Liverpool Care Pathway – And The Creep Of Nazi Bio-Ethics

No...

They weren't joking! It's all been said before.

See here:

Ethicist: OK to kill disabled newborns

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

October 06, 2001

Singer said society condones other efforts by parents to influence their future children's attributes. On some Ivy League campuses, ads in student papers offer big money to entice female students to donate eggs.

"This is clearly the genetic supermarket at an early stage," he said.

If it is all right for people to try to breed children with high IQs and other desirable characteristics, Singer asked, what is wrong with euthanizing newborns who would suffer throughout their lives because of a severe disability? 

Downs syndrome children are prime candidates for his pogrom. In his book, Practical Ethics, Singer writes: “We cannot expect a child with Down syndrome to play the guitar, to develop an appreciation of science fiction, to learn a foreign language, to chat with us about the latest Woody Allen movie or to be a respectable athlete or basketball or tennis player.” (50) 

He suggests that parents may wish to prevent becoming attached to their baby with Down syndrome: “When this can be done at a very early stage of the voyage, we may still have a chance to make a fresh start. This means detaching ourselves from the infant who has been born, cutting ourselves free before the ties that have already begun to bind us to our child have become irresistible.”(51)

What is really frightening is that Giubilini and Minerva go further than even Singer and extend the cull to all new-borns...

The outrageous is gaining plausibility and acceptance. By becoming almost tiresome by its very mention, it is gaining the confidence to be all the more disgraceful, shocking and shameful in its outbursts.

Liverpool Care Pathway – An Innocuous Logic.

Would that this could be simply condemned as a sick joke...

The death-culture has spread its vile tentacles and seeks to permeate every level of our moral being, to overwhelm us until we succumb to what is promoted as its innocuous logic.

Yes, they really did mean to say that...!

Lady Warnock

Baroness Warnock has said that elderly people suffering from 

dementia are “wasting people’s lives” and “wasting the resources of the National Health Service” and should be allowed to die. These are the words of a well-respected commentator on medical ethics.

Lady Warnock’s comments were published in an interview with the magazine of the Church of Scotland, Life and Work, and have been condemned by dementia charities.

Jacques Attali

Jacques Attali, is a leading French intellectual and former President of the European Bank for reconstruction and development.


He has said, "As soon as he goes beyond 60-65 years of age man lives beyond his capacity to produce, and he costs society a lot of money...euthanasia will be one of the essential instruments of our future societies." 

BMA: Let patients die 'to save cash'

Published on Saturday 25 June 2011 13:55THE leader of Scotland's doctors has questioned whether society can afford to pay thousands of pounds to keep terminally-ill people alive for weeks or months when health service budgets are under unprecedented strain.



In The Telegraph:

Martin Amis says euthanasia is 'an evolutionary inevitability'

Martin Amis says the 'primitive' Christian notion of the 'sanctity of life' is holding back debate on assisted suicide 



In The Guardian:

Martin Amis in new row over 'euthanasia booths'

His comments were immediately condemned as "glib" and "offensive" by anti-euthanasia groups and those caring for the elderly and infirm. Supporters of assisted suicide, meanwhile, insisted that a dignified and compassionate end should be on offer to those who are dying.

Alistair Thompson, from the Care Not Killing Alliance, said Amis's views were "very worrying". "We are extremely disappointed that people are advocating death booths for the elderly and the disabled. How on earth can we pretend to be a civilised society if people are giving the oxygen of publicity to such proposals?

In The Telegraph:

Killing babies no different from abortion, experts say

Parents should be allowed to have their newborn babies killed because they are “morally irrelevant” and ending their lives is no different to abortion, a group of medical ethicists linked to Oxford University has argued.

A group of ethicists has argued that killing young babies is no different from abortion Photo: Alamy 

 

By Stephen Adams, Medical Correspondent

1:38PM GMT 29 Feb 2012

The article, published in the Journal of Medical Ethics, says newborn babies are not “actual persons” and do not have a “moral right to life”. The academics also argue that parents should be able to have their baby killed if it turns out to be disabled when it is born. 

