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

If you kill another human being, however much you love them, you should face a court of law

Shockingly, even today, it appears that the British courts can get it right. Their record in dealing with “mercy killings” provides evidence that we do not need the blunt instrument of a new law legalising euthanasia/assisted suicide.

Robert Cook, 60, suffocated his wife of 29 years with a plastic bag after she took an overdose. Vanessa Cook had worsening multiple sclerosis and had written of her wish to die. On Friday her husband received a 12-month suspended sentence, after pleading guilty to manslaughter on the ground of diminished responsibility. The judge called it an exceptional case. Last November Stephen Jobling, 52, was also given a 12-month suspended sentence after a bungled suicide pact with his ailing 72-year-old wife. Both survived taking a drug overdose.

Not all “mercy killings” are seen in the same way. Last May a jury found Frank Lund, 52, guilty of murder for smothering his wife. Patricia Lund, 62, suffered from depression and irritable bowel syndrome, but was not terminally ill. The judge called the case “highly unusual, if not unique” and imposed a tariff of only three years.

All of which proves that courts are still capable of deciding each case on its merits, taking a humane view of people whose lives are blighted by the suffering of loved ones while starting from the premise stated by the judge in the Lund case: “It is the duty of citizens in this country not to take any steps which might lead to the death of another citizen.”

The danger now is that a sweeping new law on euthanasia and assisted suicide would give the official nod to taking “any steps which might lead to the death of another citizen”. We could end up with Swiss-style euthanasia clinics, where Brits who are not dying but feeling depressed have already gone to kill themselves.

Even without a law, the trend for viewing euthanasia as legitimate can lead to tragic cases. A drunken Jennifer Allwood decided it would be a “mercy” to smother her 67-year-old cancer-stricken father - who didn't want to die. He fought back and survived. In December Allwood received a 12-month suspended sentence for attempted murder after the court decided she had not hastened his subsequent death. Her bitter family said she got off far too lightly: “It's just giving the impression that any relative who's got cancer, let's kill them off, it's quicker.”

That impression would be written into law by legalising assisted suicide. You don't have to be a religious nutter to oppose it. The libertarian Marxist in me is against giving the courts wider jurisdiction over our lives. But one thing that should still come before a judge and jury is the taking of a life, however much the accused loved the deceased. One universal right I don't want from the State is the right to kill my wife - or vice versa.

DEFENDING THE UNBORN: In Wilberforce’s day, defenders of the slave trade alleged that the British economy would collapse if it were ended.

In 1967, the fear of the “population bomb” persuaded many to accept the Abortion Act. Today, even with global warming to worry us, the realisation that we are attacking the unborn on a massive scale makes people uneasy.

Those who believe in the value of all human life are called many names, as Wilberforce was; “ghoulish” is new. But pretending that killing is curing is only effective for a limited time.

Dr Mary Knowles
Chair, Doctors who Respect Human Life
London SW3

Thursday, January 31, 2008

By Jo Steele

(Metro)

The debate over Britain's 24-week legal limit on abortions could be re-ignited after new research showed a dramatic improvement in survival rates for premature babies.

More than double the number are surviving now than 20 years ago at London's University College Hospital.

Only 32 per cent of babies born between 22 and 25 weeks survived in 1981 – that soared to 71 per cent in 2000.

On average around 50 per cent of Britain's most premature babies survive.

'This study is hugely important because it provides information on the survival rates that can be achieved with consistent levels of staffing and resources, and consistent ethical policies,' said Prof John Wyatt, of University College London.

The study also showed almost a quarter of very early babies were disabled.

When the abortion laws, introduced in 1967, were last amended 18 years ago premature babies had a survival rate of ten per cent.

Abortions may be performed up to 24 weeks if two doctors agree that continuing with the pregnancy involves a greater risk to the physical or mental health of the woman, or her existing children, than having a termination.

January 31, 2008

Volume 11, Number 7

By Samantha Singson

(NEW YORK — C-FAM) At the European Union in Brussels this week, C-FAM Senior Fellow Douglas A. Sylva testified before the European parliamentary committee on women’s rights and gender equality, urging them to resist efforts by pro-abortion advocates to manipulate international law. He warned that giving in to those who would abuse international law to advance abortion risks undermining the consent of nations which undergirds the legal system.

At the public hearing chaired by Anna Zaborska, Member of the European Parliament from Slovakia, speakers on both sides of the abortion debate addressed the topic of sexual and reproductive health and rights, a confusing term that has been used to advance abortion. Abortion advocates from International Planned Parenthood and the ASTRA Network called for the EU institutions to make reproductive rights a priority and called for the removal of barriers to sexuality education, access to contraception and abortion.

