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

from Disability Tribune

"The Hammersmith Hospital Trust is planning to ask older people to write a 'living will' which would inform doctors when to stop medical treatment should their health deteriorate' reported Disability Tribune, the magazine of Disability Awareness in Action, the international disability and human rights information network, in March 2003." However doctors intend persuading people to sign such a document by playing on people's negative assumptions about impairment. People will be asked to imagine their life if they had cancer, advanced dementia, were doubly incontinent or 'confined' to a wheelchair.

"What is alarming is that yet again the medical profession have deemed themselves 'the experts' in deciding what is an acceptable or unacceptable quality of life. Indeed the doctors will almost certainly fail to mention what support statutory agencies can make available should the individual decide to ignore the 'living will' option.

"The decision to introduce this policy was taken after a survey, funded by the hospital trust, showed that older people would rather not have their lives prolonged by medical treatment if they were terminally ill. Instead they would rather be 'kept warm, comfortable and free from pain.' However, the reality of ceasing medical treatment, which since a recent court decision includes food and water, can mean a slow and painful death."

The Medical Ethics Alliance commented on this leading hospital's pilot scheme:

"Patients should beware of the implications of what they sign up to, as one effect of signing as the [Sunday Telegraph] article correctly explains, is to put yourself into the hands of those who may interpret the piece of paper in a way you had not expected. What is more, your relatives may not be able to help you."

Nurse Nancy Valko, a campaigner against euthanasia in the U.S.A., writes in connection with a court case there (13 March):

"I've often asked my patients who have made out such directives what it is they want and I've never had a patient who really understood what he or she had signed. Instead, they believed the hype that such directives would protect their rights and spare their families suffering. "I believe that such directives are also a kind of anti-informed consent document because the person is asked to make a legally binding decision before a particular situation arises and without an explanation of legal terms or the risks/benefits of particular treatments. For example, the term 'artificial nutrition and hydration' has even been interpreted to include a simple IV!"

Australia's "Bland case" has been duly lost (Canberra Times, 30 May 03), but thanks to the Right to Life Association of Australia with nationwide publicity for their side of the argument.

RTLA won the right to contest the withdrawal of tube feeding from a 68 year-old woman with Pick's disease, in the Victoria Supreme Court, and was represented by Jeannette Morrish QC, a criminal lawyer whose mother had survived a Nazi slave labour camp; but they were not allowed to call evidence or cross-examine witnesses.

Justice Stuart Morris ruled that food and fluid given though a tube were medical treatment, not palliative care, thus condemning the patient to death. RTLA president Margaret Tighe said it was "not an act of love to kill somebody by dehydration and starvation...." "I do feel fearful for the lives of many people who will be considered expendable."

How they do it

Stephen Drake, of NOT DEAD YET reported in an article in Ragged Edge, "Changing the Words, re-framing the issue: A brief history" that NDY and other groups had been expressing concern over some of the advocacy of the 'end of life' movement. "Specifically, we've charged that certain aspects of disability health care policy are being reframed as 'end of life care' policy. In doing so, groups such as Partnership for Caring and Last Acts have encroached on disability policy, but in re-naming it as something else have been able to bar our place at the policy discussion table....." "Partnership for Caring" was previously named "Choice in Dying" and before that "The Euthanasia Society of America."

"Shortly after the Supreme Court in California rendered its decision in August 2001, saying that people with cognitive disabilities could not have life-sustaining treatment removed absent 'clear and convincing evidence of their own wishes' (the case of Robert Wendland), Last Acts decided to frame and define the Wendland case in its own way - for a much bigger audience than the one reading California Supreme Court decisions. ......In October 2001 the Last Acts Writers Project hosted a workshop for Hollywood writers. The workshop was meant to give writers story ideas and expert accounts of how 'end of life' stories should be framed..... Vicki Michel was Last Acts' Wendland 'expert' - she was the author of one of the many briefs arguing for Robert Wendland's death. As would be expected, her account of the case departed significantly from the facts marshalled by those of us fighting to save him and other people with cognitive disabilities.

