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Ontario Government’s Expert Advisory Group Wants Euthanasia for Children 12 and under

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(LifeSiteNews) – “A stacked deck” of pro-euthanasia academics has recommended that children 12 years of age or younger be eligible for assisted suicide or euthanasia, and palliative care hospices, religious-based care providers and health professionals must violate their consciences to “aid and abet” state-mandated killing of patients in care.

“It’s pretty awful,” was disability rights advocate Amy Hasbrouck’s reaction to the just-released recommendations of the Ontario government’s grandly-named Provincial-Territorial Expert Advisory Group on Physician-Assisted Dying. Hasbrouck, the director of Not Dead Yet, says the advisory group “obviously didn’t feel it necessary to protect the vulnerable, the handicapped and the elderly.” CONTINUE

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Jahi Mcmath: Biological Father Sues Hospital Claiming Botched Surgery

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(San Jose Mecury News) – The biological father of Jahi McMath has sued an Oakland hospital and the doctor who performed surgery on the girl, who was declared brain-dead more than two years ago after post-surgical complications.

Milton McMath, who was largely estranged from Jahi before her fateful surgery, filed the lawsuit Wednesday, exactly two years after his 13-year-old daughter had nose and throat surgery at UCSF Benioff Children's Hospital Oakland to treat sleep apnea. His lawsuit, which is nearly identical to the claim filed by Jahi's mother, Nailah Winkfield, will likely be consolidated as the complicated case slowly crawls through Alameda County Superior Court, attorneys have said. CONTINUE

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Terri Schiavo Life & Hope Network Joins Texas Right to Life Condemning Actions of Houston Methodist Hospital

Contact: Tom Shakely, Executive Director, Terri Schiavo Life & Hope Network, 855-300-4673, ext 3, [email protected]

PHILADELPHIA, Dec. 15, 2015 /Christian Newswire/ -- The Terri Schiavo Life & Hope Network stands with Texas Right to Life, calling for Houston Methodist Hospital to allow mother of Chris Dunn, Ms. Evelyn Kelly, to speak for Chris so that Chris continues living.

Chris Dunn, 46, and a former EMT, has been in the Houston hospital for more than eight weeks because he collapsed, likely due to a mass on his pancreas. While Chris breathes with assistance from a ventilator, he is conscience and alert. His mother has had to fight for Chris's continued care because Methodist Hospital has invoked the statutory process, found in the Texas Advanced Directives Act, which allows the hospital to override medical directives of a patient and provide only ten days' notice before withdrawing life-sustaining treatment. CONTINUE

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The Coming Euthanasia Bureaucracy

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(NRO) – They say that evil eventually becomes banal. If that is true, that tells us about the future of euthanasia, which a Canadian writer sees as becoming bureaucratized. From, A Major Shift is Happening in the Meaning of Death, by Joseph Brean:”


“Sooner or later, death will become a civil servant. He will operate in the open, during business hours, with a budget and a boss. His work will be humanized and bureaucratized. Death will be licensed, regulated and empowered by law to solve a public policy problem — the unacceptability to certain people of certain types of dying.” CONTINUE

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Severely Injured in 2014, 23-Year-Old Continues Long Journey Toward Recovery

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(MassLive.com) – Chloe Rombach, hit by a car one year ago in a Bridge Street crosswalk, continues her long and still uncertain journey toward recovery at Tewksbury Hospital in the eastern Massachusetts. The 23-year-old former Northampton resident, who suffered traumatic brain injury among other serious injuries, remains in a post-coma vegetative state but has shown some signs of increasing awareness, according to her father, Marblehead resident Edward Rombach.

"It comes in fits and starts," Rombach said during a recent telephone interview with The Republican, shortly after he wheeled his daughter outside to enjoy an unseasonably warm December morning. "She still has a lot of healing to do, and we don't know what the final outcome will be." CONTINUE

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Hospital Files Guardianship Petition for David Christopher Dunn

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(NRO) – A futile care dispute in Texas involving David Christopher Dunn, which Houston Methodist Hospital is seeking to refuse wanted life support, is beginning to garner national attention. First, as I noted over at The Corner, a constitutional challenge to the Texas law has been filed as violating due process, among other claims.

