Saving Lives Act: Ending Lives

Jill over at Feministe has an excellent commentary on a new bill introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives that would allow doctors to refuse therapeutic abortions even in life-saving cases. Thomas over at Blog for Choice also posts some commentary and links to further information. Whether you are pro-choice or pro-life, you should oppose [...]

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Dutch Pro-Euthanasia Association to Start End-of-Life Clinic in 2012

The Dutch pro-euthanasia association, NVVE, is planning to open an end-of-life clinic in 2012. Here, severely ill people who are unable to find a physician willing to assist with their euthanasia, can come to die. The clinic is completely legal, according to both the NVVE and physician organization KNMG. In the Netherlands, people who suffer [...]

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Of Bodies and Burdens: Abortion vs. Child Euthanasia

Sometimes, it would’ve been easier if I were still radically pro-life, so that I could tell anyone supporting abortion or euthanasia that people have no right to take the life of anotheer person, no matter how dependent that person is on someone else. Yet I recognize a person’s right to bodily autonomy, too, and for [...]

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Fetal Personhood and Viability

The reason I have always considered the fetus a person – a significantly dependent person, but a person nonetheless -, is that I have never been able to find a non-arbitrary point at which the fetus could possibly acquire personhood. If birth is said to be the criterion, preemies acquire personhood at the same developmental [...]

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Study Finds Brain Activity in “Vegetative” Patients

Yesterday, my boyfriend sent me a NYtimes.com article on brain activity in people in apparent vegatative state. The study the article discusses examines the possibility that some people in a vegatative state – that is, people who have opened their eyes and for this reason are not in a coma, but who give no further [...]

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Dutch Infant Euthanasia Guidelines May Be Expanded to Suit Practice

Just read on a Dutch health news site that it is being proposed to change the rules for infant euthanasia (currently regulated under the “Groningen protocol”) again. The argument is that they are not in line with current practice, and therefore, physicians rarely submit euthanasia cases for review to retrospectively judge whether the rules were [...]

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Euthanasia and the “Burden Meme”

I just found out that a man suffering from cancer killed his demented wife and then himself to prevent her from being a “burden” on their children after his death. Wesley J. Smith comments on the case over at Secondhand Smoke. He writes: The message that it is worse to be a burden than dead [...]

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Who Decides What “Quality of Life” Means?

Over the last few days, I’ve come across a few blog posts on the subject of quality of life, as it relates to euthanasia and assisted suicide. Note here, that my opinion about assisted suicide and euthanasia is not based on some kind of mantra that says that everyone has an obligation to live until [...]

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Developmentally Disabled Die becaue of Carelessness and Discrimination

Last week, Mencap, a UK advocacy group, published a report detailing six cases in which developmentally disabled people died because of poor healthcare (PDF-file). The reasons for these people’s deaths ranged from the failure to insert a feeding tube after a Down Syndrome patient was left unable to swallow by a stroke – a practice [...]

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Shock: Infant Euthanasia Has Been Legal Here for Two Years

I’m shocked. I live in the Netherlands, I am pro-life, and yet I was not aware of this until now: infant euthanasia was legalized here in 2006! It doesn’t make a real difference in a sense, in that the so-called Groningen protocol – by which children under age twelve years with severe disabilities can be [...]

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