Monthly Archives: August 2017

In a story Aug. 2 about euthanasia, The Associated Press reported erroneously that the study authors wrote that euthanasia and assisted suicide had become common practice. They were referring to certain medication methods used by physicians as becoming common practice, not to euthanasia and assisted suicide.

A corrected version of the story is below:

Euthanasia used for 4.5 percent of deaths in the Netherlands

Report shows euthanasia has become common in the Netherlands; accounts for 4.5 percent of deaths

By MARIA CHENG

AP Medical Writer

LONDON (AP) Euthanasia has become a common way to die in the Netherlands, accounting for 4.5 percent of deaths, according to researchers who say requests are increasing from people who aren't terminally ill.

In 2002, the Netherlands became the first country in the world that made it legal for doctors to help people die. Both euthanasia, where doctors actively kill patients, and assisted suicide, where physicians prescribe patients a lethal dose of drugs, are allowed. People must be "suffering unbearably" with no hope of relief but their condition does not have to be fatal.

"It looks like patients are now more willing to ask for euthanasia and physicians are more willing to grant it," said lead author Dr. Agnes Van der Heide of Erasmus University Medical Center in Rotterdam.

The 25-year review published in Thursday's New England Journal of Medicine is based on physician questionnaires. The use of morphine and sedation which might hasten death has become common practice in the Netherlands, the authors said in the report.

The review shows that in 1990, before it was legal, 1.7 percent of deaths were from euthanasia or assisted suicide. That rose to 4.5 percent by 2015. The vast majority 92 percent had serious illness and the rest had health problems from old age, early-stage dementia or psychiatric problems or a combination. More than a third of those who died were over 80.

Requests from those who aren't terminally ill still represent a small share, but have been increasing, Van der Heide said.

"When assisted dying is becoming the more normal option at the end of life, there is a risk people will feel more inclined to ask for it," she said.

About 8 percent of the people who died in 2015 asked for help dying, the review showed. Van der Heide said about half of all requests are approved now, compared with about a third in previous years.

Scott Kim, a bioethicist at the U.S. National Institutes of Health who was not part of the study, said the report raises concerns, particularly in regards to people seeking euthanasia due to age-related issues.

"These are old people who may have health problems, but none of them are life-threatening. They're old, they can't get around, their friends are dead and their children don't visit anymore," he said. "This kind of trend cries out for a discussion. Do we think their lives are still worthwhile?"

Euthanasia is also legal in Belgium, Canada, Colombia and Luxembourg. Switzerland, Germany and six U.S. states allow assisted suicide.

Some experts said that the euthanasia experience in the Netherlands offered lessons to other countries debating similar legislation.

"If you legalize on the broad basis (that) the Dutch have, then this increase is what you would expect," said Penney Lewis, co-director of the Centre of Medical Law and Ethics at King's College London.

"Doctors become more confident in practicing euthanasia and more patients will start asking for it," she said. "Without a more restrictive system, like what you have in Oregon, you will naturally see an increase."

In 1997, Oregon was the first U.S. state to allow physician-assisted suicide for those given six months or less to live. It is now legal in Colorado, California, Montana, Vermont, Washington state and the District of Columbia.

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Correction: Netherlands-euthanasia story - ABC News

Euthanasia is now the cause of 4.5 percent of deaths in the Netherlands. The rise in the practice has grave implications for the elderly and people dependent on caregivers, as more people who don't suffer from terminal illness are requesting euthanasia.

In 2015, more than one-third were older than 80 years. According to the New England Journal of Medicine, 92 percent of those who died from assisted suicide or euthanasia suffered from a "serious somatic" illness, mental disorders, and 14 percent suffered "an accumulation of health problems" from old age, and a small number had dementia or mental health problems. A patient must be suffering unbearably without hope of relief, but having a terminal illness is not required for legal assisted suicide or euthanasia.

It looks like patients are now more willing to ask for euthanasia and physicians are more willing to grant it, Agnes Van der Heide from Erasmus University Medical Center in Rotterdam said.

The growing number of cases is frightening for advocates of the dignity of human life at every stage. AP quotes Scott Kim, a bioethicist at the U.S. National Institutes of Health saying, These are old people who may have health problems, but none of them are life-threatening. Theyre old, they cant get around, their friends are dead and their children dont visit anymore. This kind of trend cries out for a discussion. Do we think their lives are still worthwhile?

Van der Heide said, When assisted dying is becoming the more normal option at the end of life, there is a risk people will feel more inclined to ask for it.

According to the journal: In the Netherlands, euthanasia isdeath resulting from medication that is administered by a physician with the explicit intention of hastening death at the explicit request of the physician. And assisted suicide, the patient self-administers medication that was prescribed by a physician. While it has become more common, the journal says that the 2002 Euthanasia Act was formalizing a practice that already existed.

