Eideard

Excerpts from CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta: No matter how old someone is, or how sick they have been, it still comes as a shock to hear they have died. 83-year-old Jack Kevorkian, Dr. Death himself, died this morning as Bach, his favorite, played over the intercom. I felt an involuntary gasp of air in my throat when I learned of his passing.

Last June, he agreed to sit down with me, and participate in what would be the last interview of his life…

Dr. Kevorkian told me he was afraid to die. “Just like everyone else,” he added. If you sat and listened to him, that wouldn’t seem nearly as ironic as you think. He also said he wasn’t ready to die. He said he needed to warn the world about the perils of an overabundant society, change their views on euthanasia, and help re-establish the glory of the 9th amendment…

I told Jack I hoped to see him again one day. And, I meant it. RIP.

Please read the following interview that Dr. Gupta did with Kevorkian.

CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta interviews Jack Kevorkian

Voters in Zurich overwhemingly rejected on Sunday proposed bans on assisted suicide and “suicide tourism” — foreigners traveling to Switzerland to receive help ending their lives.

Only 15.5 percent of voters in the local referendum backed a ban on assisted suicide, while nearly 22 percent supported a ban on suicide tourism, final results showed. About 200 people commit assisted suicide each year in Zurich.

Assisted suicide has been allowed in Switzerland since 1941 if performed by a non-physician who has no vested interest in the death…

A rise in the number of foreigners seeking to end their lives in Switzerland, and a study showing that more and more people seeking assisted suicides in the country do not suffer from a terminal illness, have provoked heated debate…

Turns out the people raising the debate were noisier than their numbers.

Right-to-die group Exit has agreed rules to govern assisted suicide with prosecutors in Zurich in the hope they might eventually form the basis of national regulation.

Foreigners are not explicitly excluded under the new rules, but a Swiss doctor who prescribes the deadly anesthetic must have met the person twice over a period of time to be sure of their wishes.

Here in the Land of the Free we get to have everyone who believes the religion governing some small portion of their life forbids anyone else from choosing death with dignity. Since our politicians fear the religious even more than they fear honesty – there is little chance of entering into a public dialogue and decision about the topic in most American states.

A retired GP who has been told she will not be charged over allegations she advised a seriously ill woman on how to die has said she has “no regrets” but has admitted she feared the police investigation would put her in “deep, deep trouble”.

Dr Libby Wilson, 84, was the first person to be arrested in connection with an assisted suicide after new guidelines on euthanasia were published by Keir Starmer, the Director of Public Prosecutions. She allegedly spoke to Cari Loder, 48, a multiple sclerosis sufferer, twice on the telephone in the days before she took her own life last year.

Speaking yesterday after the case against her was dropped, Dr Wilson, the founder of Friends At The End (Fate) lobby group, pledged to carry on helping people end their lives. “I have no regrets over what I did and I would do the same thing again.

“I don’t wish to become a martyr to the cause and realise people may try to get me into more trouble. I will have to live with that. I have a conscience and it is perfectly clear.

“My sons and daughters were far more worried than I was. I just could not see how they could put an 84-year-old great grandmother in jail for 14 years for twice speaking to someone on the telephone.

“If I was some little flower it could have finished me off but, thankfully, I’m not and I didn’t lose too much sleep. My main worry was if the police had started going in to Fate. I did think about getting rid of my computer hard drive as it was full of documentation about other cases…

“My main concern is that pro-life campaigners call pretending to be people looking for advice on how to kill themselves. These people may try to trap me and start a new case. That’s a risk I will just have to take.

“I have campaigned for more than 30 years for assisted suicide to be legalised and I will continue to do so.”

Bravo! A brave doctor, a doctor with a conscience and more courage than any ten politicians or priests.

Elderly people should be allowed to end their lives with the help of a doctor even if they are not terminally ill, according to a new campaign group that claims to have widespread support.

The Society for Old Age Rational Suicide, led by a former GP…says that pensioners should have the human right to declare “enough is enough” and die with dignity.

Dr Michael Irwin says he knows of an elderly English woman who is considering taking her life through Dignitas, the Swiss “suicide clinic”, as she is suffering from progressive arthritis and worsening eyesight.