Wanda Nowicka of the ASTRA Network based her argument for abortion on the UN's Beijing Platform for Action and a handful of EU reports, using these as evidence of what she called “international consensus” on "reproductive rights." Nowicka also claimed that religious fundamentalism was an obstacle to the spread of contraception and the acceptance of abortion and asked Member States to base their policies on "scientific evidence, not on religious ideology."

Sylva refuted all of her claims by reminding the committee that there are no binding international legal instruments which establish a right to abortion, and pointed out that reproductive health advocates acknowledge as much. According to Sylva, abortion advocates also admit that getting such a binding law would be impossible given widespread opposition and so they have turned to an alternate approach that claims to make “settled international law in the face of unsettled international debate.”

This “soft law” strategy devised in the mid-1990s by the UN Population Fund (UNFPA), the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and the UN Division for the Advancement of Women consists chiefly of using interpretive recommendations made by treaty monitoring bodies which are charged with overseeing state compliance to UN conventions and treaties. Rather than sticking to the terms of treaties that were negotiated by sovereign states, the treaty monitoring bodies were taught how to “find” rights, such as a right to abortion, embedded within already existing human rights. Sylva charges that this strategy has been increasingly applied over the last ten years with at least sixty nations being pressured by the six treaty bodies to legalize or increase access to abortion.

The problem with this approach, Sylva warned the committee, is that erodes nations’ trust in the system. Sylva explains, “If member states believe that specific commitments they have ratified can expand, and expand in a manner without national oversight, they may grow distrustful of the entire regime of international law. It is therefore in the best interests of the UN system that international law should only reflect explicit consensus between and among national actors.”

Washington Times

From combined dispatches

VATICAN CITY — Pope Benedict XVI yesterday defended the Vatican's right to speak out on bioethics, including its opposition to artificial procreation methods and embryonic-stem-cell research.

He also dismissed criticism that the Roman Catholic Church blocks scientific progress.

"Church teaching certainly cannot and must not weigh in on every novelty of science, but it has the task to reiterate the great values which are on the line and to propose to faithful and all men of good will ethical-moral principles and direction for new, important questions," Benedict said.

He brushed off those who criticize the church "as if it were an obstacle to science and to humanity's true progress."

The pope singled out as "new problems" the freezing of embryos, selecting which embryos should be implanted after testing them for defects, research on embryonic stem cells and attempts at human cloning.

He decried them as proof that "the barrier protecting human dignity has been broken."

Benedict was addressing a meeting of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, a powerful Vatican office that safeguards doctrinal orthodoxy. He headed the office before being elected pope in 2005.

"When human beings in the weakest and most defenseless state of their existence are selected, abandoned, killed or used as pure 'biological material,' how can one deny that they are being treated not as 'someone' but as 'something,' " he said.

It was the pope's latest foray into scientific issues. On Monday, he warned against the "seductive" powers of science, saying it was important that science did not become the sole criteria for goodness.

U.S. Cardinal William Levada, Benedict's successor as head of the doctrinal department, said it was mulling the possibility of preparing a new Vatican document on bioethical issues.

Korean scientists have created pluripotent stem cells from normal skin cells and have further improved the technique. From the story:

Park said the overall process of making the stem cells is similar to those by U.S. and Japanese scientists, there has been a marked improvement in the success rate. "Foreign scientists used the so-called retrovirus, but we made headway by attaching the lentivirus to the transporting vector, and inserted it into the somatic cell of the lab animal," he said.

This process resulted in a stem cell being confirmed by a fluorescent microscope. The team claimed it was able to push these stem cells to differentiate into liver, nerve and muscle tissues. They said efforts are underway to recreate the process using human somatic cells.

Patent applications are also being filed. The lawsuits to come as various bioetechnology companies vie to become the next Microsoft or Google are sure to keep lawyers happily litigating for years to come.

Surrogate mothers could be given up to £15,000 of Health Service money to have children for gay couples, it emerged yesterday.

An NHS trust is considering funding the service for infertile couples - whether they are heterosexual or of the same-sex. If the proposals are approved, the Health Service will pay for IVF cycles and the expenses surrogate mothers are allowed...Surrogates would also be able to claim damages if things went wrong.