Notably, the Texas Attorney General is not intervening to defend the law. But now, a hospital social worker has filed a petition to have a guardianship established for Dunn. The idea may have been to moot the constitutional question, since that claim was brought in Dunn’s own name. CONTINUE

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FSU Student Survives Crash and Brain Injury, Set to Graduate

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(WCTV) – An FSU student survived a motorcycle wreck - and a traumatic brain injury - and this weekend he will reach another milestone. James Durham will walk across the stage to receive his college diploma. He says he's literally been to heaven and back to get there. "She t-boned me and I remember the impact.

I remember flying off my bike and hitting the pole," Durham said as he described the crash. Durham - who lived in San Antonio, Texas at the time - was riding his motorcycle home that night in September 2011 when a car without its blinker on - turned left - right into him. "No one expected me to wake up. Even the doctors told my family within 24 hours there's nothing that medicine or doctors can do. You just need to pray," Durham said. CONTINUE

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Dr. Death: Philip Nitschke Burns Medical Certificate, Will Promote Euthanasia

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(The Guardian) – The euthanasia campaigner Dr Philip Nitschke has burned his medical practising certificate, and will continue to advise terminally ill patients about how to take their lives. Nitschke has been embroiled in a fight with the Medical Board of Australia since last year, and says that 25 conditions imposed upon him last month were too onerous and violated free speech.

“The conditions the board sought to impose on me (and by extension, all doctors in Australia) amounts to a heavy-handed and clumsy attempt to restrict the free flow of information on end-of-life choice,” he said, vowing to defy the medical board. CONTINUE

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Moving on With Life: Local Boy Continues ‘Amazing’ Recovery After Brain Injury

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(Shelby County Reporter) – Brayden “BB” Butler and his family will never forget the afternoon of Oct. 18, 2014. On the final lap of an afternoon motocross practice, Butler, who was 8 years old at the time, went down on a jump, crashing and falling on his helmet-clad head.

The hours immediately following the crash are a blur for Butler, but his parents remember every excruciating moment they waited to find out whether their son would survive, and if so, how the rest of his life might look. Christie Butler, BB’s mother, had left the track minutes before the crash, but his father, Sean, saw everything, from the moment of impact to his son lying on the track, unconscious and gripped by seizures. CONTINUE

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Texas Hospital Still Fighting to Let Patient Die

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(ChurchMilitant.com) - In the ongoing case of Christopher Dunn, a patient refused life-sustaining treatment by a Texas hospital, justice has been upheld — for the time being. Nearly two months ago, Chris (46) was admitted into Houston Methodist Hospital because he was coughing up blood. Doctors found spots on his liver and pancreas. He has been on a breathing tube and is frequently put under heavy sedation.

On Friday, November 13, a panel of administrators and doctors at the hospital notified Chris' mother that in 10 days they would be withdrawing him from all life-sustaining treatment. Chris' doctor, Adita Uppalapati, had determined that further treatment was futile. Effectively, they were giving Chris until Thanksgiving to live. CONTINUE

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Commemorating Terri Schiavo's 52 Birthday

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A Note from Bobby Schindler

Today, December 3, 2015, my sister Terri would have been 52 years old. Her life—and her chance for rehabilitation—was cut short by a husband, a lawyer, a judge, and ultimately a culture that decided that man rather than God should decide which lives matter.

We work every day at the Terri Schiavo Life & Hope Network in service to the medically vulnerable, providing the sort of medical, legal, emotional, and spiritual support to families in crisis that affirms life, and that, whenever possible, ensures a chance for a meaningful rehabilitation for a loved one. I share many of those stories every day.

In a world that seems to embrace an increasingly hopeless attitude toward the most vulnerable of our brothers and sisters, I take encouragement in having come to know so many advocates for life over the past ten years. The public work of affirming life and hope is important, but the most important work in affirming one another's fundamental dignity—regardless of whatever circumstances we happen to find ourselves in—almost always happens in small, private moments.

I'm happy to be a part of the fight for life with you, and I know Terri is smiling on the work we're doing. She is not forgotten, and her spirit endures as a force for good in a world that's forgetting its ethics. We can build a better world together, so that the next person in Terri's situation is loved and embraced unconditionally.

To everyone fighting for life, thank you.

In service,

Bobby

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Quebec Euthanasia: Pause Before the Hurricane

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(NRO) - A brief pause before the killing agenda to come in Canada. A court has restrained Quebec’s euthanasia law from going into effect. From the Globe and Mail story:

The injunction sought by the Quebec-based Coalition of Physicians for Social Justice and Lisa D’Amico, a handicapped woman, was related to a Supreme Court ruling last February that struck down the prohibition on physician-assisted dying. The high court’s decision gave the federal government 12 months to craft a new law to recognize the right of clearly consenting adults with enduring intolerable physical or mental suffering to seek medical help to end their lives.

