and Citizenship of the Catholic Bishops' Conference of England and Wales, said, "The right of conscience is a fundamental human right. The doctor's right to act according to his conscience remains firmly embedded both in medical practice and in the law."
 
The British Medical Association is one of the most ardent supporters of abortion in the UK. At last year's conference, the membership at the annual conference voted 67 percent to 33 percent to remove the necessity for two doctors to sign approval for abortions.
 
Dr. Harris also tabled an amendment to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill, that moves on to the final Report Stage in Parliament next week, to remove the need for two doctors to sign consent to an abortion.

By Hilary White

LONDON, July 3, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) - Doubtless in anticipation of the apparently imminent passage of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill, the UK's embryo research authority has granted a license to scientists to begin work to create human/pig cloned hybrid embryos. The Labour government's proposed bill, however, would, if passed into law, do away with the necessity of researchers even asking for individual licenses.

The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) granted the license to the Clinical Sciences Research Institute, University of Warwick, who want to make the embryos in order to produce embryonic stem cells.

Professor Justin St. John told the Daily Telegraph: "We will take skin cells from patients who have a mutation for certain kinds of heart disease...and put them into pig eggs after their chromosomes have been removed. We will then make embryos so that we can attempt to derive embryonic stem cells which will allow us to study some of the molecular mechanisms associated with these heart diseases."

The researchers say they hope to use the cells to learn the origins and workings of certain types of heart disease and provide models for drug testing. "We will effectively be creating and studying these diseases in a dish," Professor St. John said.

The initial stages of the research will be focused on learning to create human/animal hybrid clones more efficiently.

The Christian Legal Centre responded to the announcement with a warning that this was only a "foretaste of things to come." Andrea Minichiello Williams, Director of the Christian Legal Centre, also argued that the 1990 Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act does not give the HFEA the power to grant such licences.

"The HFEA has not met the 1990 Act's stringent standards for granting licences, in as much as these licences are neither 'necessary' nor 'desirable'," said Mrs Williams.

"No significant advances have been made in embryonic stem cell research, while great advances in disease treatment have been seen in research on adult stem cells and umbilical cord blood cells," she said.

"When other viable alternatives to such controversial research already exist, such as human induced pluripotent stem cells, then it cannot be claimed that such new research is either necessary or desirable."

The Society for the Protection of Unborn Children (SPUC) have called on supporters to contact their MPs to defeat the HFE bill, currently moving into its final stages in Parliament.

Mrs. Williams added, "When we are talking about making human pig clones, we should lament our dulling of conscience as a society which permits such embryos to exist. This underscores the deplorable state of bioethics in which the UK now finds itself."

London, England (LifeNews.com) -- After medical associations in the United States caused headaches for pro-life doctors by potentially approving a policy requiring abortion referrals for accreditation, now pro-life physicians in England are concerned. Dr. Evan Harris, the pro-abortion MP and member of the British Medical Association Medical Ethics Committee, has tabled a motion for the BMA's forthcoming Annual General Meeting July 7-10. According to the leading British pro-life group SPUC, the Society for the Protection of the Unborn, Harris's motion would marginalize doctors with a conscientious objection to abortion, specifically by effectively barring them from seeing patients with unplanned pregnancies. The Christian Medical Fellowship led by Dr. Peter Saunders, has published a comprehensive analysis of Harris's motion and his parliamentary agenda for more abortion, according to SPUC director John Smeaton. Meanwhile, two medical students went skydiving on Saturday to raise awareness of the pressure on medical staff to take part in abortion against their consciences. Siobhan Fearon and Abigail Smith, both 19, did the jump parachute jump in Lancashire, England. Smith recently wrote, “I had to help a close friend deal with the after-effects of an abortion. Seeing first-hand the impact an abortion has on such a young life has really challenged my views on the procedure. It has made me more determined to help women make sure that they make the right decision for them and their unborn child when faced with crisis pregnancies in my career." The event will raise money for SPUC through sponsorship.