He believes that many more will want to take the same course of action as Britain’s population ages.

The new group has commissioned a national poll that found 67 per cent of those questioned agreed that very elderly and mentally competent individuals should be allowed to receive a doctor’s assistance to die, if they are suffering from health problems but not terminally ill. Only 19 per cent of the 1,009 adults questioned by ICM said they opposed the move while the rest were uncertain.

It opens up a new front in the war to create a right to die in England and Wales, following the high-profile court battle last year that led to unprecedented legal guidelines being published…

Last year a landmark court case won by Debbie Purdy, who has multiple sclerosis, forced the Director of Public Prosecutions, Keir Starmer, QC, to set out exactly when prosecutions would be brought against people who assist another to die..

But the new campaign, SOARS, wants to legalise assisted suicide with the help of a doctor for those who are merely tired of life because of their age and health problems rather than a terminal disease.

Its hope is that a future law would allow two doctors and a legal witness to agree that the patient was mentally competent and not being pressured to die by relatives, then for the elderly person to be provided with the “necessary medication” after a two-month cooling-off period.

Organized religion and most conservative political organizations will reject this measure of individual liberty. For no other reason than they think they should in order to appear moral. Whatever that might mean.

Personally, this is a right I intend to exercise if I ever feel I need to or wish to. It’s just a boatload of bother that I would have to engineer the whole process to be certain those I love aren’t attacked by the state afterwards.

An Australian high court ruled Friday that a quadriplegic man has the right to refuse food and water and can be allowed to die, a rare legal finding that some see as a major victory for right-to-die campaigners.

The ruling means that the nursing facility in which Christian Rossiter has lived since November 2008 cannot be held criminally liable for allowing the patient to die, the Supreme Court of Western Australia said…

Chief Justice Wayne Martin noted…in his order, saying, “This is a case in which a person with full mental capacity and the ability to communicate his wishes has indicated that he wishes to direct those who have assumed responsibility for his care to discontinue the provision of treatment which maintains his existence…”

Australian law gives patients the right to refuse life-saving treatment, but helping someone commit suicide is a crime that can carry a life prison sentence. The Brightwater nursing facility sought the ruling to make sure it would not be held liable if it complied with Rossiter’s request to stop all nutrition and hydration, except to be given enough liquid to make it possible to take pain medication.

Rossiter attended the hearing in a wheelchair, breathing through a tracheotomy tube in his throat. He told the judge he wants to die…

“I can’t move,” Rossiter said in a televised interview this week. “I can’t even wipe the tears from my eyes. And I’d like to die. I’m imprisoned in my own body. I have no fear of death. Just pain.”

Rossiter pointed out in a recent interview with the PerthNow news outlet that he once led an active life.

“It’s a bit sad that the best that Australia can come up with,” Dr. Nitschke said, “is that we can let a person like that starve to death.”

They don’t even have a proper Death Panel in Oz – to satisfy the Australian flavor of Palin loonie.

I agree – of course – with Dr. Nitschke that it’s a shame this brave man can’t choose an easier method to shuffle off this mortal coil. Religious crackpots work very hard at taking away any shred of dignity one might associate with your own death – having to rescue your medical attendants in advance of the Christian juggernaut.

UPDATE: Christian Rossiter has died.

Debbie Purdy and Omar Puente
Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission

A woman with multiple sclerosis has made legal history by winning her battle to have the law on assisted suicide clarified.

Debbie Purdy wanted to know if her husband would be prosecuted if he helped her end her life in Switzerland. Five Law Lords ruled the Director of Public Prosecutions must specify when a person might face prosecution.

Ms Purdy, 46, from Bradford, said she was “ecstatic” at the ruling and she had been given her life back…the Law Lords’ decision was “a huge step towards a more compassionate law”…

“The decision means that I can make an informed choice, with Omar, about whether he travels abroad with me to end my life because we will know exactly where we stand.”

No one has been prosecuted for assisting someone’s death, although the law says they could potentially face 14 years in prison…

Ms Purdy said she would like to see the policy distinguish between “what is acceptable and what isn’t” so people in situations like hers could make decisions about what to do.

The Law Lords also said she had the right to choose how she died, under Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights.

