ProLife Alliance » Euthanasia Articles

Minimal Consciousness case goes to court...

Posted on 19 July 2011.

Today the case of a 53 year old woman with minimal consciousness goes to court for a 10 day hearing. In 2003 ‘M’ suffered brain damage, although she is not in a persistent vegetative state. She responds to touch, can move an arm and can put her tongue in and out. Her mother, who has Alzeimers, has made an application for food and fluid to be...

Whitewashing Assisted Dying...

Posted on 28 June 2011.

On 27th June the Daily Mail reported on the other patient who was mentioned in Terry Pratchett’s documentary ‘Choosing to Die’. Some of us wondered why the documentary didn’t show the death of the second man, Andrew Colgan. We now know why. In the programme ‘Choosing to Die’, although there were two deaths, only one was shown (that of...

Posted on 15 June 2011.

Monday night’s BBC2 programme “Terry Pratchett: Choosing to Die” was even more disgraceful than expected. It breached both the spirit and the letter of WHO guidance: “Don’t publish photographs or suicide notes. Don’t report specific details of the method used. Don’t give simplistic reasons. Don’t glorify...

The legal aspects of palliative care...

Posted on 20 May 2011.

Professor John Keown, the Rose F. Kennedy Professor of Christian Ethics at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics, Georgetown University, Washington, D.C., spoke on May 16th in a House of Lords committee room about the legal aspects of palliative care, to an audience mostly composed of medical personnel. The talk was arranged by the Anscombe Bioethics Centre...

Posted on 19 May 2011.

Last year, assisted dying campaigners asked for a Royal Commission on assisted suicide and were turned down because a House of Lords committee and the Scottish Parliament had recently considered the subject in depth and had rejected attempts to weaken the law. The same campaigners, using money from supporters including Terry Pratchett, to set up a...

Posted on 16 May 2011.

Voters in Zurich took part in a local referendum on assisted dying at the weekend. The main issue at stake was whether non-residents should be able to avail themselves of Swiss facilities to side-step more stringent laws in their own countries. Although there is concern in Switzerland about suicide tourism, the deaths of mentally ill people and scandals...

Euthanasia and the Disabled...

Posted on 11 May 2011.

Members of the ProLife Alliance attended a meeting organised by ALERT and the Resistance Campaign, and hosted by Baroness Campbell of Surbiton, in the House of Lords on May 4th. Lady Campbell has suffered from spinal muscular atrophy since birth and has campaigned for many years for disabled people to be able to live normal lives. She told the meeting...

Posted on 11 April 2011.

Marini McNeilly, a 57-year-old former language teacher, who suffers from locked-in syndrome, has made medical history by conducting and composing music, with the help of a computer system developed by scientists at Essex and Plymouth universities. At London’s Royal Hospital for Neurodisability (RHN), Mrs. McNeilly was already using a system called...

Death of a Euthanasia Activist...

Posted on 6 April 2011.

A recent victim of Dignitas, the suicide provider in Zurich, was Nan Maitland, an 84 year old British woman. She and Michael Irwin, who went with her, were founders of SOARS (Society for Old Age Rational Suicide) which campaigns to allow non-terminally ill elderly people to have help in committing suicide. Liz Nichols of a similar society FATE (Friends...

Posted on 28 January 2011.

Belgian doctors reported in 2008 that three patients who had been euthanased in the last few years had donated organs for transplant. Far from this ringing warning bells at the time, it appears to be becoming the norm. In December 2010, at a conference run by the Belgian Royal Medical Academy, three doctors from the University Hospitals of Antwerp,...

Posted on 2 November 2010.

The ProLife Alliance heartily congratulates Mme. Maryannick Pavageau, who has been awarded France’s highest decoration, the Légion d’Honneur, for her anti-euthanasia activity. 30 years ago, at the age of 29, she had a stroke, and was in a coma for three months. She suffers from Locked-in Syndrome, and is virtually completely paralysed...

Posted on 21 October 2010.

Healthcare Professionals for Change, a group started by Dr. Ann McPherson, sounds an innocuous title until you see that the change they want is the removal of the law which protects patients from being killed. Dominica Roberts of the ProLife Alliance warned that it is frightening for vulnerable people not to be able to trust doctors and nurses. Patients...

Posted on 20 August 2010.

The Times and the Daily Telegraph report today (20/8/10) on the case of Ray Gosling. Mr Gosling claimed in two BBC programmes, East Midlands Inside Story and The Today Programme broadcast in February 2010 that he killed his lover, an AIDS victim, by smothering him to death. The Director of Public Prosecutions, Keir Starmer, states that Ray Gosling...

Posted on 15 March 2010.

The Australian doctor Philip Nitschke, founder of the pro-euthanasia group Exit International’, is today running a series of seminars in Holborn, including one on ‘DIY death’. Nitschke is a well-known lobbyist for the ‘right to die’ movement and has previously courted controversy by giving well publicised ‘how to commit suicide’ classes...

