The Spoof: Euthanasia Man Wanted to Live

euthanasia, humor, Our News & Commentary Blog, satire, Switzerland

The Spoof is a web publication specializing in satire and humor. Quality-wise, I’ve found it to be kind of hit-and-miss, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Edgy humor can sometimes miss the mark – or at least end up not hitting everyone who reads it as funny.

Spoof writer MonkeyInTheBath decided last year’s seemingly never-ending stories about elderly, ill and disabled Brits going on one-way Swiss suicide trips were overdue for some satirical treatment:

Euthanasia man wanted to live

A man was killed by his family because they believed he wanted euthanasia to end his suffering.

Mr Dan Kilmeov was taken by his family to a clinic Switzerland where doctors administered life-ending medicine, more commonly known as poison.

It is thought that Mr Kilmeov’s wife misinterpreted a comment he made, when he said “Oh, I could die for a curry right now”. Mrs Kilmeov immediately booked flights to Switzerland and had her husband killed. She had help from the euthanasia promotions company, DignityMyAss.

There’s more to the article, but you should go read the rest of it here.

This article was published in early December. I can’t wait to see if MonkeyInTheBath or some other Spoof writer tackles the latest about the accusations of profiteering leveled against Dignitas (aka “DignityMyAss”). –Stephen Drake

Seattle Weekly – “Terminal Uncertainty”

assisted suicide, media coverage, Our News & Commentary Blog, professional accountability, research, safeguards, Washington state

Just out today, the Seattle Weekly has an in-depth article exploring the uncertainties surrounding a medical prognosis of having six-months to live and its implications for impending legislation for legalization of assisted suicide in Washington state.

From the article:

The law has deeply divided doctors, with some loath to help patients end their lives and others asserting it’s the most humane thing to do. But there’s one thing many on both sides can agree on. Dr. Stuart Farber, head of palliative care at the University of Washington Medical Center, puts it this way: “Our ability to predict what will happen to you in the next six months sucks.”

Reporter Nina Shapiro shares the somewhat “arbitrary” selection of a “six months or less” to live for assisted suicide legislation following Medicare guidelines for hospice eligibility. Here are the hoops Shapiro says doctors have to jump through to justify hospice for their patients:

To do so, doctors fill out a detailed checklist derived from Medicare guidelines that are intended to ensure that patients truly are at death’s door, and that the federal government won’t be shelling out for hospice care indefinitely. The checklist covers a patient’s ability to speak, walk, and smile, in addition to technical criteria specific to a person’s medical condition, such as distant metastases in the case of cancer or a “CD4 count” of less than 25 cells in the case of AIDS.

OTOH, the process for OKing assisted suicide is a lot less complicated:

No such detailed checklist is likely to be required for patients looking to end their lives in Washington, however. The state Department of Health, currently drafting regulations to comply with the new law, has released a preliminary version of the form that will go to doctors. Virtually identical to the one used in Oregon, it simply asks doctors to check a box indicating they have determined that “the patient has six months or less to live” without any additional questions about how that determination was made.

According to studies described in this article, roughly 20 percent of patients in hospice die at about the time their doctors say they will. Between 13 and 20 percent die after the time predicted by their doctors – some months or years after the date. The majority die sooner than the prognoses given by their doctors indicated.

But that’s just if you look at the population of hospice patients as a whole. Zeroing in on certain conditions yields some interesting data:

When a group of researchers looked specifically at patients with three chronic conditions—pulmonary disease, heart failure, and severe liver disease—they found that many more people outlived their prognosis than in the Christakis study. Fully 70 percent of the 900 patients eligible for hospice care lived longer than six months, according to a 1999 paper published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

So, given all that uncertainty, what will doctors do? Some won’t participate. Others will only prescribe lethal medications to patients with a prognosis of a month or two to live.

Alarmingly, other doctors have a different way to deal with the dilemma:

The UW’s Farber leans toward a different approach. While he says he hasn’t yet decided whether he himself will write fatal prescriptions, he plans at least to refer patients to others who will. Given that prognostic precision is impossible, he says, “I personally just let go of the six months.” Instead, he says he would try to meet what he sees as the “spirit of the law” by assessing that someone is “near” the end of their life, so that he could say to them, “You’re really sick and you’re not going to get better.”

Knowing exactly when someone is going to die, he continues, is not as important as knowing when someone “has reached the point where their life is filled with so much suffering that they don’t want to be alive.”

In other words, according to Farber, the letter of the law and the strict guidelines that were promised aren’t important – or anything he’s obliged to follow. It’s probably not too big a leap to assume that some doctors in Oregon have already adopted that mindset (the article contains some good information the Oregon law makes it impossible to know how many people live long after getting a lethal prescription).