One of those areas where European Law is centuries ahead of the United States.

Another couple decades of battling with the backwards religious institutions that still exert unreasonable control over politicians – if not the state.

Only difference? Pope doesn’t dye his hair

Italy’s government on has passed an emergency decree to keep a woman who is in a vegetative state alive and on a feeding tube, circumventing a high court decision that she be allowed to die.

Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s cabinet passed the decree the day a private clinic was to remove Eluana Englaro’s feeding tube. The 37-year-old woman has been in a vegetative state since a car accident in 1992.

Englaro’s father had won a lengthy court battle to remove the tube, saying it was not his daughter’s wish to remain in a coma.

At a news conference Friday after the cabinet meeting, Berlusconi said that not acting “would make me feel responsible for not coming to the rescue of a person whose life is in danger.”

He said that Englaro “breathes on her own,” that her “brain cells send electric signals” and that she could, “in theory, have a child.”

Berlusconi also said the government would enact the decree even though President Giorgio Napolitano said he would not sign it to make it legally binding.

The Vatican praised the government’s decree. Some center-left politicians and constitutional scholars criticized it.

The politics of opportunism tend to join the same reactionary forces at the hip. Between the Vatican and Berlusconi’s right-wing cadres there is little appreciation of science, reality or intellectual honesty.

UPDATE: While the politicians and the Pope fiddle, life takes its course and Eluana Englaro has died.

A family’s request to cease all medical assistance to a 75-year-old woman in a persistent vegetative state should be granted, a South Korean court has ruled.

Seoul Western District Court ruled Friday that the woman, identified only with the surname Kim, should be taken off life support and have her feeding tube removed as per the family’s request, the Yonhap News Agency said.

The judge’s ruling was unexpected given the fact it marked the first time in South Korea that a removal of life support has been legally approved, the report said. The fact the removal of life support was supported without the patient’s consent made the ruling particularly ground-breaking, Yonhap said.

Bravo!

Daylife/Reuters Pictures

Italy’s Supreme Court provoked the fury of conservatives yesterday by ruling that a father can disconnect the feeding tube that has kept his daughter alive in a coma for nearly 17 years.

In one of the most painfully emotive cases this Catholic country has confronted for years, the court overturned the earlier rejection by an appeal court of the father’s right to end his daughter’s life. The ruling was denounced by conservatives as the legalisation of euthanasia in Italy, but by the father, Beppino Englaro, as “a way out of hell”.

Eluana Englaro was still a teenager in 1992 when she was injured in a car crash which put her into a “persistent vegetative state”, from which she has shown no signs of emerging in the subsequent 16 years. Her father has been fighting for nearly 10 years for the right to remove the feeding tubes that keep her alive in her hospital room in the northern Italian town of Lecco. In a first reaction to the court’s ruling last night, he said: “We live in a state of rights. At last there is a way out of this hell.”

The Supreme Court endorsed the original ruling by a court in Milan in July which accepted that Ms Englaro’s coma was irreversible, and that before the car crash she had stated her preference to die rather than be kept alive artificially.

Apart from the courts, does her family have the right and responsibility to make this decision?

A woman who has multiple sclerosis has launched a landmark legal bid to ensure her husband is not prosecuted for helping her travel abroad to end her life.

Debbie Purdy, 45, who has primary progressive multiple sclerosis, is asking the director of public prosecutions (DPP) to clarify the law in England and Wales. Anyone who helps facilitate suicide faces up to 14 years in prison, although prosecutors have been reluctant to press for the maximum penalty.

Purdy who wants to have the option of travelling to a specialist euthanasia clinic in Switzerland, is worried that her husband, Omar Puente, could be prosecuted if he helps her. She wants clarity on where the DPP would draw the line and decide to prosecute someone who had helped a loved one go abroad to die.

If her husband was liable for prosecution Purdy has said she would have to travel alone to the clinic run by the Swiss organisation Dignitas, and would have to consider going while she was still healthy enough. Purdy, from Bradford, can no longer walk and is gradually losing strength in her upper body.

Perish the thought that any of our bastions of individual freedom in the Western World should be forced to issue an opinion supporting individual rights.

Preparing to die shouldn’t include wasting time fighting the “morality” of some superstitious git.