In all, the AP reports that approximately 8 percent of people who died in 2015 received assistance.

The Netherlands was the first country to legalize euthanasia and assisted suicide, when the law passed in 2002. But in 1997, Oregon allowed for the assisted suicide of people who had six or fewer months to live, and is legal in multiple U.S. states.

Continue reading here:

Frightening Trend in Age-Related Euthanasia in the Netherlands - Townhall

OXFORD, England Recent increases in euthanasia and assisted suicide deaths among psychiatric and dementia patients reflect the concerns church officials expressed years ago, said a Dutch cardinal.

Cardinal Willem Eijk of Utrecht, Netherlands, said psychiatrist Boudewijn Chabot was right to complain that doctors were now ignoring legal requirements that a patient requesting death should be suffering unbearably and without prospect.

Writing in the NRC Handelsblad daily, Chabot, a pioneer of the Dutch euthanasia law, said he fully favored self-determination and was unconcerned about the increase in euthanasia deaths. However, he added that he was alarmed by euthanasias extension to psychiatric patients, as well as to dementia sufferers, 141 of whom were killed in 2016, compared to just 12 in 2009.

RELATED: Vatican launches Belgium euthanasia investigation

In an August 1 statement to Catholic News Service, Eijk, who heads the Dutch bishops medical ethics commission, said, Chabot is now complaining about a development he himself initiated.

Of course, its good to read that an initiator and early advocate of euthanasia and assisted suicide is now concerned, the cardinal said. But the Dutch bishops conference has warned from the beginning against violating the intrinsic dignity of human life through euthanasia or assisted suicide, because it is never ever allowable to violate intrinsic values, and because in doing so you put yourself on a slippery slope.

But was it not naive, when he started this in the 1990s, to suppose that ending life for psychiatric disorders would remain limited to a few cases only? the cardinal asked.

RELATED: Head of Vaticans Academy of Life: Dialogue is love, not compromise

The Netherlands became the worlds first country to legalize euthanasia and assisted suicide in 2002 and has since witnessed a rapid increase in related deaths, with 20 now occurring daily, according to a May report by the Regional Euthanasia Commission.

The report said 6,672 euthanasia deaths had been registered in 2015, compared to just 150 from assisted suicide, while 431 patients had been killed without explicit consent.

Eijk said euthanasia had originally been permitted only at the explicit request of a patient in the terminal stage of an incurable somatic disease, but had been steadily extended and was now accepted before the terminal stage of life.

When one breaks the principle that human life is an essential value, one steps on the slippery slope, the cardinal added. Dutch experiences teach that we will be confronted time and again with the question whether the ending of life shouldnt also be possible with less serious forms of suffering.

In a landmark case in the early 1990s, Chabot was found criminally guilty, but spared punishment, for assisting the suicide of a 50-year-old healthy woman suffering existential distress.

However, in a January 2017 petition, he and 200 other Dutch doctors warned that legal protections were slowly breaking down, with many dementia and psychiatric patients being killed without actual oral consent.

In his NRC Handelsblad article, Chabot accused the official Euthanasia Commission of concealing that incapacitated people were surreptitiously killed, and said executions were now occurring.

In his statement, Eijk said ending life without consent had been made possible by the 2004 Groningen Protocol, which allows handicapped newborns with conditions such as spina bifida to be killed because of their perceived future suffering, or that of their parents.

He said a new assisted suicide bill, introduced in 2016, would allow healthy people suffering nonmedical conditions such as loneliness, bereavement, limited mobility and decline from old age to be helped to die by a nonprofessional assistant-in-suicide.

Our answer to suffering should not be to offer euthanasia or assisted suicide, but adequate, professional and loving palliative care of which, from a Christian perspective, pastoral care is an indispensable part, Eijk said.

When people suffer unbearably and without prospect from loneliness, a frequent problem in todays present hyper-individualist culture, we should try to change that culture instead of offering suicide to healthy people, he said.

Euthanasia and assisted suicide are also legal in neighboring Belgium and Luxembourg and are deemed nonpunishable in Switzerland. Polls suggest most Europeans favor euthanasia laws with safeguards.

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Dutch cardinal: Bishops warned of euthanasia's slippery slope - Crux: Covering all things Catholic

TV personalityAndrew Denton has been diagnosed with advanced heart disease and will be required to undergo multiple bypass surgery shortly.

The diagnosis has forcedDenton, 57,to withdraw from the campaign to legalise euthanasia to which he has been devoting his energy in recent years.

