Featured Speaker Professor Theo Boer, pictured below.
Introductory comments by Mark Komrad, MD, below.Please click HERE to join: Password: 089934, check your time zones listed below.
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Dr. Komrad:
Featured Speaker Professor Theo Boer, pictured below.
Introductory comments by Mark Komrad, MD, below.Please click HERE to join: Password: 089934, check your time zones listed below.
* * *
Dr. Komrad:
By Gabrielle Peters (article excerpt).
“On the question of religious hospitals, despite being a lesbian couple, Patricia and I would tolerate life-size crucifixes in the treatment room if it meant being safe from MAID.” ~ Catherine Frazee, (pictured here).*
Disabled people often talk about being made invisible. This feeling is particularly striking around issues that are specific to us like MAID, "Medical Assistance in Dying." The lobbyists and proponents for Canada’s MAID regime routinely mischaracterize or, more often, omit mention of disabled people or our reasons for opposition entirely.
https://www.concordmonitor.com/NH-Senate-kills-MAID-55151269
After months of intense public debate, with Granite Staters on both sides of the legislation that would allow medical aid in dying [meaning assisted suicide, physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia], packing the room at every public hearing, the Senate voted on Thursday to kill the bill [HB 1283] ....
The bill, which was struck down in the senate with a vote of 17-7 and referred to an interim study, proposed granting individuals aged 18 and above, diagnosed with a terminal illness and a prognosis of six months or less, and having sound mental capacity, the option to end their lives without suffering from the disease. ...
By Alex Schadenberg
Life expectancy for Canadians has dropped for at least three straight years from 2019 to 2022.
The drop in life expectancy also occurred in the US during Covid, but life expectancy rebounded in the US in 2022, whereas in Canada life expectancy has remained a year lower.
Based on the sheer number of euthanasia deaths in Canada, and the fact that Canadians are not required to be terminally ill in order to be killed by euthanasia, deaths by euthanasia have strongly affected Canada’s death rate resulting in the average Canadian dying one year earlier than in 2019.
I, JEANETTE HALL (pictured with her son), declare as follows:
1. I live in Oregon where assisted suicide is legal. Our law was enacted in 1997 via a ballot measure that I voted for.
2. In 2000, I was diagnosed with cancer and told that I had 6 months to a year to live. I knew that our law had passed, but I didn’t know exactly how to go about doing it. I tried to ask my doctor, Kenneth Stevens MD, but he didn’t really answer me. In hindsight, he was stalling me.
3. I did not want to suffer. I wanted to do our law and I wanted Dr. Stevens to help me. Instead, he encouraged me to not give up and ultimately I decided to fight the cancer. I have both chemotherapy and radiation. I am so happy to be alive!
May 3, 2024
Last November, Not Dead Yet (NDY) filed a Public Comment on HHS/OCR Proposed Section 504 Healthcare Regulations. This week, the Department of Health and Human Services announced the finalization of the new regulation prohibiting disability discrimination in healthcare under Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act.
While the primary focus of our public comment was the denial of life-sustaining healthcare treatment based on negative disability biases, we mentioned the issue of equality in suicide prevention as well, for example, here:
As HHS has indicated in its discussion of the proposed rule, biases about the impact disabilities have on “quality of life” are endemic among medical professionals. One manifestation of these discriminatory attitudes is the failure to treat suicidal depression in people with disabilities, including older individuals, although other people with suicide ideation are routinely offered suicide prevention services.
By Amanda Prestigiacomo, Jan 9, 2020 DailyWire.com
By Margaret Dore, Esq., MBA
Consideration of the pending climate change petition is outside of the jurisdiction of the PSC, set forth here: https://psc.mt.gov/
In the event that providing such jurisdiction would be advisable, it would be up to the Montana Legislature to enact appropriate legislation regarding same.
Without such legislation, addressing the pending climate change petition is ultra vires, meaning beyond the scope of the PSC's scope of authority.
The Commission has no authority to go forward.
Going forward is a waste of our taxpayer dollars.
Senator Catherine Blakespear has removed proposed Senate Bill 1196, seeking to expand assisted suicide and euthanasia in California, from consideration prior to its first hearing.
"At this point, there is a reluctance from many around me to take up this discussion, and the future is unclear,” Blakespear said in a statement. “The topic, however, remains of great interest to me and to those who have supported this bill thus far.”
Senator Susan Eggman, who authored the original act in 2016, commented that pushing forward now would create a risk of pushback. She stated:
Stephen Mendelsohn (pictured here): "Meaning she supports further expansion, just not this much this fast if it will cause a backlash and help our side."
This letter is filed on behalf of Not Dead Yet, a national disability organization headquartered in New York with members in California. We oppose the SB 1196 amendments to the California End of Life Option Act for several reasons.
ELIGIBILITY: First and most importantly, the proposed amendments provide for a greatly expanded eligibility for receiving a lethal prescription, removing the current provision based on a “terminal” diagnosis expected to lead to a natural death within six months. The SB 1196 amendment makes millions more people eligible, people with chronic conditions and disabilities who are nowhere near the “end of life” except for their proposed eligibility for assisted suicide.
By Dr. Kevin Garner*
I am writing as a medical doctor with board certifications in internal medicine, hospice and palliative medicine, and addiction medicine. I work as a hospital physician, a hospice consultant, and provide primary care to an underserved population suffering from mental illness and addiction. Due to the Illinois Senate’s recent efforts to legalize “medical aid in dying” (aka, physician assisted suicide or euthanasia), I feel compelled to voice the opinion of many in the medical community regarding our opposition to empowering medical professionals to prescribe death.
The bill [SB 3499] is based on several flawed assumptions. Firstly, it overestimates the accuracy of a physician’s ability to predict a patient’s death within six months. Over the years, I have witnessed numerous patients who, despite meeting the six-month prognosis criteria for hospice care, have survived well beyond this period. Published studies confirm the high variability of physician prognostication.
By Alex Schadenberg,
Executive Director, Euthanasia Prevention Coalition
On March 22, 2024 a proposal for legalizing euthanasia and assisted suicide in Jersey was released in preparation for a debate on the issue on May 21, 2024.
The proposal claims to be limited to people in certain circumstances but upon further examination, the proposal is not limited to terminally ill people and the definitions within the proposal would open the door to a Canadian style euthanasia law.
When Not Dead Yet activists joined me in attending Jack “Dr. Death” Kevorkian’s trial in the late 1990s, Hemlock’s executive director Faye Girsh was there supporting him. Two thirds of his body count consisted of people with non-terminal disabilities. Girsh also advocated eligibility for people with cognitive disabilities and dementia, with or without consent. Leaders also advocated active euthanasia and “mercy killing.”
Dr. Sonu Gaind, [pictured right] head of the psychiatry department at Sunnybrook Hospital, said he is concerned about what the surge in medically assisted deaths & [what it] "says about our society.”
The number of Canadians ending their lives through medically assisted death has grown at a speed that outpaces every other nation in the world.
As Canada is poised to expand eligibility criteria under medical assistance in dying (MAID) legislation, data from all 11 countries where the controversial end-of-life treatment exists shows Canada is the fastest-growing adopter in history, an analysis by the Investigative Journalism Bureau and the Toronto Star has found.