Belgium and Netherlands are Euthanizing Mentally Ill Patients and Harvesting Their Organs
Latest Pro Life news. We must keep praying the rosary to end this system/culture of death.
Wesley Smith
This isn’t happening here–yet.
But many in organ transplant medicine and bioethics want permission to kill the profoundly cognitively disabled for their organs, either by lethal injection and then harvesting, or by the process itselfWhere it is inevitable that an incapacitous patient is going to die—and specifically when it has been agreed through the courts that a patient in a PVS is going to have CANH [tube-supplied sustenance] withdrawn, it could be in a patient’s best interests to have a drug that would stop their heart and to have vital organs donated to a family member, acting as a means to the end of saving another, much as the mother would be doing in running out on the road to save her son.As I wrote above, this isn’t fringe thinking but of a kind being proposed continually in the world’s major professional journals.
By extension, it could also be in the patients best interests to donate their organs to someone else, if that was consistent with their previously expressed wishes. (3) The current practice of withdrawing CANH from patients in PVS or minimally conscious state—with the inevitable consequence of death—is ethically inferior to actively ending life with a drug that would stop the heart.
The ‘act’ rather than the omission would allow families to be present at the death of their loved one and obviate the potential for the physiological signs seen with starvation and dehydration; it would negate the (although tiny) possibility that the individual suffers during withdrawal of CANH, rather than addressing this with sedation and analgesia as is currently the case.
And it would allow those who had previously expressed a desire to donate their organs to do so allowing their altruistic desires to be respected as part of a wider interpretation of best interests.
I also hasten to repeat that killing for organs as proposed in this article isn’t happening in organ transplant centers at this time–except in Belgium and Netherlands that have coupled lethal injection euthanasia of the disabled and mentally ill with organ harvesting.
Light is the best disinfectant. The best way to make sure that killing and harvesting never spreads generally to the USA and other countries is to expose these pernicious ideas every time they are proposed in prominent professional journals.
Dr. Paul Byrne "Organ Harvesting & System of Death"
Obama Wants to Force States to Fund Planned Parenthood Abortion Biz
If only the Obama administration would defend the nation as boldly as it defends Planned Parenthood. The White House has just proposed new mandate that would prevent states from blocking Title X funding for “family planning services” (aka pro-abortion companies). Judging by the bill’s language, Planned Parenthood is set to be one of the rule’s biggest benefactors.
“Title X serves women, men, and adolescents to enable individuals to freely determine the number and spacing of children,” the rule reads. “By law, services are provided to low-income individuals at no or reduced cost. Services provided through Title X-funded health centers assist in preventing unintended pregnancies and achieving pregnancies that result in positive birth outcomes.”The law goes on to explain that Title X funding is prohibited from going toward abortion services except in rare cases, but any federal funding toward Planned Parenthood, which performs over 300,000 abortions a year, should cause concern for the pro-life community.
Rep. Diane Black (R-TN) told LifeNews.com that this latest HHS mandate smells like a political “stunt.”
“This latest stunt from President Obama’s Department of Health and Human Services should surprise absolutely no one,” Rep. Diane Black told LifeNews.com
“We’ve known all along that the Obama Administration will go to untold lengths to protect its friends in the big abortion industry. After all, this Administration has previously used backdoor maneuvers to line Planned Parenthood’s pockets with Obamacare navigator grants and praised the abortion provider’s ‘high ethical standard’ even after it was caught trafficking in baby body parts,” Black said.
Pro-abortion Justice Ginsburg to appear at Notre Dame events
Ruth Bader Ginsburg, one of the U.S. Supreme Court’s most pro-abortion and gay “marriage” justices, is scheduled for two appearances next week at the University of Notre Dame.
Advocates of Catholic identity at Notre Dame and other Catholic colleges expressed concern and criticism over the university hosting Ginsburg.William Dempsey, president of the Board of Directors of the Sycamore Trust, a group of Notre Dame alumni, isn’t as troubled over her scheduled “conversation with law students,” calling it “unexceptionable.”
“That will be Notre Dame functioning as a university,” Dempsey said.
Ginsburg’s general appearance at the university, however, is another matter, where Dempsey expects her to be publicly lauded despite her support for abortion and homosexual “marriage,” both of which violate Catholic Church teaching, and despite the justice’s opposition to religious liberty, such as in the Hobby Lobby case.
“The Justice’s appearance thereafter in the Purcell Pavilion before what will be a very large audience — ticket distribution has been suspended — will plainly be something quite different,” Dempsey told LifeSiteNews. “It will be a celebratory appearance in which the Justice will be fulsomely praised and warmly applauded.”
“That will be Notre Dame functioning as an admirer of one of the country’s most influential supporters of abortion and same-sex marriage and influential opponents of religious liberty,” he continued. “That is to say, as with Notre Dame’s recent award of the Laetare Medal to Vice President Joe Biden, it will be Notre Dame proclaiming once again that neither secular academe nor anyone else opposing the Church on these vital issues ought to hold Notre Dame’s professed Catholicism against it.”