From Wesley J. Smith

Big money is out there for the brightest minds to shove utilitarianism and the goal of human enhancement down our throats. Australian Professor Julian Savulescu (now in the UK)--who I have seen debate and believe me he is one scary cat--has just picked up an 800 thousand pound grant to begin a eugenics, er neuroethics, center at Oxford. From Bioedge's report:

Professor Savulescu said: “Neuroscience studies the brain and mind, and thereby some of the most profound aspects of human existence. In the last decade, advances in imaging and manipulating the brain have raised ethical challenges, particularly about the moral limits of the use of such technology, leading to the new discipline of neuroethics.

Professor Savulescu has become notorious for arguing that we should genetically enhance the human species by improving IQ, behaviour, mood, character and morality. “Biological manipulation to increase opportunity is ethical,� he once said. If we have an obligation to treat and prevent disease, we have an obligation to try to manipulate these characteristics to give an individual the best opportunity of the best life.� He has even argued that parents have a moral responsibility to select the best children they could have. It will be interesting to see what sort of ideas about brain manipulation will emerge from the well-funded new centre

So, they make up a new field whole cloth dedicated to destroying universal human equality and the intrinsic worth of merely being human and the money comes pouring in. And with the money and the prestigious academic affiliation comes awesome power to influence young and bright minds who are society's leaders of tomorrow. And, being very bright, they see which way the financial winds are blowing and what they need to believe--or say they believe-in order to climb the ladder of success.

What chance do you think there would be for someone as bright as Savulescu, and with the same credentials, to receive such major funding and Oxford offices if he held opposite views? Good luck with that and don't call us, we'll call you.

But that's the high academy/foundation nexus today. And these folk are determined to tear down what they consider the ancien regime. And unless "the folk" stand up to it, the forces that be will bulldoze the very concept of universal human rights directly into a landfill--claiming as they go that they are the "enlightened" ones, the "brights."

This is exactly how it was with the first eugenics movement. The people who paid were not the connected but the powerless. And those who urged their sterilization and even killing were at the top of the social/academic/political/legal and even liberal religious heaps.

Bitter? A bit, I admit. Scared? A lot.

From Wesley J. Smith, 18 June 2008.

I have been warning and warning that a virulent anti-humanism is becoming rampant on the left side of the scale, and even within the MSM. A site on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (roughly akin to the BBC) Website--Planet Slayer--specifically, "Professor Schpinkee's Greenhouse Calculator" tells you to enter and "find out when you should die!" I kid you not.

Hit the start button and find out when you should become six feet under (I assume cremation is worse than burial for global warming). I answered the questions roughly, and found I should have died at age 7.4. The pig (me) blew up in a bloody mess.

Realize that this is being sold to children and it is shameful and profoundly nihilistic. And it illustrates again how profoundly anti-human and pro death certain aspects of our culture are becoming.

As Andrew Bolt, a blogger for the Herald Sun noted:

What a lovely insight into the green philosophy. Children should die to save the planet. Scott [Bolt's son], I calculated, should have died at age 4.2.

A little joke, you will say. A mere attention grabber in a good cause. Trouble is, though, that there really is an insanely anti-human bent to deep green preaching on global warming, and there really are believers who feel only too keenly the planet is doomed by our sin, and humans must vanish.

Take the influential Gaia preacher Professor James Lovelock, whose latest book, The Revenge Of Gaia, calls for nine-tenths of humanity to vanish to "save" the planet from warming. Or hear the ABC's Ockham's Razor air a lecture by a former academic arguing we must "put something in the water, a virus that would be specific to the human reproductive system and would make a substantial proportion of the population infertile."

And see the lengths to which some true believers now go. There's Toni Vernelli, from animal liberation group PETA, who aborted her baby because "it would have been immoral to give birth to a child that I felt strongly would only be a burden to the world." There's Sarah Irving, from Ethical Consumer magazine, who sterilised herself because it "was the most environmentally friendly thing I could do" in a warming world.