Ignoring that New Jersey voters recently rejected a $450 boondoggle bond issue to pay for embryonic stem cell research, New York State is funding the research to the tune of $600 million without even giving the people a chance to vote on the issue. And those behind the effort have no intention of letting nonsense like ethics get in the way. From a column by members of the New York Task Force on Life and the Law:

Ian Wilmut's old cloning team is furious, apparently, that he is receiving a knighthood for his "service to science." Their point is that Wilmut did not actually clone Dolly or do anything other than administer the lab in which the groundbreaking cloning experiment took place. From the story:

The admission by Sir Ian Wilmut in 2006 that he did not personally create Dolly the sheep set tongues wagging across the world of science. His name had been synonymous with the breakthrough that led to the first clone from an adult mammal, but he made clear that his role was a supervisory one.

So when Sir Ian was knighted at New Year for "services to science", controversy was to be expected.

The latest rumblings have come in the form of a petition to the Queen requesting that his knighthood be revoked. It is signed by four former employees of the Roslin Institute, where Dolly was created in 1997. "Wilmut's knighthood is seen as the crowning insult to honest endeavour," they write, adding that their sentiment is shared by others who signed severance deals with Roslin. "Roslin, the University of Edinburgh and Scotland are all tarnished with this grant. We beg

reconsideration."

I have been warning anyone who will listen about the coming huge policy fight over medical futility--what I call Futile Care Theory--that allows a doctor to refuse wanted life sustaining treatment when the doctor doesn't believe that the quality of the patient's life is worth sustaining (or spending money on). This isn't about asking for treatment that won't work, but withholding treatment that will or may work. Usually futile care protocols--where they have been promulgated--allow an ethics committee to make this decision after a quasi-judicial hearing. Texas has been a big center of futilitarian advances.

There is a futile care case right now in the courts of Winnipeg. In this regard, it is worth noting--and being very alarmed about--the futile care protocol adopted by The College of Physicians and Surgeons of Manitoba, which permits the doctor to make the call, after consultation with a second physician, without even having to pass it by an ethics committee. And this is in cases in which the minimal goal of the patient is likely to be met! From the protocol:

WHERE THE PHYSICIAN CONCLUDES THAT THE MINIMUM GOAL IS REALISTICALLY ACHIEVABLE BUT THAT TREATMENT SHOULD BE WITHHELD OR WITHDRAWN, that physician must consult with another physician...
2. Where the consultation supports the conclusion that treatment should be withheld or withdrawn:

a. The physician who sought the consultation must advise the
patient/proxy/representative that the consultation supports the initial assessment that treatment should be withheld or withdrawn .

b. If there is still a demand or request for treatment, the physician must attempt to address the reasons directly and with a view to reaching consensus...

c. If consensus cannot be reached, the physician must give the patient/proxy/representative a reasonable opportunity to identify another physician who is willing to assume care of the patient and must facilitate the transfer of care and...

d. Where, despite all reasonable efforts, consensus cannot be reached the physician may withhold or withdraw life-sustaining treatment, but: i) in the case of a patient/proxy who is still not in agreement with the decision to withhold or withdraw treatment, the physician must provide at least 96 hours advance notice to the patient or proxy as described below.

There you have it: Doctors think that their values should rule over those of their patients.

This is the beginning of the institution of a duty to die that we ignore at our peril. It also threatens the trust of people in medicine. My prediction: A lot of fireworks ahead!

January 3 2008 (The times)

Find the orginal here.

Peggy Norris was a passionate and formidable anti-abortion campaigner who was one of the initial committee members of SPUC, the Society for the Protection of the Unborn Child, an association which was founded in 1967 in opposition to David Steel’s Abortion Bill. Later, Norris fought attempts to legalise euthanasia and founded the anti-euthanasia pressure group, Alert.

Peggy O’Meara was born in Kilcormac, King’s County (now Co Offaly), Ireland, in 1921. In 1943 she graduated from the National University of Ireland and worked in UK and Irish hospitals.

After the war she went to Germany with the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, treating Polish concentration camp survivors, many of whom suffered from tuberculosis. In 1948 she married Dr Jim Norris, and until 1979 worked as a GP on Merseyside.

In 1967 Norris and her husband were among the first supporters of SPUC, a non-denominational association set up to fight David Steel’s Abortion Bill. Norris regretted the Roman Catholic bishops’ decision not to make a powerful attack on the Bill, as they had followed advice that to do so would be counterproductive.

Fellow members of SPUC’s executive committee included the gynaecologist Aleck Bourne, who in 1938 had carried out an abortion on a raped woman, a case which made therapeutic termination legal in case law.

Norris’s anti-abortion stance was deeply influenced by the time she had spent in postwar Germany and observing the consequences of the Nazi philosophy as applied to medicine. Other anti-abortionists at the time founded a separate anti-abortion group, the charity LIFE, which provides counselling and care for women considering abortion.