Posted on 2 February 2010.

On Panorama on BBC1 last night Kay Gilderdale defended her decision to assist in taking her daughter’s life and called for a change in the law on assisted suicide. Also on BBC1 delivering the annual Richard Dimbleby Lecture, Sir Terry Pratchett argued for the creation of assisted suicide ‘tribunals’ to assess the cases of those wanting to die....

Posted on 21 January 2010.

A ‘caring and loving’ mother helps her ME-suffering daughter commit suicide by handing her two syringes filled with large doses of morphine. Another ‘caring and loving’ mother gave her brain-damaged son a lethal injection of heroin in order ‘to save him from an agonised existence’. Two similar cases illustrate more than ever why assisted...

Posted on 21 January 2010.

Recent interim guidelines on assisted suicide prosecution have been condemned by the All Party Parliamentary Group on Dying Well. In their response to the consultation on the interim guidelines, the group expresses their fears that by listing factors against prosecution, it could be used as a basis for appealing against convictions if a case doesn’t...

Dutch Regret Euthanasia Legislation...

Posted on 10 December 2009.

The legalisation of euthansia in Holland has resulted in a steep decline in medical care for the terminally ill. Speaking about the phenomenan Dr Els Borst, the former Health Minister who guided the law through Dutch parliament, admits that it was brought in “far too early” without adequately protecting those people who wished to die naturally....

Posted on 24 November 2009.

The testimony of Rom Houben, a misdiagnosed coma victim, has once again cast doubt on the campaign of the pro-euthanasia lobby. Neurologist Steven Laureys, who discovered that Houben’s brain was in fact functioning normally 23 years after he was declared to be in a persistent vegetative state, maintained that this was not a unique case. In a BMC...

Posted on 23 October 2009.

The Liverpool Care Pathway is the recommended management of dying patients. Its supporters claim that it provides clear helpful criteria for assessing whether a patient is at the very end of life, whether further treatment is useful and if so what, whether sedation is needed to prevent pain or discomfort, and so on. The LCP has been carefully...

Posted on 25 July 2009.

It is both sad and strange that the Royal College of Nursing has ceased to oppose assisted dying and adopted a ‘neutral stance’, neither supporting or opposing assisted suicide, given the recent overwhelming rejection of assisted suicide recently in the House of Lords. When a group of pro-euthanasiasts pushed through a similar ‘neutral’...

Sad loss of double suicide...

Posted on 15 July 2009.

The ProLife Alliance defends the right to life from conception to natural death, and is therefore opposed to assisted suicide or euthanasia in any form whatsoever. We are proud of the fact that the United Kingdom has some of the best palliative care specialists and end of life medicine in the world, with hospice care of the highest level. It is extremely...

Posted on 9 July 2009.

The ProLife Alliance welcomes the House of Lords decision on July 7th, to reject, by 194 votes to 141, Lord Falconer’s perverse amendment to the Coroners and Justice Bill. The intention of the Coroners and Justice Bill is to prohibit incitement to suicide. However, euthanasia supporters had tabled an amendment in support of assisted suicide,...

Dr Death promotes suicide...

Posted on 8 May 2009.

The arrival of a Dr Nitschke, nicknamed Dr Death, and his suicide workshop tour of the UK have been widely reported by the media. One of the most disturbing details of the news is that he is deliberately targeting towns with a high proportion of elderly people for his suicide tour. These suicide worshops are only open to people aged over 50, who have...

Ban Dr Death from Britain...

Posted on 19 April 2009.

The People Newspaper has called for Dr Death (Philip Nitschke) to be banned from Britain, after reports that he plans to hold four workshops to tell people how to kill themselves using his £35 kits. Dominica Roberts, of the ProLife Alliance, said: “He is a terrifying person and should be banned. I am amazed they are letting him in the country.” Nitschke...

Posted on 23 March 2009.

Patricia Hewitt, the former Health Secretary, has begun a campaign to “gain the legal right for people to assist their own death”, reports The Times. During her time as Health Secretary she read many accounts of people’s suffering, and was prompted to consider how she would respond in a similar situation of crippling illness. She...

Posted on 15 March 2009.

The Times today reports that the mother of Dan James, the 23 year old man who was paralysed playing rugby and ‘assisted to die’ in Switzerland, has criticised the inadequate care her son received from the NHS, where he was moved instead of immobilised, which is likely to have made his paralysis more severe and contributed to the depression...

Dignitas: dignified death?...

Posted on 25 October 2008.

The Swiss suicide clinic Dignitas has drawn some intense scrutiny this week after facilitating the death of a 23-year old rugby player who suffered a spinal cord injury that left him paralysed. The Times reports that from the lake near the current Dignitas premises, large quantities of bone fragments have been washed up. They are thought to be from...

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