In "The Silence of the Asparagus" I warned:

What is clear, however, is that Switzerland's enshrining of "plant dignity" is a symptom of a cultural disease that has infected Western civilization, causing us to lose the ability to think critically and distinguish serious from frivolous ethical concerns. It also reflects the triumph of a radical anthropomorphism that views elements of the natural world as morally equivalent to people.

Why is this happening? Our accelerating rejection of the Judeo-Christian world view, which upholds the unique dignity and moral worth of human beings, is driving us crazy. Once we knocked our species off its pedestal, it was only logical that we would come to see fauna and flora as entitled to rights.

And once we see "the planet" as personal, it is easier to see humans as the vermin good only for eradication.

From Wesley J. Smith, 18 June 2008.

The doctors in the Winnipeg Samuel Golubchuk case are intent on showing his family and society who is boss. Two more have resigned rather than provide care. From the story:

CBC News has learned that two other doctors--Bojan Paunovic and David Easton--have also said they will no longer care for Golubchuk.
"What I can tell you is that there are three critical care doctors who have recently resigned from the [intensive care unit] shift schedule at the Grace Hospital," said Heidi Graham, spokeswoman for the Winnipeg Regional Health Authority. The WRHA is working with other physicians to ensure the hospital can continue to provide critical care despite the loss of the three doctors, Graham said.

A few thoughts: First, this seems a power play to me--even though I have no doubt that the physicians sincerely believe that maintaining Mr. Golubchuk is the wrong way to go. Second, in their determination, they are, in effect, abandoning other patients in their care. Third, the court is precisely where this case belongs. If wanted life-sustaining treatment is really so egregious that it is torture--rather than merely a matter of a profound disagreement over values--doctors and hospital bioethics committees should have to prove it in an open court with full rights of due process and appeal for the patient/family. Moreover, I think the hospital should pay the legal expenses of the patient/family otherwise it becomes David versus Goliath.

And now, let's ponder this paradox. The Bioethics and Medical Establishments generally insist on the right to withhold wanted life sustaining treatment based on their views about the quality of the patient's life and/or the proper use of the resources involved. In contrast, they also insist that doctors and other medical professionals appalled by birth control, Plan B, RU 486, abortion, or (eventually) assisted suicide should not be able to opt out based on their moral principles because patients have a right to these services. Yet, the futile care cases involve life and death while the others usually are elective in the sense that there are not lethal consequences for the denial of services.

In reality, it isn't a paradox because the medical issues are actually the fronts for the real contest, which is about determining the first principle moral values that will govern general society--as, when I think about it, are many if not most of the issues that we discuss here at SHS.

From Wesley J. Smith, 15 June 2008.

So many of these adult stem cell success stories come to me now, that I am unable to post them all here at SHS. Two recent examples: A new adult stem cell therapy is successfully restoring vision to people with chemical injuries and a genetic defect that causes impaired vision. From the story:

Using stem cells from tissue donors, surgeons grew the cells in the laboratory before transplanting them onto the patients' eyes.

Dr Julie Daniels, who is leading the research team, will present the results at a conference on regenerative medicine being held in Welwyn Garden City, Hertfordshire, today. She said: "Before the surgery the patients were barely able to recognise when someone was waving a hand in front of their face but we have restored their vision to the point they can read three to four lines down the eye chart."

Nineteen patients have now received the treatment, known as limbal stem cell therapy, at Moorfields Eye Hospital.

Meanwhile, scientists have discovered a molecule that may one day lead to important regenerative techniques with a patient's own nerve stem cells. From the story:

Inspired by a chance discovery during another experiment, researchers at UT Southwestern Medical Center have created a small molecule that stimulates nerve stem cells to begin maturing into nerve cells in culture.

This finding might someday allow a person's own nerve stem cells to be grown outside the body, stimulated into maturity, and then re-implanted as working nerve cells to treat various diseases, the researchers said. "This provides a critical starting point for neuro-regenerative medicine and brain cancer chemotherapy," said Dr. Jenny Hsieh, assistant professor of molecular biology and senior author of the paper, which appears online today and in the June 17 issue of Nature Chemical Biology

This is the opposite of no news being good news. With adult stem cell research, too much news to fit manageably within a blog format is very good news, indeed.