After abortion became legal, Norris was at the forefront of the series of large SPUC demonstrations organised in London, Liverpool and elsewhere calling for an amendment of the law. There, she and other SPUC supporters faced pro-abortion students who chanted “not the Church, not the State, women must decide their fate.” In Liverpool Norris was with Malcolm Muggeridge when an angry crowd shouting “Half of you were unwanted” showered them from a bridge with condoms. Muggeridge responded: “I have heard it all before . . . trying to silence us . . . in Germany in 1936.”

In 1974, however, Norris resigned from the executive committee of SPUC, along with a majority of the original committee and secretariat, a move resulting from an internal wrangle. Four years later she founded the Medical Education Trust, which promotes ethical standards in medicine and disseminates little publicised scientific reports from governments and scientists on public health concerns.

In 1972 she was also a founder member of the Dutch-inspired World Federation of Doctors Who Respect Human Life (WFDWRHL). It argued that doctors should adhere to the 1948 Declaration of Geneva, which states that human life should be respected from conception until natural death. In 1991 Norris started Alert as an anti-euthanasia pressure group.

A tall, attractive woman with an apparently tough exterior, Norris combined unfailing kindness with generosity, while concealing her own vulnerability behind a brisk aura of certainty. She was also known internationally as an articulate speaker and writer on anti-abortion and anti-euthanasia issues, who liked, in an argument, to pin down her adversaries on the precise use and meaning of their terms. In 1991 Cardinal Basil Hume appointed Norris a Dame of St Gregory.

Norris’s husband predeceased her, and she is survived by three sons and two daughters. Another son died in a motorcycle accident.

Find the original here.

India is searching for a monster who convinced the destitute to sell their kidneys at bargain basement prices and sold them for a huge profit. But the real empowerers of this atrocity are the foreigners who wanted new kidneys and didn't care who got hurt in the process. From the story:

India has launched an international hunt for a doctor accused of running an illegal clinic that duped between 500 and 600 poor labourers into selling their kidneys and then peddled them to foreign clients...

Police alleged that Dr Kumar used middlemen to entice poor labourers with the promise of jobs worth 150 rupees (about £2) a day, plus food and accommodation, and then offer them money for their kidneys. Those who refused were often drugged and had their kidneys removed without their permission, according to several former "donors"...

India banned the trade in human organs in 1994 but non-governmental organisations estimate that 2,000 human kidneys are still sold in India every year.

If organs can be bought and sold, the rich will buy and the destitute will sell. It's that simple. And there will be horrible people to take advantage of their need. We are entering an era of biological colonialism and it must be stopped.

The only way to effectively stop this is to stifle demand. The time has come to make such purchases illegal and punishable internationally. Desperation over one's own illness does not justify such exploitive depredations. Stop the demand and the supply issue will resolve itself.

In a stunning development, doctors responding to a questionnaire have urged that promiscuous people be denied certain treatments based on their unhealthy lifestyles. From the story:

I agree, it is absolutely outrageous. But to get your attention, I lied about the proposed targets. It isn't the promiscuous who doctors in the survey want to punish--whose behaviour is at least as dangerous as that of smokers, at least in the short term--but others with unhealthy lifestyles or too many years under their belts. Here is how the story actually reads:

Smokers, heavy drinkers, the obese and the elderly should be barred from receiving some operations, according to doctors, with most saying the health service cannot afford to provide ding free care to everyone.

If we are to punish lifestyles in health care, we should not just pick on those without political power such as smokers and the obese, or people who are deemed "style crimes," a wonderfully evocative term that I stole from Secondhand Smokette. But my real message is: Doctors should not be mutated into some kind of lifestyle police force. Their jobs are to treat patients as they find them, not judge why they are sick nor withhold proper care if they don't approve.

This could be great news aways down the road for diabetics. From the story:

An international team of researchers has finally managed to locate stem cells in the pancreas--in mice, at least.

If the findings are confirmed in humans, they could pave the way for dramatic new therapies for diabetes, namely the regeneration of beta cells so the body could once again produce its own insulin. Until now, scientists had all but abandoned hopes that the pancreas made its own stem cells because they had failed to find evidence to support the theory. But any clinical advances from the new research are still a long way off, experts cautioned.

Adult stem cells are ubiquitous. I am not a scientist, but from what I am reading, it may turn out that pluripotency will not be so important after all for clinical uses because ASCs exist in so many tissues.