"Did the Last Acts workshop bear fruit? In the March 8 2002 episode of the television drama series 'First Monday', the justices grapple with a case eerily like that of Robert Wendland. James Garner plays one of the justices - a wheelchair user, who at first holds views about withholding food and water very similar to that of Not Dead Yet. But by the episode's end, he has a change of heart, and rules with the other justices to pull the plug" (The Ragged Edge magazine).

Dr. Ira Byock, author of "Dying Well" and one of the founders of "Partnership for Caring" is adamant about what he sees as "end of life" organisations' failure to seek the input of disability rights groups, Mary Johnson reports in Ragged Edge magazine. PfC's website, is entitled "Last Chapters".

"It takes money to change a nation's morality and public policies from the top down: research must be funded, academic chairs established, issue advocates supported, studies commissioned, articles in academic and medical journals underwritten, advertisements paid for, the popular culture culture influenced in myriad ways", writes Wesley J. Smith in "Philanthropy's Brave New World: will those who give decide who should live?" (Philanthropy magazine, Jan/Feb 2001).'

"Up to a quarter billion dollars has been spent by foundations since 1996 to promote end-of-life programs - and the shaping of public policy and opinion," writes Steve Drake in Ragged Edge. "The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation alone has invested $148 million to improve care at the end of life."

"I think the Last Acts folks are well-meaning, well-educated, well-funded progressives who are ignorant about disability rights," says the American Association of People with Disabilities' Andrew Imparato. Coleman refers to this group as the "4 W's - the white, well-off, worried well."

"The issue of quality of life for people with disabilities is not something either the public or the end-of-life groups understand," said one national advocate. "Understanding "why terminal illness and long-term disability are different is a real stretch for them."

Another "4 W's" project is to speak of "life-limiting illness" and to enlist the Hospice movement in implementing the connection.

The words "Dutch euthanasia" and "strict guidelines" have made a perfect foursome in the British media for a long time, despite all evidence from Dutch doctors. They were never seen apart. However a recent TV programme in Holland and a Lancet report on 19.4.03, seems to have unhitched them.

Officially, 54 per cent of euthanasia cases are reported as such by the doctors concerned. A new law supposed to encourage reporting came into effect on April 2002. However doctors still feel that reporting formalities are "too much fuss". Before the broadcast, when details had appeared in the press, the Royal Dutch Medical Association condemned the alleged misuse of "terminal sedation". "Supporters of the Dutch euthanasia policy hope the Reporter documentary will not be distributed to foreign television stations," wrote Frank van Kolfschooten in The Lancet.

Earlier in the year in the U.S.A. "Breakpoint with Charles Colson (13 Jan. 03) reported: "Grandpa Reitsema was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma And while his lymphoma was terminal, he was expected to live for a few more years. And he would have, if his nursing home had been located someplace other than Holland."

The first hint that something was amiss came when one of his daughters tried to give him some water. A nurse entered the room and said "Don't give him water." When the daughter asked why not, the nurse replied, 'You're not allowed to give him anything to drink.'

What the Reitsemas didn't know was that their grandfather's doctor had, as Jonathan Finbody of the Christian Medical and Dental Society put it, "aimed to kill" Grandpa. Without consulting his patient or the family, the doctor had "quietly ordered nurses to administer overdoses of morphine while withholding food and water." By the time the Reitsemas understood what was going on, it was too late. Grandpa died the day after his daughter's run-in with the nurse."

The Reitsemas' further enquiries led them to estimate that seventy-five percent of the time a Dutch doctor acts to hasten a patient's death, he acts without the patient's permission.

A meeting in the House of Lords sponsored by Baroness Masham on 15 Jan. 03 unveiled more facts about the UNFPA's efforts to reduce world population than had been known before. As well as gross financial mismanagement, and the shipping of 10 million faulty condoms to Tanzania, UNFPA's involvement in China's One-Child policy had been more substantial than originally thought.