From Wesley J. Smith, 13 June 2008.

Cloning reduces procreation to a matter of mere manufacture and transforms human life into an instrumentalized natural resource, whether that life is a nascent cloned embryo created and destroyed for its stem cells or women exploited for their eggs--since an egg is required for each cloning attempt.

One reason the human cloning agenda has stalled is the lack of human eggs. I have been warning that researchers are more than willing to risk the health, fertility--and even the lives--of women to obtain these eggs, and if volunteers won't put themselves at risk, then they will promote an egg commodities market. And now in Nature News, we see that coming to pass. From the story:

US stem-cell researchers are calling for changes to state laws that prohibit compensating women who donate eggs for research. The laws, in leading stem-cell research states such as Massachusetts and California, are crippling the promising field of ‘therapeutic cloning’ that could produce useful embryonic stem-cell lines for studying various human diseases, they say.

It took Kevin Eggan and Douglas Melton, of Harvard University's Stem Cell Institute, two years and US $100,000 in local advertising to secure a single egg donor for their attempt to develop embryonic stem-cell lines to model diseases such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. The group, which obtained fewer than ten eggs, completed its experiments early this year, Eggan announced last month at a meeting of the Society for the Study of Reproduction in Kona, Hawaii. They are not yet ready to discuss results.

The US National Academy of Sciences (NAS) guidelines barring compensation were set in part to protect poor people from being exploited by labs that might offer large sums of money--along the lines of rules barring compensation for organ donation. But Alta Charo, a lawyer and bioethicist at the University of Wisconsin Law School in Madison, who liaised with the NAS committee that set donor-compensation guidelines in 2005, says the move was as much political as ethical. In California, supporters of Proposition 71, which allows funding for stem-cell and cloning research in the absence of federal funding, adopted compensation prohibition in part, Charo claims, "to assuage a fringe group of the women's movement" that was aligned against the assisted-reproduction community.

In other words, all of those assurances about protecting women are nothing more than temporary expedients that will be swept away as soon as it is deemed politically feasible. And if the assurances made in this area are nothing but cow manure, so too are the equally oleaginous promises to limit the lives of cloned embryos to 14 days, and to never engage in fetal farming, and to never want reproductive cloning. The mendacity of the pro cloning advocates in establishing "self limiting"--but really made to be broken--"ethical" guidelines makes me sick.

Next stop will be the developing world and biological colonialism. We need to not only bar buying and selling eggs for research in this country, but also have international protocols to govern the matter.

From Wesley J. Smith, 17 June 2008.

Apparently many doctors don't tell cancer patients when they enter the terminal stage of the disease. From the story:

Only one-third of terminally ill cancer patients in a new, federally funded study said their doctors had discussed end-of-life care. Surprisingly, patients who had these talks were no more likely to become depressed than those who did not, the study found. They were less likely to spend their final days in hospitals, tethered to machines. They avoided costly, futile care. And their loved ones were more at peace after they died.

The story proceeds to inaccurately describe AB 2747 as being about making sure people are told when they are dying when its real purpose is to open the door to backdoor assisted suicide via dehydration and terminal sedation, and thereby corrupt palliative care properly understood. Also, the bill defines terminal illness as one year to live--a time so far out that a doctor could be wildly inaccurate. But I have discussed that bill, its ultimate purpose, and media ignorance and biases before--and will again. So, for now, let's focus on the primary thrust of the story.

This is a sensitive issue, but patients deserve the truth without taking away hope in the understanding that there are few sure things in life--even with cancer. My dad's doctor told me and I told him--which for us was a very good way to go because we were so tight. His cancer was terminal but there was a small chance for life extenstion with chemo. Dad took the option and had a very good year as a result--which the doctor had not expected--during which he traveled and enjoyed life. We put him into hospice as he entered his final few months of decline.