David Burrowes MP has introduced a Bill to encourage umbilical cord blood to be donated at birth so that it can be stored for public use. Umbilical cord blood can be used for the treatment of diseases and for further research of new treatment methods using cord blood stem cells - providing an alternative to embryonic stem cell research. The Bill received its first reading and was ordered to be read a second time in October.

Links

• David Burrowes’ speech on Hansard

  http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200708/cmhansrd/cm080108/debtext/80108-0004.htm

Hundreds rallied outside the House of Lords yesterday to take a stand against the Bill. There was a great atmosphere as those present sang hymns, prayed and held placards reading: No Animal Human Hybrids; Protect The Embryo; Children Need Fathers; and, Protect The Family. Some wore cow and rabbit masks to demonstrate the absurdity of creating animal-human hybrids. A picture of protesters wearing masks and holding placards was featured in The Guardian on Wednesday.

http://www.ccfon.org/guardian.php

January 24, 2008

Volume 11, Number 6

By Maciej Golubiewski

(NEW YORK — C-FAM) A report just released by the European bishops calls on the European Union (EU) to focus on what they consider to be the real needs of families in Europe and further calls on the EU to respect national marriage laws of the member states. The report by the Commission of the European Bishops’ Conference (COMECE) entitled “Proposal for a Strategy of the European Union for the Support of Couples and Marriage” focuses on two fundamental problems that present “high emotional, social and financial costs to European society:” the continuing increase in divorce rates and the difficulty faced by young Europeans who decide to raise children.

The report says that in the field of matrimonial matters, “[national] diversity has to be respected and family law is and must remain the sole competence of member states.” The bishops found that some legislative proposals of the European Commission for increased cross-border legal cooperation come close to encroaching on the exclusive right of member states to make their own family policy. Moreover, EU policy in the areas of employment, social protection and poverty reduction ignore the importance of marriage altogether, they said.

In the area of employment and social protection, the bishops make the case that “loving and stable couples are a social capital for all Europeans” and are “founts of mutual trust in society” as well as “the preferable instance for bringing up children” and charge the EU with ignoring this. They call for EU assistance in sharing European best practices regarding divorce prevention programs such as communication training for high-risk couples, especially those dealing with pressures of dual employment and separation due to increased geographic mobility.

The bishops also took issue with the EU’s assumption that a dual-income family is “a new social norm” among European citizens, arguing that some dual earning households exist primarily for financial constraints. For that reason, they said, EU should support and not discriminate single-earner families. Staying at home to care for one’s children is “an important and welcome contribution to the well-being of all citizens of the European Union,” according to the report, which cites studies showing family break up as an important cause of poverty.

As for cross-border legal cooperation in family matters, the bishops warn that the EU’s legislative proposals exceed EU mandates by recognizing de facto unions and registered partnerships. This could prematurely “entail common recognition of such unions in a situation where member states do not provide recognition for the legal aspects of such unions” and dangerously undermine the importance of marriage as endowing parents with social and legal responsibilities which otherwise do not exist, they said.

David Fieldsend, from the Brussels-based CARE Europe, said, “The Bishops’ paper is a timely and well-researched contribution to the debate that is at last being aired at the EU on family matters. For too long talk of the family has been taboo while all sorts of fringe agendas were embraced with enthusiasm. Now the demographic crisis has forced the EU’s leaders to sit up and take notice.”

Sir, Not satisfied with their recently gained right to create human-animal hybrids, scientists and those who lobby on their behalf are now pushing for a system of presumed consent with respect to the use in cloning of previously obtained tissue (letters, Jan 21). This is an outrageous presumption that should not be permitted. Those who donated tissue for medical research, and naturally those from whom tissue was taken without consent, cannot have envisaged that it would be used to create human or animal-human embryos for destructive research, and might understandably have been repulsed at the prospect.

There is plenty of evidence that research using adult stem cells will realise true therapeutic benefits, possibly surpassing the potential of embryonic stem cells without posing any of the ethical dilemmas. How edifying it would be if scientists were to declare a respect for human life, from the time of its conception, as did their medical colleagues in the Declaration of Geneva in 1948.

Dr Paul King
School of Biological and Chemical Sciences, Birkbeck, University of London

Sir, The memory of some scientists in this country is very short. The Alder Hey scandal involved the retention of organs from children without consent and the public was rightly outraged; the proposals by Lord Patel and others to bypass proper consent in order to use human tissue to create cloned human or animal-human embryos contravenes every protocol put in place post Alder Hey. Informed consent remains a fundamental pillar of medical ethics, one which the stem-cell imperative cannot overturn.

Josephine Quintavalle
Director, Comment on Reproductive Ethics