But Wesley: That’s good news, right? Yes, but I am afraid it is merely the calm before the hurricane. CONTINUE

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Even Seniors Can Recover from Traumatic Brain Injury

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(PsychCentral) – Even patients over the age of 75 are able to recover from severe traumatic brain injury (TBI), according to a study at the Helsinki University Hospital Department of Neurosurgery in Finland. The study is the first to describe the results of surgically treated elderly patients with acute subdural hematomas (a blood clot on the external part of the brain usually caused by an injury, such as a fall or collision). Age is one of the most significant outcome predictors in patients with TBI.

If the patient is young, an acute subdural hematoma is typically treated through a neurosurgical operation. However, even among young patients, mortality is still common, despite surgical treatment. CONTINUE

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Top Neurologist: Jahi McMath is ‘No Longer’ Brain Dead

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(National Catholic Register) — Several doctors, many pre-eminent ethicists and a California judge all pronounced Jahi McMath “brain-dead” almost two years ago, and a county coroner issued her death certificate. But a document filed this month in the Superior Court of California claims a world-renowned pediatric neurologist has spent hours with the 15-year-old girl and determined that she “no longer fulfills standard brain-death criteria” because she responds to verbal commands.

If proven true, the case will be the first in which a person correctly declared “brain-dead” according to accepted diagnostic criteria was then shown to have improved to no longer meet the conditions of death — and is alive. As such, McMath’s case is potentially explosive in the medical, legal and ethical end-of-life arena, where a host of diagnoses, including “brain-death,” are increasingly untenable. CONTINUE

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The End-of-Life Bureaucracy

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(Wesley J. Smith/Weekly Standard) – The federal technocracy, like the old B-horror-movie monster The Blob, grows by sucking all surrounding life into its amoeba-like digestive system. There are never enough bureaucratic controls or government programs to “incentivize” us—in the jargon—to behave in ways the technocrats think best.

That is why we should look with a jaundiced eye at new legislation that would pay Medicare beneficiaries for preparing an advance medical directive. The Medicare Choices Empowerment and Protection Act is founded on the belief of its authors—senators Chris Coons (D-Del.) and Bill Cassidy (R-La.) along with representatives Diane Black (R-Tenn.) and Mike Thompson (D-Calif.)—that we are not doing a good job accomplishing what the government wants us to do. CONTINUE

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Editorial: Veterans Fighting For Therapy

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(Reflector.com) – Congressman Walter B. Jones Jr. has been working, without success, to gain approval for military doctors to prescribe hyperbaric oxygen therapy for mild traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress disorder.

Although the Defense Department refutes claims of successful treatment, based on its own clinical trials, veterans who have received the therapy through a physician in Louisiana tell a different story. Their stories should convince the Veterans Administration and the Department of Defense to give closer consideration to the value this therapy could have for treating veterans who suffer from combat injuries. CONTINUE

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EXCLUSIVE: Ben Carson Snubs Terri Schiavo’s Brother

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(Daily Caller) – Ben Carson called Terri Schiavo’s brother Friday morning but declined to meet with him or apologize for saying the gargantuan Republican effort to save the Florida woman’s life was “much ado about nothing.” Instead, Carson simply repeated his earlier dubious assertion that the media misquoted him about Schiavo.

“We spoke for a few minutes,” Bobby Schindler told this reporter. “I don’t remember him apologizing. I don’t think starving somebody to death is much ado about nothing.” “He basically repeated his clippings,” said Schindler, referring to Carson’s insistence that a Florida newspaper misrepresented his impromptu comments on the woman whose case continues to galvanize the pro-life community. CONTINUE

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The Dangerously Contagious Effect of Assisted-Suicide Laws

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(Washington Post) – The debate over doctor-assisted suicide is often framed as an issue of personal autonomy and privacy. Proponents argue that assisted suicide should be legalized because it affects only those individuals who — assuming they are of sound mind — are making a rational and deliberate choice to end their lives. But presenting the issue in this way ignores the wider social consequences. What if it turns out that the individuals who make this choice in fact are influencing the actions of those who follow?