An even better example: A friend of mine had a seizure. It was caused by lung cancer that had metastasized to the brain. The cancer was inoperable other than to remove the lung. He was told he had 3 months to live--eight years ago. He lived because he took every aggressive measure he could--and he believes, because of a whole lot of prayer.

On the other hand, as the story notes, not being candid impedes the patient from receiving proper hospice care opportunities. Indeed, I have another friend who did not get into hospice until two weeks before he died because the doctor refused to tell him it was in a terminal stage--and he only got into hospice after his wife forced a proper referral after I threw a fit about the unalleviated pain he was in.

Part of the problem, I think, is our hospice system. For those of us in the USA, hospice is often perceived as a kind of "abandon hope all ye who enter here" matter because in order to receive the services, patients must eschew all curative and most life sustaining treatment. When I interviewed Dame Cicely Saunders, the founder of modern hospice, she told me that was a profound weakness of the American system. In the UK, such a choice does not have to be made and people more readily enter hospice care knowing that if they want that last shot of chemo, they can have it (leaving aside for the moment, the problems with the NHS).

If we want more people in hospice, if we want to give them hope while still being able to care for them best when they are dying, a good way would be to change our hospice approach. Then perhaps doctors would be less reticent to tell patients that it looks like their time has come.

From Wesley J. Smith

A cancer patient killed himself a day after being told he had been refused a wonder drug by his local primary care trust.Terminally-ill Albert Baxter, 75, committed suicide hours after learning he had been turned down for a drug which could have prolonged his life and shrunk his tumour.

In desperation, the cancer sufferer offered to pay for the drug, only to be told that he would have to foot the bill for his entire treatment which he could not afford. The pensioner, who was diagnosed with renal cancer in January 2007, had been told by his oncologist, Dr Fiona McKinna that the drug Sutent was his only hope...

But when he learned that his appeal had been rejected he returned to his home in Eastbourne, East Sussex. He was found dead the next day by his partner with a bin liner over his head in June last year. His partner of 30 years, Barrie Curryer, 70, a retired nurse, hit out at the postcode lottery for cancer treatment.He said: "What really upset him was that he worked all his life and paid into the health system and was refused treatment."

From Wesley J. Smith

ALS, called Lou Gehrig's disease in the USA and motor neurone disease in the UK, is the bloody flag often waved by euthanasia activists as a reason to legalize mercy killing. "Of course he wants to die," they will say. and then some will assert falsely and cruelly that death from ALS will agonizing by choking on saliva, even though patients receiving proper care do not die choking.

My last hospice patient died peacefully in his sleep from ALS. While I was with him, euthanasia was in the news with ALS patients featured on ABC Nightline as wanting euthanasia. Bob was fit to be tied! After being suicidal for more than two years--because he felt so abandoned by his friends, not due to the disease--he told me that his ending period was the best time of his life. (Yet, had assisted suicide been legal, he would have probably missed the good times--or so he told me. But people from Compassion and Choices say that people like Bob can't commit suicide because their lives are already over.) And he is not the only ALS patient I have known with that incredibly positive attitude.

Now, there is some journal evidence that ALS patients quality of life is not unremitting horror. From the story:

Although an outside observer would have expected ALS patients to be depressed, as the disease is so serious, this was only the case for 10% of patients. This means that the proportion of depressive disorders is only slightly greater than in the overall population.

In view of the public discussion on euthanasia and assisted suicide, the authors think it essential that there should be a scientific investigation of the quality of life, as seen by the patient. The present studies show that the quality of life of patients with a fatal degenerative disease does not necessarily have to differ from that of healthy subjects.

In an accompanying editorial, Professor Hans Förstl points out the significance of these studies for the discussion of measures to shorten life. These could no longer be simply justified by saying that the patient had to be freed from his suffering. Förstl commented that the suffering is seen by the observer and not felt by the patient.

Not that the pro euthanasia types will care. For them, it's an ideological quest, not an empirically driven cause.

'To say, we'll pay for you to die, but not pay for you to live, it's cruel'

WorldNetDaily

State officials have offered a lung cancer patient the option of having the Oregon Health Plan, set up in 1994 to ration health care, pay for an assisted suicide but not for the chemotherapy prescribed by her physician.

