Aussie: Here's What Pro-Death Bias Looks Like

If you want to see how bias masquerades as a factual article, read this pro-death piece from Australia.

Voluntary Assisted Suicide legislation in NSW: politics vs human rights

During the current term of the NSW state government, the Greens plan to introduce the Rights of the Terminally Ill Bill, which, if passed, would legalise voluntary assisted suicide (VAS) in NSW.

This legislation is only for sound-minded people with an intolerable terminal illness, who request to be allowed to die, rather than suffer indignity and pain before inevitable death. This legislation allows them to take a prescribed lethal sedative, ideally at home with the support of family, and hence to die peacefully. more

The Pro-Death Planned Parenthood Connection

The pro-deathers never die, they just reinvent themselves.

Planned Parenthood Insider Now Works for Assisted Suicide Group

When Compassion & Choices, formerly The Hemlock Society, convened its June 2012 conference, former Planned Parenthood insider Theresa Connor, now director of government affairs with the assisted suicide group, was a featured speaker. She was public policy director for PP in Washington state for 15 years and instituted the research and strategy behind the 2001 Erickson v. Bartell case “that required employers’ insurance plans to cover prescription birth control under anti-discrimination laws.”

Connor joined Compassion & Choices’ president, Barbara Coombs Lee, author of Oregon’s “Death with Dignity” Act, were co-speakers at the conference on “the strategies for success in affirming and protecting end-of-life liberty, including aid in dying in the states.”

In addition, Connor moderated a panel consisting of Kate Tudor, Health Care Lobbyist from White Tudor, LLC; Elaine Faithful; The South Carolina Coalition for Healthy Families; and Sammie Moshenberger, from the National Council of Jewish Women and Coalition for Religious Liberty, in explaining how to counter “conservative political ideology and religious doctrine that have nothing to do with good medical practice or patient needs.”

“Learn how you, as an end-of-life advocate,” the program says, “can work with reproductive justice and LGBT allies to defeat refusal legislation at the state and federal levels.” The topic of the presentation was “Legislating Medicine and Morality.” more

Vatican Gets It Right About The Culture Of Death

Well, yes, indeed. This piece counters the argument that there’s no real pro-death connection between the Nazis’ way of thinking and what the pro-death movement is doing today.

Proponents Of Euthanasia, Nazi Genocide Use Same Arguments According To L'Osservatore Romano

Proponents of euthanasia and aborting chronically ill fetuses use the same arguments that were once used by the Nazis to promote their eugenics program of mass extermination, according to the Vatican's semiofficial newspaper.

The article appears on the front page of Saturday's (May 5) issue of L'Osservatore Romano and is signed by Lucetta Scaraffia, an Italian historian who is a frequent contributor to the Vatican paper.

Scaraffia's article comes in the wake of the Italian translation of a 1920 book by two German scholars, Karl Binding and Alfred Hoche, that set the ideological foundations for the Nazi program of extermination of disabled and incurably sick people.

The authors of the 1920 book ("Allowing the Destruction of Life Unworthy of Living") proposed that the lives of the chronically ill or of the mentally and physically disabled were "unworthy of being lived," and should be given a "charitable death."

Scaraffia argues that this mentality can still be seen in the "writings of many contemporary bioethicists, and of many politicians who support legislative proposals of a euthanasic type." more    

Great Canadian Example Of Pro-Death Spin

Here’s a very good example of pro-death spin, this time from Canada.

Is a dignified death too much to ask?

At 87, Lochan Bakshi’s sharp mind has decided when to free his failing body.

When he dies — sooner rather than later, he plans — he wants his body to be burned, the ashes mixed with garden soil and used to plant a rose bush. When the flower buds, he imagines his grandsons exclaiming, “ ‘Grandpa has come to life.’ That is my reincarnation. What else?”

The retired biology professor has thought hard about death and about the way he wants it to arrive. After all, he’s seen men like himself hunched over in chairs in long-term-care centres, their minds absent, unaware there hasn’t been a visitor for years.

His cousin had a massive stroke that stole his memory and his mind. He would sit in his own mire until the next nursing visit, bathed by his caring wife. “It struck me: why should he be like this? Why not just finish it? He’s just a vegetable,” Bakshi said to her. “ ‘You mean kill my husband? I can’t kill him,’ ” she responded. more

Irish Pro-Death Spin On The Falconer Commission Recommendations

Here’s an Irish piece pretending to be balanced on the assisted suicide/euthanasia front. However, read it closely, and you’ll find that the logic is this: If we have assisted suicide/euthanasia for some, why can’t we have it for all? Pure pro-deather spin.

Proper debate on controversial issue is a matter of life and death

CONTRARY to popular belief, the right to die has been enshrined in Irish case law — but only for those who are physically incapable of voicing their desire to end their own lives.

This week’s recommendation of the UK’s Commission on Assisted Dying, that terminally ill adults should be allowed end their lives with the help of their doctor, has again raised the controversial issue of euthanasia. Having described the current UK law as "inadequate and incoherent", the commission’s year-long review concluded by recommending that those with less than a year to live should be allowed end their lives as long as some stringent guidelines — including, any lethal medication must be self-administered and two independent doctors must be satisfied with the terminal diagnosis — are adhered to. more