Parents should be allowed to have their newborn babies killed because they are “morally irrelevant” say medical ethicists linked to Oxford University.  Writing in the Journal of Medical Ethics, Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva stated, “We take ‘person’ to mean an individual who is capable of attributing to her own existence some (at least) basic value…” As such they argued it was “not possible to damage a newborn by preventing her from developing the potentiality to become a person in a morally relevant sense.” 

In this view — which is rife within international and American bioethics — the unborn, infants (at least through the first few weeks) and those who have lost relevant capacities because of, for example, late-stage Alzheimer’s or severe brain damage are not persons because they have either not yet attained or have lost the capacities of personhood. 

Alberto Guibilini and Francesca Minerva argue that both the fetus and the new-born infant are only potential persons without any interest. 

These are frightening times.   

Liverpool Care Pathway – A Moral Lassitude

A moral lassitude is infecting society...

What follows is an extract from a paper published by the Journal of Medical Ethics:

After-birth abortion: why should the baby live?
Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva

J Med Ethics published online February 23, 2012
doi: 10.1136/medethics-2011-100411


ABSTRACT
Abortion is largely accepted even for reasons that do not
have anything to do with the fetus’ health. By showing
that (1) both fetuses and newborns do not have the
same moral status as actual persons, (2) the fact that
both are potential persons is morally irrelevant and (3)
adoption is not always in the best interest of actual
people, the authors argue that what we call ‘after-birth
abortion’ (killing a newborn) should be permissible in all
the cases where abortion is, including cases where the
newborn is not disabled.

CONCLUSIONS
If criteria such as the costs (social, psychological, economic) for
the potential parents are good enough reasons for having an
abortion even when the fetus is healthy, if the moral status of
the newborn is the same as that of the infant and if neither has
any moral value by virtue of being a potential person, then the
same reasons which justify abortion should also justify the
killing of the potential person when it is at the stage of
a newborn.

It is an old ploy to keep floating an idea that, thereby, it may cease to appear so novel and extreme.

Thus does the outrageous gain plausibility and acceptance, by becoming almost tiresome by its very mention.

It slips in under the radar, a fifth column of ideas that are no longer foreign to our concepts of right and wrong simply because they have permeated our very consciousness and infected our moral outlook, a dark cancer in our soul.

But, really, can they be serious about this? It’s a sick joke… surely!

This is infanticide.

Liverpool Care Pathway – A Fatal 'Diagnosis'

Implementation of the LCP protocols require that a diagnosis of 'dying' first be made. It is well documented that, under normal circumstances, misdiagnosis is more common than is commonly accepted to be the case. A misdiagnosis in implementation of end of life protocols such as LCP may prove fatal!


This from The State Journal Register - The Oldest Newspaper in Illinois -

Medical misdiagnoses can have fatal consequences

BY DEAN OLSEN
THE STATE JOURNAL-REGISTER

Published June 26, 2011 @ 6 a.m. 


Stephen Reindl told his mother what he thought would be his final goodbyes as she struggled with pneumonia and a blood infection the day after Thanksgiving.

Mary Reindl had been taken to Memorial Medical Center in late November after she broke her leg in her Taylorville home. At 78, the longtime smoker and retired state Department of Revenue employee had come to the hospital with labored breathing and abdominal bloating that was getting worse, her son said.

Doctors reviewing her case suggested Mary Reindl had fewer than 24 hours to live, and that her condition was the result of advanced lung cancer and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, Stephen Reindl said. After he talked with Memorial staff and his mother's doctors, she was taken off oxygen, and her pain medication was increased.

"They told me there was nothing more they could do for her," said Stephen Reindl, 51. "It tore me up."

Then the case was reviewed by Dr. Thomas Shanahan, a radiation oncologist who bucked what he called "the assumption bandwagon" by Mary Reindl's other doctors and fought to treat her for a condition that had prevented her bowels from emptying.

