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Deathly Quiet:.(euthanasia)(Brief Article)(Statistical Data Included)
The first of this month, April 1, 2002, marked the official legalization of euthanasia in the Netherlands. With the enactment of the Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide Control Act, doctors who "terminate" their patients may do so according to statute. But it is widely known that for the last 20 years Dutch physicians have been routinely dispatching their patients with impunity. Therein lie both a lesson and a warning for us.
We are well aware that the euthanasia movement seeks to change the laws that currently protect the medically and emotionally vulnerable, but often their methods are to first skirt and violate those laws long before they change them. And that is exactly what is happening in the United States today.
Throughout the United States, physicians who support euthanasia are routinely utilizing a special form of "terminal sedation," not as a means of pain control, but with the explicit intention of causing death -- frequently for incompetent patients who have never asked to die. This is routinely being used on patients who are not in immediate danger of dying, but are in other ways considered "incurable" or "hopeless." (See, for example, the case of Robert Wendland in California. NRL News, June 2001, p. 1.)
Essential to this approach is the mandatory withdrawal of hydration. It is a form of non-voluntary euthanasia that is particularly difficult to monitor. David Orentlicher, a pro-euthanasia physician, stated in the New England Journal of Medicine, "Terminal sedation seems consistent with accepted practices E however terminal sedation is tantamount to euthanasia, or a kind of slow euthanasia." (NEJM, Vol. 337, No. 17:1237)
Orentlicher, a physician/"ethicist"/advocate, has made a point of traveling the nation instructing sympathetic physicians not to bother with the law or attempts to change it. Euthanasia can safely be practiced under the guise of terminal sedation. "Just do it," he told the California Conference on Physician Assisted Suicide.
Similarly, Robert Brody, chair of the Ethics Department at the University of California San Francisco Medical Center (and a board member of the pro-euthanasia group Compassion in Dying), instructs his student physicians that "terminal sedation" is an acceptable and appropriate form of "near euthanasia."
But Dr. Rex Greene, a California oncologist and advocate for the medically vulnerable, is alarmed at the hijacking of aggressive sedation.
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Source: HighBeam Research, Deathly Quiet:.(euthanasia)(Brief Article)(Statistical Data Included)