Ginsburg’s “conversation” with Notre Dame law students will be Tuesday, September 13, according to the university’s website. The event is scheduled for an hour in the middle of the school day at an on-campus courtroom. Ginsburg is slated to “talk with students about a variety of issues” at the event moderated by a Notre Dame associate law professor who also directs its Center for Civil and Human Rights.
Ginsburg will also “share a conversation with the university community” the night before, “engag(ing) in a dialogue on a wide range of issues” with Notre Dame alum and Trustee and U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Ann Claire Williams. As of August 31, ticket reservations for the two-hour September 12 event sponsored by the Office of the University President, Notre Dame Law School and Notre Dame Student Government group were suspended because of high demand.
Appointed in 1993 by Bill Clinton, Ginsberg has a history of open and ardent support for abortion and homosexual “marriage.”
The justice presided over a homosexual “marriage” for two men last year, at least her fourth such ceremony, and one that took place between the time Ginsburg and her colleagues on the Supreme Court heard arguments and rendered a decision in the June 2015 Obergefell case redefining marriage.
In a 2009 New York Times interview on abortions and government-funded healthcare, Ginsburg said Medicaid should cover abortions, and that she had originally thought Roe v. Wade would enable such coverage so as to control the population of groups "that we don't want to have too many of." Three years later, she later backpedaled on the statement.
Last year, she referred to pro-life laws regulating the abortion industry as a “crying shame” for purportedly making abortion inaccessible to poor women.
Cardinal Newman Society Editor Adam Cassandra sees issues with both campus appearances, telling LifeSiteNews, “Obviously, there are Catholic identity concerns in that Justice Ginsburg has been very outspoken, especially recently, in her public advocacy for abortion and same-sex ‘marriage’ in opposition to Church teaching — which isn’t mentioned in Notre Dame’s news release about these ‘conversations.’”
“It’s unclear if any representative of Notre Dame will be willing and able to adequately challenge her on such topics should they come up,” Cassandra stated. “Simply leaving it to one or two students to explain why Justice Ginsburg is wrong on these important moral issues would be abdication of the Notre Dame’s responsibilities as a Catholic university.”
“But this is the same university that just awarded Vice President Joe Biden its highest honor for an American Catholic despite decades of public opposition to Church teaching,” he continued, “so it’s not likely the incidence of scandal is something the current Notre Dame administration would care about now.”
“Still,” he concluded, “Notre Dame continues to be a Catholic university, and we should expect that every official action of the university is in accord with its Catholic identity, per Ex corde Ecclesiae.”
Issues with Notre Dame’s Catholic identity have abounded for decades, but more recently with criticism earlier this year of Notre Dame’s choice to honor pro-abortion and homosexual “marriage” Vice President Joe Biden with its annual award of the Laetare Medal to an American Catholic in recognition of outstanding service to the Church and society. University president Holy Cross Father John Jenkins accused critics of acrimony and intransigence.
The Notre Dame president saw fit at the time to renew his continual defense of Notre Dame’s 2009 honoring of pro-abortion Barack Obama with an honorary degree and featuring him as a keynote speaker, the controversy occurring in spite of objection from 83 cardinals, bishops, and archbishops, among them Notre Dame’s local ordinary, and a 367,000-signature petition.
Last year, a prominent priest-professor was compelled to back out of a project providing Notre Dame students information to help ensure they get an authentic Catholic education at the university
Notre Dame denied official recognition in 2014 for a student group dedicated to promoting traditional marriage at the same time it had officially sanctioned a student group for homosexuals.
And while other Catholic entities have fought the federal government in court to preserve their Catholic principles, the university announced in 2014 it would willingly comply with the immoral HHS contraception mandate, saying as well that year it would offer employee benefits to “same-sex spouses.”
Back in 2006, the University hosted the vulgar “Vagina Monologues” on campus.
Assisted suicide on November ballot in Colorado
Coloradans will vote on whether to legalize physician-assisted suicide in November.
If passed, the Colorado End of Life Options Act would allow doctors to prescribe lethal drugs to patients who have been diagnosed with a terminal illness and have been told that they have six months or less to live.Patients would not be asked to undergo a mental health examination. The law would require two doctors to agree that a patient over age 18 is in the final stages of a terminal illness.
The “Yes” campaign supporting the ballot initiative is supported by Compassion & Choices and the Compassion & Choices Action Network. Compassion & Choices is the Planned Parenthood of the euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide lobby; it was formerly the Hemlock Society and was a key force behind the much-publicized suicide of Brittney Maynard.
The Colorado Catholic Conference is promoting a coalition urging Coloradans to vote “No” on Prop 106. The coalition maintains that the proposed law is “fatally flawed” because it does not take into account the possibility that doctors may misdiagnose a patient’s life expectancy, it does not require the involvement of a psychiatrist or psychologist, and it makes it “too easy for big healthcare companies and greedy heirs to financially exploit assisted suicide.”
“If you face a potentially life-ending disease, [the law would allow] you to choose suicide on the basis of the opinion of any old doctor, even one that has no experience with your disease or illness,” the coalition warns.
The Archdiocese of Denver provides information on its website about the threat assisted suicide poses to the state’s vulnerable. It urged Catholics not to sign the petition putting assisted suicide on the ballot.