Douglas D. Sylva, of the International Organisation Research Group, reported:

"According to a report written by a research institute that collaborates with UNFPA, UNFPA provided China with an enormous grant - $50 million - when China was establishing the One-Child Policy in 1979. With the assistance of UNFPA, this grant was used by the Chinese State Family Planning Commission, the agency responsible for implementing the policy, in order to establish a demographic institute with the main objective to collect data, conduct research and disseminate information on population and family planning. In essence, UNFPA taught the Chinese government how to make the one-child policy work: with this demographic information, the State Family Planning Commission could tell where fertility needed to decline more quickly, what contraceptives and abortive quotas to set for different regions, and where women were regularly evading family planning regulations. With this data, the Chinese government was able to extend the implementation of the One Child Policy across the vast expanse of China." PRAG, 25 Mar 2003.

SPUC reported in December 2002: "Following criticism by the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee and lobbying by SPUC. the Foreign Office has for the first time included a section on the one-child policy in its Human Rights Annual Report (2002 edition)." SPUC commented: "The wall of silence with which the Foreign Office surrounded forced abortion in China has been broken."

Steven W. Mosher, of the Population Research Institute, reported last year on UNFPA's connection with similar policies in North Korea, run from its office in Beijing. In the populous concentration camps, abortion or infanticide is compulsory.

SPUC reported on 31 Mar 03 that UNFPA had launched a campaign to provide "reproductive health" to Iraqi refugees. Anthony Ozimic said " UNFPA has used this deceit in other recent war zones. For example, UNFPA aided and abetted 'ethnic cleansing' by indicted war criminal Slobodan Milosevic by assisting his regime's plan 'to limit or forbid the enormous increase of the birthrate in Kosovo.'"

Note: In 2002, the European Parliament agreed to increase the EU's overseas aid budget by 300 per cent, from €8 million to €24 m. This is in addition to EU money spent on "reproductive health" projects in particular countries. (Image News, November 2002.)

Population Research Institute, 1190 Progress Drive, Suite 2D, PO Box 1559, Front Royal. VA 22630, U.S.A.

SPUC News, December 2002, noted that official figures for England and Wales showed the number of abortions funded by the state in 2001 was the highest ever at 134,705. 186,274 abortions were recorded and 176,364 were performed on residents. These figures do not include pregnancies that may have been ended by "so-called emergency contraception". There were 12,126 NHS abortions in Scotland in the same year.

Image News (November 2002) states: "A report by the Family Planning for Glasgow NHS Board said a proposed large centralised abortion facility to replace the city's five abortion clinics would be a magnet for pro-life pickets, stigmatise patients and cause doctors whose only job was to perform abortions to become depressed.

"Professor Allan Templeton secretary of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, seemed surprised that medical staff did not like to perform abortions. He said it was 'an interesting area' and could be 'enormously satisfying'.

Labour Life Group News of Spring 2003 reported:

"There is a long way to go to remedy the collapse in the British birth rate, now close to a Total Fertility Rate nearer to 1.6 than to 1.7. With a completed family size of only 1.64 children we are about 21% below replacement level in England. And in Scotland with a TFR of 1.5 it is about 28% below replacement level."

"According to the guidelines introduced by the European Commission, researchers could spend EU money to harvest new stem cells from frozen embryos - a practice that is illegal in Ireland, Germany, Austria, Denmark, France and Spain......." (Irish Independent, 10 July 03). The Irish Government 's Assisted Reproduction Commission will report at the end of 2003.

"While the proposal says the EU will not fund embryonic stem cell research where it is forbidden, many countries don't want their tax money from central EU coffers going to support such work anywhere.

"Under the guidelines that were finally agreed, despite divisions among Commission members, research can be carried out on frozen embryos that have been left over from IVF treatment and were clearly donated by couples...... The guidelines ban any form of cloning to create new cells..... Research can only take place on embryos frozen over a year ago."

Britain is disregarding any agreed guidelines (House of Lords ruling on "therapeutic" cloning, 13 Mar 03). Competition is coming from Singapore. The Medical Research Council is offering money to fertility clinics to encourage them to provide more embryos for destructive research. The Roslin Institute in Edinburgh has also been licensed by the HFEA to create short-lived human embryos by a form of parthenogenesis.

Wesley Smith writes that in spite of the "brass band" treatment that any success with embryonic stem cells always gets in the Press, "the trend-line of the research results is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore. The shortest and most likely route to the creation of a thriving regenerative medical industry appears to lie not with embryonic stem cells derived from human cloning, but with adult stem cells and other non-embryonic tissues."