As I’ve noted elsewhere, “strict safeguards” are no better than posted speed limits on a highway. Farber and others of his profession know they don’t have to worry about monitoring or enforcement on this particular “highway.”

In the end, Farber is exposing what is already obvious to those of us who have watched and argued with the assisted suicide/euthanasia movement – this has nothing to do with medicine or a physician’s duties. It’s a value judgment, plain and simple. A lethal one. –Stephen Drake

Peter Singer’s “Tribute” to Harriet Johnson – and Paul Longmore’s Response

euthanasia, Harriet McBryde Johnson, infanticide, media issues, Our News & Commentary Blog, Paul Longmore, Peter Singer

On December 28th, the NY Times Magazine published an edition titled “The Lives They Lived,” which consisted of 24 essays about notable people who passed away in 2008. One of the individuals selected for inclusion in the issue was disability rights lawyer/activist/writer/lecturer Harriet McBryde Johnson.

Not long after that, Paul Longmore, historian and Director of the Institute on Disability at San Francisco State University, wrote a message to a large number of people in his address book:

Colleagues and Friends:

This past Sunday, the New York Times Magazine carried obituaries on people who died during 2008. One of the obituaries was about Harriet McBryde Johnson, disability rights campaigner and challenger of philosopher Peter Singer. Yet the Times had Singer write that obituary. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/28/magazine/28mcbryde-t.html?ref=magazine. I sent the letter below to the editor a few minutes ago. I urge everyone who regarded Harriet as one of our most important leaders to register their outrage.

As I am sure others did, I waited for the NY Times Magazine to print Longmore’s letter. The wait was in vain. Last Sunday, two responses to Singer were published, and I don’t want to take away from the authors, who made some good points. But they weren’t the points made in the letter submitted by Longmore, whose critique is blunt and brutal. Here it is, published with permission:

Having Peter Singer write an obituary about Harriet McBryde Johnson seems so reassuring. We can have a calm, rational, even friendly discussion about “killing” people with disabilities. That’s Mr. Singer’s word and that’s his ethical and legal position. He thinks parents should have the right to have their disabled babies killed. And that’s what my comrade in disability rights activism Harriet fiercely opposed. In this short piece, Mr. Singer demonstrates that while he learned a couple of things about the real lives of people with disabilities from his encounters with Harriet, he still does not understand the meanings and values and imperatives of her life, or, for that matter, the lives of the rest of us who live with significant disabilities. If he did, he wouldn’t question surveys which find “that people living with disabilities show a level of satisfaction with their lives that is not very different from that of people who are not disabled.” And though the magazine’s editors published a couple of Harriet’s articles, you expose your failure to understand her and her message by offensively headlining this piece “Happy Nevertheless.” In the end, Mr. Singer still thinks that Harriet’s parents should have been able to prevent her from living her life, from having her life at all, a life that championed the dignity and value of all people’s’ lives. So the Times, which a long time ago editorialized in favor of a disabled person’s right to have a doctor help her commit suicide (“Condemned to Life,” April 24, 1986), gives Mr. Singer the last word in his debate with Harriet and enables him portray himself as open-minded, tolerant, and humane. Meanwhile, we who mourn the loss of our Harriet must regard this obituary as not just falsifying but obscene.

A few weeks ago, there was an article saying that the print version of the NY Times could actually come to an end within the next year. This produced a lot of warning calls from (big surprise) professional journalists that our society could suffer without the benefit of classically trained journalists.

Me, I’m not convinced. I don’t see where the NY Times or other big newspaper has really ever “gotten” disability. Maybe it’s time to try something new. –Stephen Drake

Emergency Workers Accused of Letting Man Die – And then the Media Engages in a Posthumous Assault

blog recommendations, crime and punishment, media coverage, neglect, Our News & Commentary Blog, professional accountability, wrongful death

U.K. — This news is making the rounds of blogs and newsgroups. Two ambulance workers in the U.K. have been suspended from work and booked on charges of “neglecting to perform a duty” in a case that initially caused shock. One of the earliest news stories about the incident came out on December 31, from The Press Association:

Two ambulance workers were arrested on suspicion of neglecting a dying man after detectives were passed a tape recording of them in which they were allegedly heard discussing whether they should bother to revive him, it has been reported.

The two men, who are both employees of South East Coast Ambulance Service NHS Trust, were sent to Barry Baker’s home in Brighton, East Sussex, on November 29, after he called 999 saying he thought he was having a heart attack.

It is understood the 59-year-old, who lived alone, collapsed while on the phone to ambulance controllers.

However, the line to the control centre was still open when the crew arrived at the scene and operators allegedly heard the ambulance men make derogatory comments about the state of Mr Baker’s house, The Daily Telegraph reported.

