LIFE DIGEST: Assisted-suicide movement marches on
- Dec 15, 2008
The assisted-suicide movement continues to make inroads on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean.
Recent developments in the campaign to legalize physician-assisted suicide have included:
- A Montana district judge ruled Dec. 5 residents of the state have the right to assisted suicide.
- A member of the Scottish Parliament said Dec. 9 she plans to introduce legislation next year that would not only legalize the practice in her country but could make it a right for children 12 and younger.
- An assisted suicide—this one performed in Zurich, Switzerland—was televised for the first time in Great Britain Dec. 10.
“Like the proverbial boiling frog, we are slowly feeling the temperature rise in the assisted-suicide movement, but too few people seem bothered by the heat,” said C. Ben Mitchell, a professor of bioethics and contemporary culture at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in suburban Chicago.
“Make no mistake about it, the legalization of assisted suicide isn’t about a patient’s right to a death free of pain. Patients already have that right, and it is exercised every day in hospitals all over the world,” he said, referring to pain management in dying patients. “Legalized medical killing is about the devolution of medicine from a caring profession aimed at the patient’s good to a consumer-driven commodity purchased from technologists in white coats.
“The only way to turn back the tide is to show that there is a better way,” said Mitchell, a consultant on biomedical and life issues for the Southern Baptist Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission. “Many Christian doctors, nurses and laypersons are modeling a compassionate countercultural alternative to assisted suicide by serving in palliative care and hospice.”
In Montana, judge Dorothy McCarter ruled the state constitution includes “rights of individual privacy and human dignity [that], taken together, encompass the right of a competent terminally [ill] patient to die with dignity.” State Attorney General Mike McGrath asked McCarter Dec. 10 to block enforcement of the decision until the Montana Supreme Court rules on an appeal.
Oregon and Washington are the only states with legalized assisted suicide. In each case, citizens approved the practice in a ballot initiative.
Planned Parenthood of Indiana fires worker in cover-up
Planned Parenthood of Indiana (PPIN) has fired an employee of a Bloomington affiliate who was caught on video tape trying to cover up alleged child sexual abuse.
PPIN President Betty Cockrum announced Dec. 11 the firing of the unidentified health center assistant, saying she violated the organization’s rules on the reporting of abuse, the Associated Press reported. All employees of PPIN’s 35 centers have been trained again on reporting rules since the incident, she said, according to AP.
The employee is shown via an undercover video camera telling a girl who identified herself as a 13 year old impregnated by a 31-year-old man that she will not file a report. Such a report is required by state law. Later on in the video, the PPIN employee tells her how to avoid Indiana’s parental consent law and gives her the name and location of an Illinois abortion clinic where it will be easier to avoid notifying her parents.
The 13 year old, who calls herself “Brianna” on the video secretly recorded during the summer, is actually Lila Rose, a 20-year-old student at UCLA and president of the pro-life organization Live Action. In 2007, Rose posed as a minor and gained video footage of a similar cover-up at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Los Angeles.
The incident was reported by Live Action only weeks after it was reported PPIN was offering gift certificates that can be redeemed for its services, including abortions.
Affiliates of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA), the national organization, performed nearly 290,000 abortions in 2006, the latest year for which statistics are available. PPFA surpassed $1 billion in annual revenue for the first time last year, with more than $336 million of that total coming in grants and contracts from the government.
Egg donation, surrogacy rise as economy wanes
Some American fertility clinics are reporting an upswing in women seeking to donate their eggs or be surrogate mothers amid the faltering economy.
Egg donors typically earn from $3,000 to $8,000, but some agencies advertise a much higher pay day for women with particular traits. An ad in some college newspapers offers $25,000 for a donor who is “100% Jewish with . . . High SAT Scores . . . Attractive, at Healthy Body Weight and Free of Genetic Diseases,” The Wall Street Journal reported Dec. 9.
“Whenever the employment rate is down, we get more calls,” said Robin von Halle, president of Alternative Reproductive Resources in Chicago, according to The Journal. Calls to her agency about egg donation have increased about 30 percent in recent weeks. “We’re even getting men offering up their wives. It’s pretty scary,” she said.
A reproductive specialist in Cleveland, Ohio, reported his roster of egg donors has increased by more than four times, and a Los Angeles lawyer said the normal six-month wait for a surrogate in California has disappeared, according to The Journal.
Carrie Gordon Earll, senior bioethics analyst at Focus on the Family Action, decried the development.
“That goes against every tenet of medical ethics,” she told Focus on the Family Action’s CitizenLink. “Serious complications can come into play, including blood clots, liver and kidney damage, future infertility and even death.
“And even if the risks are minimal, this type of idea enters into creating life outside of the marital union . . . ,” Earll said.
Clinic owner pleads guilty to posing as abortion doctor
The owner of a Southern California abortion chain has pleaded guilty to felony charges after she posed as a medical doctor in order to perform abortions.
Bertha Bugarin, 48, could receive a prison sentence of as many as nine years after entering a guilty plea to felony charges that included practicing medicine without a license and grand theft, The San Diego Union-Tribune reported. Bugarin, who made the latest plea Dec. 4 in a San Diego court, had entered a “no contest” plea to felony charges Dec. 1 in a Los Angeles court. The L.A. court ordered her to pay $7,800 in restitution to 16 former patients, according to the newspaper.
Bugarin performed abortions on several women in February and March 2007, prosecutors said, The Union-Tribune reported. At least nine former patients said she conducted surgical or medical procedures on them, prosecutors said.
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