What happened in the next days showed the potential for medical error in complex cases such as this. It also showed how one doctor's vigorous - some say abrasive - fight to counter an established course of treatment ultimately led to Mary Reindl's recovery and how questions were raised over how the doctor advocated for his patient.

Was this a case of doctors getting on "the assumption bandwagon," as Shanahan says, or was this a case in which the complexities of treatment clouded an alternative diagnosis? It's hard to know for sure, because the Springfield Clinic doctors who treated Mary Reindl wouldn't speak to The State Journal-Register.

Liverpool Care Pathway – A 'Quality Control' Document

Implementation of the LCP protocols require that a diagnosis of 'dying' first be made.

In the following post, blogged on 14 March 2012, no such diagnosis of 'dying' has been made; the decision to implement the LCP protocols is reached solely on an assessment of the patient's condition and perceived quality of life and, as has been confirmed elsewhere in these pages by Dr. Pullicino and others, is - put plainly and simply - euthanasia.

Sad times

My mum had a massive stroke a couple of days ago. The doctors were amazed she survived it, I'm not sure it's a good thing that she has. I feel bad about thinking this, as I know her will to live is very strong, even though she has many serious health issues. However, her quality of life has been poor at best for the past couple of years, she's elderly, frail and this seems to be the final straw. The stroke has left her unable to speak or swallow and paralysed down her right side, although her doctor says she can hear. At the moment she's kept hydrated with a drip and food comes through a tube in her nose and the only other treatment seems to be time. They say the next few days will be crucial.

My fear is that she's afraid and anxious (which she is at the best of times), locked in her body and unable to communicate how she feels. Yesterday she developed a nasty infection, so was given constant oxygen, a course of antibiotics, another drug to bring her heart-rate down, and she was attached to a monitor giving out constant readings. Funny how you stare at a screen even though you have no way of interpreting the data. It doesn't actually tell me the things I really want to know like how she's feeling, is she frightened, can she hear me, will she get better? The only thing I can be relatively sure of are my feelings of inadequacy and powerlessness to help.

The future seems so uncertain right now. Even though like all mothers and daughters we've had our ups and downs, the prospect of life without my mother makes me very sad. There would be no-one to share stories about growing up in the backstreets of Bolton in the 1950s, about life working in the cotton mills, about my beloved grandmother, who died when I was six. When we've seen her recently, one of the best ways of engaging her was to ask about her childhood, life in the war, other members of the family etc. Her longterm memory was still good and we both enjoyed these chats - they were one of the few things lately that could bring the old sparkle back to her eyes.

I keep telling myself it's the natural rhythm of life and everyone's got to die sometime. It's just that since she came to York to be closer to us about five years ago, whenever I've thought of her dying, I always imagined it to be in her bed at home, feeling secure with the people she loves around her. This is no criticism of the staff at the acute stroke unit, who couldn't have been more kind and caring. Yesterday she had Tristan and Rowan two of her three grandchildren at her bedside, plus Rowan's wife, Nicky and Philip and me. Today Felix is coming from Bristol, and it's at times like these when you really appreciate your family - it's enormously comforting for me to know that Lily's surrounded by people who love her.

The doctor told me last night that if there's no visible signs of improvement by this morning then the plan is to implement the Liverpool Care Pathway. As I understand it, this means that all treatment except palliative care will be discontinued. My mother will be cared for, made comfortable but she will not be given oxygen, drugs, drips etc so that hopefully she will be able to have a peaceful and dignified death. I'm told this is not a one-way street and that if she rallies then therapy can be resumed, but sadly at the moment this doesn't seem likely.

Liverpool Care Pathway – When The Law Is Not The Law

An article By Cristina Odone in The Telegraph argues that those responsible for implementing the letter of the law are not enforcing the letter of the law and that, quite plainly and simply, the law is no longer the law –

Britain has legalised assisted suicide when no one was looking

By Cristina Odone Politics Last updated: September 5th, 2011 

 

I read the splash in The Times today: prosecutors in this country are turning a blind eye to cases of assisted suicide. The number of incidents where someone helps a friend or relative take their lives is rising; but no one is being prosecuted.