The story appears to be a happy ending for Barbara Wagner, who has been notified by a drug manufacturer that it will provide the expensive medication, estimated to cost $4,000 a month, for the first year and then allow her to apply for further treatment, according to a report in the Eugene Register-Guard.

But the word from the state was coverage for palliative care, which would include the state's assisted suicide program, would be allowed but not coverage for the cancer treatment drugs.

"To say to someone, we'll pay for you to die, but not pay for you to live, it's cruel," Wagner told the newspaper. "I get angry. Who do they think they are?"

She said she was devastated when the state health program refused coverage for Tarceva, the drug her doctor ordered for treatment of her lung cancer.

The refusal came in an unsigned letter from LIPA, the company that runs the state program in that part of Oregon.

"We had no intent to upset her, but we do need to point out the options available to her under the Oregon Health Plan," Dr. John Sattenspiel, senior medical director for LIPA, told the newspaper.

"I understand the way it was interpreted. I'm not sure how we can lift that. The reality is, at some level (doctor-assisted suicide) could be considered as a palliative or comfort care measure."

The 64-year-old Wagner lives in a low-income apartment in Springfield with her dog, the newspaper said.

State officials say the Oregon Health Plan prioritizes treatments, with diagnoses and ailments deemed the most important, such as pregnancy, childbirth and preventive care for children at the top of the list. Other treatments rank below, officials said.

"We can't cover everything for everyone," Dr. Walter Shaffer, a spokesman for the state Division of Medical Assistance Programs, told the paper. "Taxpayer dollars are limited for publicly funded programs. We try to come up with policies that provide the most good for the most people."

He said many cancer treatments are a high priority, but others reflect the "desire on the part of the framers of this list to not cover treatments that are futile."

Wagner, however, is ending up with the treatment needed when her lung cancer, in remission for two years, returned.

She reported a representative for the pharmaceutical company called and notified her the drug would be provided for at least the first year.

"We have been warning for years that this was a possibility in Oregon," said the "Bioethics Pundit" on the Bioethics blog. "Medicaid is rationed, meaning that some treatments are not covered. But assisted suicide is always covered."

"This isn't the first time this has happened either," the blogger wrote. "A few years ago a patient who needed a double organ transplant was denied the treatment but would have been eligible for state-financed assisted suicide. But not to worry. Just keep repeating the mantra: There are no abuses with Oregon's assisted suicide law. There are no abuses. There are no abuses!

Sunday Times review by Dominic Lawson

May 18, 2008

The population-control freaks are back in town. Two factors have given the neo-Malthusians hope that their bleak world view and dismal remedies might once again become intellectually fashionable.

The first is the notion that the most efficient way for mankind to cut its carbon emissions is not to breathe at all - or at least to do so in much smaller numbers. The second is the recent rapid increase in food prices worldwide - which the neo-Malthusians, as ever, do not believe is capable of being addressed by either the market or agricultural technology. These days, even apparently liberal commentators in the mainstream press write effusively in admiration of China's coercive one-child policy.

Against this background, the publication of Matthew Connelly's book is not just perfectly timed: it is essential. The assistant professor of history at Columbia University has delivered a devastating account of the population-control movement; he demonstrates, detail by shocking detail, how a movement that believed it was acting from the highest humanitarian ideals became responsible for callous abuses of human rights on a global scale, ruining millions of lives in a grotesque eugenic experiment.

From The Times

June 14, 2008

A loophole in the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill could permit some reproductive cloning without the need for fresh primary legislation, the Government has admitted.

While the update to fertility law maintains the ban on creating cloned babies, it has inadvertently made it much simpler for ministers to overturn it. If a reproductive cloning technique could be shown to be suitable for preventing the birth of children suffering from a rare type of genetic disease, it could be cleared for clinical use without changing the statute book.

Ministers would simply have to issue new regulations that permit this application of cloning. These would then need to be approved by a simple vote of both Houses of Parliament, instead of the laborious primary legislation required at present.