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Advocate Andrew Denton speaks about Australia's role in spreading euthanasia laws around the globe.

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Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and other Liberal MPs have taken aim at the media as talk continues about a same sex marriage plebiscite.

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Satirist Mark Humphries examines the federal government's $4 an hour internship to see how it's benefited young Australians. The Feed on SBS Viceland, 7.30 weeknights.

Advocate Andrew Denton speaks about Australia's role in spreading euthanasia laws around the globe.

As the director of Go Gentle Australia, the organisation he foundedto achieve law reform around the country, Denton may be absent at a critical juncture: as Premier Daniel Andrews' bill for assisted dying is introduced and thrashed out in the Victorian Parliament.

Go Gentle Australia's media director Gina McCollsaid Denton is "quite young and so the prognosis is extremely good".

"It's very successful surgery," she said. "He needs to have it quickly but after that he's expected to recover reasonably quickly and we're expecting him to join the campaign again in early September, some time like that.

"We're still in daily contact. He's still extremely funny and his humour is extremely black."

ButDenton'sabsence from the campaign as the euthanasia debate heats up this monthhas been described by some proponents as a "disaster".

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"It's terrible for Andrew, and a disaster for the broader campaign," one supporter of the bill said.

However, Go GentleAustralia played down concerns, saying Denton's work towards voluntary assisted dying would continue under its campaign manager Paul Price, a former senior adviser in the Baillieu Liberal government.

"The Go Gentle campaign continues in full force," Mr Price told Fairfax Media.

"In the next weeks and months we will be marshalling the support of the more than 75 per cent of Victorians who want voluntary assisted dying to become law."

Denton set up Go Gentle Australia last year almost two decades after watching his father Kit die a slow and painful death from heart failure in a bid to convince politicians to give terminally ill people the right to a physician-assisted death in strictly defined circumstances.

In that time, he has become one of the leading public faces of the "yes" campaign, appearing at community forums, across the airwaves, and alongside Victorian Health Minister Jill Hennessy to talk to delegates at Labor's state council.

But the debate is likely to intensify even further in coming weeks, when the bill on assisted dying is introduced in the lower house, paving the way for the most heated policy fight the Premier faces ahead of next year's election.

In a sign that the battlelines have well and truly been drawn, leaders of the Catholic, Anglican, Lutheran, Greek Orthodox and Coptic Orthodox churches placed an open letter in the Herald Sun on Monday saying that assisted suicide represented the "abandonment" of the terminally ill and sent a "confusing message" about the value of life.

Right to Life has also stepped up its opposition, sending out leaflets in nine marginal electorates which looked as though they came from the sitting MP in each seat suggesting Mr Andrews was attempting to sanction suicide to "save healthcare dollars".

If you are troubled by this report, experiencing a personal crisis or thinking about suicide, you can call Lifeline 131 114 or beyondblue 1300 224 636 or visit lifeline.org.au or beyondblue.org.au

With AAP

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Euthanasia: Illness derails campaign of high-profile advocate Andrew Denton - The Age

The final report on the public's attitudes towards assisted dying is 'deeply disappointing' and more like a cowardly essay, the former MP who instigated the inquiry says.

Maryan Street says the report is cowardly Photo: RNZ / Alexander Robertson

Parliament's health committee yesterday published its report without making any recommendations.

It said voluntary euthanasia was "very complicated, very divisive, and extremely contentious".

For that reason, it said, the authors wanted everyone with an interest to read the report in full and draw their own conclusions based on the evidence.

Former Labour MP Maryan Street, who submitted the 8974-strong petition calling for the inquiry two years ago, said the committee lacked bravery.

"[It's] a fairly cowardly report. It's more like an essay that puts out some of the evidence for and against, and it fails to arrive at any conclusion except to say 'this is a complicated issue', which anybody could have told them," she said.

The 49-page report weighs the arguments for and against, yet rarely analyses them and makes no firm recommendations.

Committee chair Simon O'Connor, a National MP who is opposed to assisted dying, said that was because it was asked to investigate and that was what it has done.

"Our recommendation is for MPs and the public to read our report.

"In many ways it's distilling the most comprehensive, largest parliamentary inquiry in the parliament's history. Trying to distill a very complex, divisive argument down to a few pages in the hope that people can make up their own minds while actually delving more deeply into the issue," he said.

Matt Vickers, whose wife Lecretia Seales died while fighting in the courts for the right to end her life, said he was disappointed the report made no recommendations.

"It would have been great for them to recommend some form of legislation but looking at the make-up of the committee and the people on it, that was a lot to ask for."

The report was useful in some ways, Mr Vickers said.