I didn't need The Times to tell me that assisted suicide is, for all intents and purposes, legal. When I researched assisted suicide for the Centre for Policy Studies just over a year ago I could see the trend was underway: yes, the police was often questioning those friends and relatives who had returned from the Dignitas clinic in Switzerland where they'd helped their loved ones do away with themselves (and helped turn Dignitas founder, Dr Ludwig Minelli, into a milionaire); but the cases were always shelved. Keir Starmer, the Director of Public Prosecutions, had issued guidelines that spelled out clearly that it was not in the public interest to prosecute (or even investigate) cases of assisted suicide. "We're losing this battle" a prominent campaigner against assisted suicide confessed, off the record. "Public opinion is against us."

He was right: people are terrified of dying in the hostile environment of a hospital, of losing dignity because of a debilitating disease such as motor neurone, or even just old age. Our culture has become obsessed with health and youth: nothing else will do. If a little pill can take us out of the misery of brittle bones, immobility and incontinence, then let's pop it.

But here's a thought: what if, when you are 70, a bit frail, a bit needy, someone else decides that life would be a lot easier without you around? They can let you know, subtly, quietly, that their happiness and fortune would benefit a great deal from your speedy exit. They can pull at your heart strings and leave you thinking that, really, you owe them this. That's when legalising assisted suicide turns tricky: because "suicide" in these cases is a euphemism. It's murder.

This is a compelling argument to beware and to be aware of the inherent dangers involved in permitting this practice to proceed unchecked. It must, surely, be the case that this taking of life is an act of premeditated murder.

In her article, Cristina Odone discusses the scenario of a person’s conscious decision to end their life for reasons that to continue to live their life would be an unbearable prospect or that their life is simply no longer worth living. But what of cases whereby that decision is reached not by the persons themselves but by a medical team on their behalves and without their knowledge or the knowledge of loved ones and family – or even with their knowledge?

Such decisions taken under the LCP protocols permit such acts to proceed with impunity and are given the full protection of the law. The LCP is a legal document. Thus is the weight and the force of the law circumvented and thwarted and an act of killing is no longer an act of murder. Put quite plainly and simply, the law is no longer the law.

Liverpool Care Pathway - "Ban The LCP"

The 'slippery slope' is in place and functioning. It is called the Liverpool Care pathway. 

It is not scientifically possible to diagnose impending death as the LCP purports to do.  The LCP is instead an assessment of the perceived quality of life of the patient by the medical team and as such is euthanasia

Dr. Patrick Pullicino

This from The Telegraph:


Terminally ill grandmother 'left to starve' by doctors

Under NHS guidance introduced in England, medical staff can withdraw fluid and drugs from dying patents and many are put on continuous sedation until they pass away. But this approach can also mask signs of improvement, it has been argued.

Miss Ball, who had been looking after her mother before she was admitted to the Conquest hospital, Hastings, East Sussex, on Jan 11, said she had to fight hospital staff for weeks before her mother was taken off the plan and given artificial feeding.

Miss Ball, 42, a carer, from Robertsbridge, East Sussex, said: “My mother was going to be left to starve and dehydrate to death. It really is a subterfuge for legalised euthanasia of the elderly on the NHS. ”

Be not complacent, therefore, but speak up and speak out. Those who fall victim to this protocol may not, but those they leave behind them whose sorrow gels with an anger in their hearts that such events might befall them and snatch their loved-ones away in such terrible and unthinkable circumstance cry out in outrage!


This post on the Care2 LCP petition site:


13:47, Mar 06, Mr. Peter Dowling, United Kingdom
You can tell a lot about a society by the way it treats its old people, the very young and the very sick. I was born very sick and one day I'll die, hopefully when I'm very old.Hopefully the same spirit of humanity and compassion that welcomed me into the world will see me out of it and into the next. BAN THE LCP