Reproductive cloning involves placing the nucleus of an adult cell into an empty egg, and then implanting the cloned embryo into a woman's womb. Any resulting baby would be genetically identical to the DNA donor. The procedure is banned under the 2001 Reproductive Cloning Act which was introduced because of scientists' fears about safety and widespread ethical concerns. This law will be repealed by the HFE Bill, which contains fresh provisions that prohibit such cloning.

The Department of Health, however, has accepted that the legislation contains a flaw that could in theory make it easier for the ban to be lifted. Dawn Primarolo, the Health Minister, insisted in a debate during the Bill's committee stage that the Government has no intention of using this new power under any circumstances. She added that as new regulations would have to be approved by Parliament, there will still be democratic safeguards against cloning.

Opposition MPs, however, have expressed concern at the watering down of the cloning ban. Evan Harris, the Liberal Democrat science spokesman, said: “There is no prospect of this Parliament, or future Parliaments, passing regulations that would allow human reproductive cloning. But it would clearly be better, for the sake of consistency and reassurance, for the Bill to do what we all thought it would do, which is totally to ban human reproductive cloning in primary legislation.” He said it would be relatively simple for the Government to redraft the Bill to exclude all possibilities.

The problem has arisen because of clauses that regulate a new approach to preventing diseases caused by faulty mitochondria - cellular “batteries” that provide energy. The flaw in the legislation, first highlighted by a small pressure group called Human Genetics Alert, is that not all mitochondrial diseases are caused by defects in mitochondrial DNA. Some are caused by defects in the nucleus.

A spokesman for the Department of Health said: “This power can only be used to permit the practice of curing an embryo or an egg of a serious mitochondrial disease. The Government will not use this power to permit the practice of reproductive cloning.”

From Wesley J. Smith.

Adult Stem Cells Taken from Parkinson's Disease Patients Produce Dopamin Making Cells in Brains of Rats!

This could be the early stages of some very good news for Parkinson's patients. Two years ago SHS readers learned that human paralyzed spinal cord injury patients have had feeling restored with their own nasal mucosa stem cells--a story utterly ignored by an MSM that would have shouted the breakthrough from the rooftops if it had been done with embryonic stem cells. And now, another type of human nasal stem cells from human Parkinson's patients have dramatically improved the brain functioning of rats giving hope for an eventual Parkinson's treatment. From the story:

The Griffith University study published today in the journal Stem Cells found that adult stem cells harvested from the noses of Parkinson's patients gave rise to dopamine-producing brain cells when transplanted into the brain of a rat. The debilitating symptoms of Parkinson's such as loss of muscle control are caused by degeneration of cells that produce the essential chemical dopamine in the brain...

Project leader Professor Alan Mackay-Sim said researchers simulated Parkinson's symptoms in rats by creating lesions on one side of the brain similar to the damage Parkinson's causes in the human brain. "The lesions to one side of the brain made the rats run in circles," he said. "When stem cells from the nose of Parkinson's patients were cultured and injected into the damaged area the rats re-aquired the ability to run in a straight line. "All animals transplanted with the human cells had a dramatic reduction in the rate of rotation within just 3 weeks," he said.

What about the side effects we've seen with ES studies? More good news:

"This provided evidence the cells had differentiated to give rise to dopamine-producing neurons influenced by being in the environment of the brain. In-vitro tests also revealed the presence of dopamine."

"Significantly, none of the transplants led to formation of tumours or teratomas in the host rats as has occurred after embryonic stem cell transplantation in a similar model. He said like all stem cells, stem cells from the olfactory nerve in the nose are 'naïve' having not yet differentiated into which sort of cells they will give rise to. "They can still be influenced by the environment they are put into. In this case we transplanted them into the brain, where they were directed to give rise to dopamine producing brain cells."

The advantage of using a patient's own cells is that, unlike stem cells from a foreign embryo, they are not rejected by the patient's immune system, so patients are free from a lifetime of potentially dangerous immuno-suppressant drug therapy.

Now that's what I am talking about!