"What they have done is to lay out all the claims and the evidence supporting those claims, and I think that will be useful when David Seymour's legislation reaches [parliament]."

Lecretia Seales' husband Matt Vickers. Photo: RNZ / Alexander Robertson

ACT MP David Seymour, whose member's bill on the same topic was drawn from the ballot in June, was also disappointed.

He allowed it had at least scotched some urban myths, such as elderly people in the Netherlands wearing 'do not euthanise me' bracelets: they don't.

Matthew Jansen, the secretary of the Care Alliance, a coalition opposed to assisted dying, was glad the report made no recommendations but said the inquiry was a wake-up for the medical community.

He said it showed many people no longer understood death.

"In our grandparents' generation, they were very familiar with death because it happened at home.

"With the hospitalisation and the medicalisation of dying, people have lost the direct contact. So they don't necessarily understand what is 'normal'.

"There is a big requirement for there to be an education process so people understand what to expect, and that some of the things they see are not about pain or distress, they are about the dying process. That's natural."

Despite 80 percent of the 22,000 submissions being opposed to assisted dying, multiple polls and studies have found New Zealanders [http://www.radionz.co.nz/news/national/322293/growing-support-for-euthanasia-in-nz-study

are at least two-thirds in favour].

Mr O'Connor expected many opinions could change on reading this report.

"Our committee is saying very strongly to Parliament and to the public, 'step back, take some time, read this report and think about it'.

"This is not a simple issue, it is a complex, divisive issue. It's trying to add a voice, if you will, against those who say 'this is just a no-brainer'," he said.

In the meantime, David Seymour's bill is awaiting its first reading.

Continue reading here:

Euthanasia report 'deeply disappointing' | Radio New Zealand News - Radio New Zealand

A "mischievous" and "misleading" Right To Life campaign that's drawn the ire of Labor MPs has hit Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews' electorate.

Right To Life are dropping 270,000 pamphlets throughout nine electorates, including Mr Andrews' seat of Mulgrave and six other Labor seats.

The flyer questions the government's proposed assisted dying laws and is emblazoned with the name of each respective local MP, causing confusion about the author.

"That rather mischievous, almost misrepresentation of who the author of that pamphlet was, that's not particularly fair, I don't think that's right, it doesn't add to the debate," Mr Andrews told ABC Central Victoria on Friday.

He later went on to tell reporters the flyer was "grossly misrepresentative" of a report completed by an expert panel and the subsequent proposed assisted dying scheme.

The Right To Life flyer reads "Do you believe in suicide prevention or suicide assistance from a doctor?"

It also contains MP contact information in large, bold type, with the Right To Life contact information in much smaller print on the back.

Bentleigh MP Nick Staikos, who is undecided on how he will vote, has copped abuse after the flyer started circulating his electorate with his details inside, making some readers believe he was the author.

He said he was disgusted with the campaign and could see why constituents were confused.

The flyer has also been sent to Mordialloc, Cranbourne, Invanhoe, Carrum and Macedon - all held by Labor - as well as Shepparton, held by independent Suzanna Sheed and Ripon, where Liberal Louise Staley sits.

Right To Life President Margaret Tighe stood by the campaign, saying international assisted dying schemes are unsafe and can lead to people being killed without their consent.

"It's not mischievous," she told AAP.

"You shouldn't kill people just because they're sick or they want you to kill them."

The government hopes to introduce legislation to parliament that would allow terminally ill Victorians to choose when they die, in accordance with strict guidelines including that they have less than 12 months to live.

Mr Andrews changed his mind on assisted dying after watching his father's terminal battle with cancer.

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Anti-euthanasia flyers hit Vic Prem's seat - The West Australian

Regarding Dr. Roman Patricks letter to the editor, Take steps to reduce ever-increasing costs of medical care (July 26):

I am a dementia survivor. I had TBI (traumatic brain injury) dementia when I was in my 20s. It was a long fight but I have been able to make it into my 40s. And really, you talk of euthanasia?

I am also a dementia expert. I have five certifications and work everyday with people who have dementia. What I have found is that families and medical professionals have little education and help in dealing with someone with various forms of dementia. If they actually took the time to learn how to really care and treat the condition, I can tell you there would be much less cost, reduced hospital visits and re-admissions, and proper care.

In addition, most people in memory-care communities and skilled nursing facilities do not belong there. They should be at home, properly cared for by a company that has expertise in dementia care. I have built programs and train others in proper care, and it makes a difference in their physical and emotional health.

I also help families learn about how to properly care for those with dementia so they can stay home longer or until end of life. This is how aging should be done: in the home with family and experts.

Angela Haas St. Louis

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Euthanasia is not an answer for those dealing with dementia - STLtoday.com