Archive for the 'Euthanasia' Category

Sign displayed at a rainy 1981 protest outside a now-closed Chicago abortion clinic

With the end of the school year fast approaching, we’ve been getting a lot of e-mails and phone calls lately from a range of students — junior high, high school, college, even law school — who are looking for help with end-of-year projects.

One e-mail we got recently was from Melanie, an eighth grader in Florida who was doing on a report on euthanasia. She contacted us to get our perspective on several questions. Since her questions are ones commonly asked by students — and adults, too, for that matter — I’ve included them, along with our replies, below.

1. Why do you believe a terminally ill person doesn’t have the right to end their own life?

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Some quick links:

Miss Kelly at Modestly Yours has a must-read post titled “Sexual Freedom Is Damaging to Students”. It’s about a new book called Unprotected, written by an anonymous psychiatrist at the student counseling center of a major American university who has seen firsthand the horrible effects inflicted — especially on women — by so-called “safe sex” and “sexual freedom”.

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Christina at RealChoice has a great post titled “Pre-Roe Mortality, Redux”:

Just about anybody that’s paid attention has heard the claim that “thousands” — or, more specifically, “5,000 to 10,000″ maternal deaths a year in the United States from criminal abortions back in the bad old pre-Roe days. In fact, Planned Parenthood’s amicus brief filed with PP v. Casey still cited this bogus “fact”.

Let’s start with the numbers. Where did they come from?

Find out here.

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JivinJ reports on some disturbing statistics from the United Kingdom about the number of teens having “two or three abortions”. (more…)

That’s how an article on a widely reported news story begins in today’s Chicago Tribune. It’s titled, simply enough, “Woman in a vegetative state exhibits brain activity.”

Of course, an article like this contains a few obligatory “Duh” paragraphs, like this one:

But new research suggests that “islands” of brain function may exist in people believed to be in a vegetative state, according to the Science report. And scientists wanted to know if important signs that a patient was assimilating input from the outside world were being missed.

Also, of course, an article like this is not without bias:

It’s the only case of its kind, reported in the Friday issue of the journal Science.

“The only case of its kind”?

How could the writer of the article (Judith Graham) possibly know that this instance of a 23-year old woman who is now exhibiting brain activity after having been diagnosed as being in a “vegetative state” is the “only case of its kind”?

Qualifiers like “documented” serve an important purpose. When they’re omitted from a news article, it’s rather telling.

Bias rears its ugly ahead again later in the article: (more…)

Uh, no:

Child abuse victim Haleigh Poutre, once deemed to be “virtually brain dead” by medical experts, continues to improve and is even speaking a few words, her biological grandmother said this week.

Sandra Sudyka, of the Feeding Hills section of Agawam, angered over the state Department of Social Services apparent termination of her and her daughter’s bimonthly visits to Haleigh at her Boston hospital, said she has decided to speak publicly of her granddaughter’s condition.

“She was doing well,” Sudyka said of the last time she saw Haleigh on July 18. “She was bright-eyed and smiling. She is always responsive to us.”

DSS had asked Sudyka and Haleigh’s biological mother, Allison Avrett, not to disclose the 12-year-old girl’s condition to the media.

“I decided since they broke the deal, I am going to talk. People should know how well she is doing,” Sudyka said. Avrett declined comment this week.

DSS spokeswoman Denise Monteiro declined comment yesterday. DSS officials have said, however, that Sudyka’s and Avrett’s visiting privileges have been suspended and not terminated.

DSS took custody of Haleigh nearly a year ago after her adoptive mother and stepfather, Holli A. and Jason D. Strickland, of Westfield, were charged with beating her.

Doctors initially reported that the battered and emaciated Haleigh was in a vegetative state due to a sheared brain stem. Social services sought to end life support systems, a plan approved by the state Supreme Judicial Court on Jan. 17, before improvements in Haleigh’s condition were known.

“They don’t want people to know how she is doing after they wanted to pull the plug,” Sudyka said.

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Via Pro-Life Blogs:

Andrea passed away peacefully a little before 3pm today, with her family and her friends at her bedside. We love her so very much and we are going to miss her terribly. We hope that the battle that we fought for our sister will bring to light and bear witness to the horrible acts committed in the name of ethics in hospitals across the state of Texas.

The fact that we had to fight this battle is both frightening and a sad commentary on the so-called “ethics” now being practiced in medical facilities in this state.

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Pro-Life Blogs is reporting on the dramatic turn of events in the case of Andrea Clark, now that one Dr. Matthew Lenz has agreed to take her into his care.

Andrea’s condition is still quite fragile, and is still very much in need of prayers, but it appears that a bullet has been dodged. Pro-life Texans now will have to set their sights on dismantling the Texas Futile Care Law — which, as many have pointed out, was signed into law in 1999 by then Governor George W. Bush.

Its major flaw is that it gives entirely too much power to doctors and hospital ethics committees, who can make the decision to discontinue life support even if a patient wants to continue living. (more…)

“God judged it better to bring good out of evil than to suffer no evil to exist.”

One year after Terri Schiavo’s death by euthanasia, these words of St. Augustine are especially fitting.

During Terri’s final days on earth, her parents, brother, and sister often said that the intensely trying ordeal of witnessing her painful death was bringing them closer together than ever before. (more…)

A few months ago, I heard Father Frank Pavone of Priests for Life give a talk about his experience ministering to Terri and her family during her final days, and he attributed the cause of her murder to an “atrophy of compassion” that has afflicted our culture and led to the devaluing of the lives of the most vulnerable. As usual, this holy and courageous priest was right.

Yesterday, he read the following open letter to Michael Schiavo yesterday at an internationally broadcast religious service:

A year ago this week, I stood by the bedside of the woman you married and promised to love in good times and bad, in sickness and health. She was enduring a very bad time, because she hadn’t been given food or drink in nearly two weeks. And you were the one insisting that she continue to be deprived of food and water, right up to her death. I watched her face for hours on end, right up to moments before her last breath. Her death was not peaceful, nor was it beautiful. If you saw her too, and noticed what her eyes were doing, you know that to describe her last agony as peaceful is a lie.

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Over the past few months, pro-lifers have been closely following the story of Haleigh Poutre and the medical care that she has (or has not) received:

In the court (and courts) of life and death, a little 11-year-old Massachusetts girl named Haleigh Poutre could be the next Terri Schiavo. For those who have not heard the tragic story, Haleigh was beaten nearly to death last September, allegedly by her adoptive mother and stepfather. The beating left her unconscious and barely clinging to life.

Within a week or so of the beating, her doctors had written her off. They apparently told Haleigh’s court-appointed guardian, Harry Spence, that she was “virtually brain dead.” Even though he had never visited her, Spence quickly went to court seeking permission to remove her respirator and feeding tube. The court agreed, a decision affirmed recently by the supreme court of Massachusetts.

And so, no doubt with the best of intentions, a little girl who had already suffered so much was stripped by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts of even the chance to fight to stay alive. If she didn’t stop breathing when the respirator was removed, which doctors expected, she would slowly dehydrate to death.

The rest of this article is available at LifeNews.com.

Please keep Haleigh in your prayers.