Ironically, on the same day that Gov. Jerry Brown (D) signed the bill to legalize physician-assisted suicide in California last month, an important study was published by British scholars David Jones and David Paton demonstrating that legalizing assisted suicide in other states has led to a rise in overall suicide rates — assisted and unassisted — in those states. CONTINUE

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Judge Allows Daughter to Starve Her “Minimally Conscious” Disabled Mother to Death

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(LifeNews.com) – A judge in England decided a landmark case Wednesday, ruling that doctors may stop providing food and water to a mother suffering from multiple sclerosis. The 68-year-old woman’s daughter said her mother was “minimally conscious” and “completely incapacitated,” according to The Daily Mail.

The daughter petitioned the Court of Protection in London to have her mother’s food and water removed, saying that continuing the treatment was against her mother’s wishes. No one involved opposed the daughter’s application, reports state. CONTINUE

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Testing a New Drug for Traumatic Brain Injury

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(Kera News) – Doctors across the country will be trying out a new treatment for traumatic brain injury. UT Southwestern, the National Institutes of Health and other partners announced today that they’ll study a new drug that could help stop bleeding in the brain.

Traumatic brain injuries can happen to anyone – a kid playing football, someone who slips and falls, a driver in a car crash. Over the past decade, the rate of emergency department visits for those injuries surged by 70 percent. But doctors like Ahamed Idris say treatment is still limited. CONTINUE

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Terri's Case: Much Ado About Everything

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(By Bobby Schindler) – Speaking to reporters at a Florida Republican Party conference recently, Dr. Ben Carson, a retired neurosurgeon and candidate for the Republican nomination for President responded to a reporter’s question on whether he believed my sister Terri Schiavo deserved Congress’s intervention to stop her court-ordered 13-day death by starvation and dehydration. Dr. Carson’s response? “I think it was much ado about nothing.”

Not only was his remark offensive to my family, but his words served to marginalize hundreds of thousands of medically vulnerable persons in jeopardy of being killed in the same barbaric manner that Terri was killed by starvation and dehydration. But Dr. Carson didn’t stop there. CONTINUE

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Terri Schiavo’s Family, Pro-Life Leaders ‘Not Completely Convinced’ By Ben Carson’s Explanation

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(LifeSiteNews.com) – Dr. Ben Carson said media reports of his comments about Terri Schiavo were misconstrued - but her family, and some pro-life leaders, are not so sure. This weekend, the Tampa Bay Times reported that Carson called the fight to keep Terri Schiavo alive "much ado about nothing."

After reading his remarks Terri's brother, Bobby Schindler, said that "Dr. Carson owes every pro-life advocate an apology." Operation Rescue President Troy Newman said the comments "disqualified" him from being president. And Rev. Pat Mahoney of the Christian Defense Coalition called his words "insensitive and uncaring." CONTINUE

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Ben Carson Says Trying to Save Terri Schiavo’s Life Was “Much Ado About Nothing”

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(LifeNews.com) – Ben Carson may be a pro-life Republican presidential candidate when it comes to the issue of abortions, but new comments the doctor made over the weekend about the Terri Schiavo case are causing concerns for pro-life voters. Carson thinks the federal and state governments overreached when they attempted to protect Terri Schiavo from a painful 14-day starvation and dehydration death.

Despite the best efforts of pro-life lawmakers in Congress and the Florida state legislature, where lawmakers approved pro-life laws to allow Terri’s family to take their case to federal courts and to allow then-Governor Jeb Bush to try to protect her, Terri’s estranged husband won a court order to euthanize her against her will. CONTINUE

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Equestrian Student Recovering From Brain Injury, Hopes to Ride Again

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(Billings Gazette) – Liz Romine knows this is all real. The horse bucked her and rolled on her before it staggered away and died. Romine landed in the intensive care unit with a traumatic brain injury. At times, she struggled to sit up and walk, her feet unresponsive.

But her recovery has advanced quickly, she can now walk unassisted, and she is now aware of her mother’s presence, and the visits from family and friends. Now the blankness of traumatic brain injury has receded, leaving a fog in its wake. Still, Romine knows what she wants to do. She wants to ride again. CONTINUE

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Germany Opens Door to Culture of Death

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(NRO) –If there is one lesson I have learned in 22 years of anti-euthanasia activism, it is that you can’t compromise with the culture of death. Once it gets its scythe through the door, it becomes like the universe: it never stops expanding. Now, Germany has failed to learn the lesson by legalizing assisted suicide for “altruistic” reasons. From the AP story:

German lawmakers passed a bill Friday allowing assisted suicide for “altruistic motives” but banning the practice in cases where it is being conducted on a “business” basis. CONTINUE

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