A police source told the newspaper the men were then overheard discussing Mr Baker and allegedly saying “words to the effect that he was not worth saving”.

The pair, aged 35 and 44, were arrested on December 5 on suspicion of neglecting to perform a duty in a public office contrary to common law.

No formal charges have been made against the two men.

Initially, the reaction of the journalists and the public seemed to be one of shock and horror. But then something happened. The company hired to clean up Mr. Baker’s house posted public pictures of the inside of his house on the web. (if you check out that link, you’ll find that SkyNews refers to Mr. Baker with scare quotes around the word “neglected” when referring to the circumstances of his death)

That site is only one of many news sites that posted the pictures and focused on the “squalid” condition of the home. In many of those sites, comments are dominated by people expressing disgust for Baker and not a little sympathy for the ambulance workers.

I’ll say right upfront that this angers and scares me. I have known people whose houses looked like this on the inside. At a few points in my life, my own living conditions have been close to the scenes pictured at that house. I wish I was exaggerating, but I’m not.

As far as the media goes, only Deborah Orr of The Independent seems disturbed by the latest turn in the press coverage of Mr. Baker, and thought it worth the effort to tell readers about the life that Barry Baker actually led:

Barry Baker did not lead a scrupulously conventional life. And his lack of convention was not, in anyone’s terms, rebellious, glamorous or bohemian. On the contrary, at 59, he still lived alone in the childhood home he had shared with his parents until they had died. Overweight, he’d had hip operations, and walked using sticks. His poor health, perhaps in combination with the years of dependency on his parents, contributed to the disordered messiness of his home.

Baker’s life may have had its limitations. But he did his best. He took a taxi to work every day, at a Job Centre in Brighton, and travelled by bus every Sunday to his favourite pub, where he had lunch with friends and played cards. All of his neighbours described him as a kind and gentle man.

As I’ve done before, I want to direct people to William Peace at Bad Cripple. Here’s a snippet:

However, my next thought was are these photographs relevant? What, if any, was the point of releasing these photos? Why did the company hired to clean Mr. Baker’s home after he died post the photos on their website?

The answer to the above questions is clear to me: the worth of Mr. Baker’s life is being called into question.

Read the rest of his excellent post here. –Stephen Drake

UK: Disability Campaigners Press For Law Enforcement on Assisted Suicides

advocacy, assisted suicide, crime and punishment, Our News & Commentary Blog, United Kingdom

As readers of this blog and others covering similar issues will know, there has been a lot of intense media attention and promotion on assisted suicide in the U.K. In spite of “right to die” advocates’ claims of a narrow agenda, the media circus hasn’t been limited to people in the last stages of a terminal illness.

Here are some excellent observations and analysis from disability campaigners, courtesy of communitycare.co.uk:

It is the James case that has raised the most moral issues. The DPP (director of public prosecutions) statement says that, despite “sufficient evidence” to prosecute James’s parents, based on the facts of the case it “would not be in the public interest” to do so.

James had been disabled for 18 months before his death and had made three attempts to kill himself. A psychiatrist found that James was both clear in his wish to die and understood that this was against everybody else’s wishes. His parents, along with health professionals, had repeatedly tried to talk him out of wanting to commit suicide at Dignitas, but to no avail, and so eventually decided to help him.

Jane Campbell, chair of the disability committee at the Equality and Human Rights Commission, believes the case sends out a dangerous signal. She says that while it may seem like a personal matter the drip, drip effect of letting such cases go has big implications for society.

“While I completely understand the family have to live with the consequences of their actions, [the Crown Prosecution Service] has got to start prosecuting otherwise it sends out a message that it’s OK to help people die,” she says.

Both Carr and Campbell express some healthy skepticism about the claims from “right to die” advocates that their agenda is limited to individuals with some sort of terminal illness, and more:

Dignity in Dying is campaigning for the law to be changed only for the terminally ill and doesn’t support such a move for disabled people. Hehir says the organisation sees the two groups as very separate.

Carr disagrees. She says the James case shows the debate is not just about terminal illness but also about disability and that society’s negative view of disabled people means any change in the law for the terminally ill would be in danger of being extended to this group.

“In a world that valued disabled people and their lives maybe the legislation could be safe for just terminal illness but it’s not,” she says.

For Campbell, assisted suicide is wrong in both instances: “While we continue to live in a world where disability or end-of-life care are seen as negative, we will never get to a situation where people can take their own lives in a non prejudicial way,” she says.

Like disability advocates all over the world (including the U.S.), advocates like Carr and Campbell already have their hands full advocating for resources that people with disabilities need to live. Not for the first time, they’re having to find more time and energy to advocate against policies that “compassionately” encourage people with disabilities to die. –Stephen Drake