I was wondering about this with the passage of Obamacare and all. What do you think?
Doctors in Belgium are killing an average of five people every day by euthanasia, new figures have revealed.
The statistics also show a huge 27 per cent surge in the number of euthanasia cases in the last year alone.
The soaring number of deaths will inevitably fuel fears that euthanasia is out of control in Belgium, a country which only months ago became the first in the world to allow doctors to kill terminally ill children.
There have been a surge in the number of euthanasia deaths in Belgium since it was legalised in 2003. Earlier this year there were protests to stop the law being extended to children
The figures, published in Sudpresse, Belgium’s leading French-speaking newspaper, showed that 1,816 cases of euthanasia were reported in 2013 compared to to 1,432 in 2012, an overall increase of 26.8 per cent.
‘You could say that currently there are 150 cases of euthanasia per month in Belgium or, even more telling, five people euthanised a day,’ the newspaper said.
Of the total number of cases in 2013, 51.7 per cent were male patients and 48.3 per cent were female.
Elderly people aged between 70 and 90 years made up just over half (53.5 per cent) of the total. Those aged between 60 and 70 years represented 21 per cent and those aged over 90 years seven per cent.
The under-60s accounted for just 15 per cent of the total number of cases.
In 2003 Belgium was the second country in the world to legalise euthanasia after Holland liberalised the law a year earlier, becoming the first country since Nazi Germany to permit the practice.
Over the past decade the numbers of Belgians dying by euthanasia has crept up incrementally.
Controversial: In February, the Belgian House of Representatives voted in favour of extending the policy to children who are terminally-ill or in a state of unrelieved suffering
There was a 25 per cent increase in the number of euthanasia deaths from 2011 to 2012, soaring from 1,133 to 1,432, a figure representing about two per cent of all deaths in the country.
In February Belgium extended euthanasia to children who are terminally-ill and in a state of unrelieved suffering.
They must also be judged to have ‘capacity of discernment’, affirmed by a psychologist, and the consent of their parents before they can die by injection.
Anti-euthanasia campaigners have argued that such safeguards have consistently proved to be meaningless.
They say that besides patients who are gravely ill euthanasia is used increasingly on people with depression or non-terminal conditions.
Those killed include deaf twins Marc and Eddy Verbessem, 45, who were granted their wish to die in December 2012 after they learned they would likely to become blind.
Last year Nancy Verhelst, 44, a transsexual, was also killed by euthanasia after doctors botched her sex change operation, leaving her with physical deformities she felt made her look like a ‘monster’.
Disability rights campaigner Nikki Kenward of the UK-based Distant Voices pressure group said the figures demonstrated the difficulties in regulating euthanasia.
She said that once a country legalised assisted suicide or euthanasia people were inevitably killed in greater numbers than ever envisaged.
The figures should serve as a warning to the Parliament not to change the law on homicide to allow even assisted suicide, she said.
‘As the numbers of people dying from euthanasia in Belgium grow, that slippery slope comes into vision,’ said Mrs Kenward of Aston on Clun, Shropshire.
‘I am vulnerable,’ said Mrs Kenward, who has been in a wheelchair since the 1990s when she developed Guillain Barre syndrome.
‘I’m afraid of becoming another statistic, another faceless victim,’ she said, adding: ‘We are told that safeguards will protect us from abuses. They certainly do not protect the elderly in Belgium.’
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2641773/Five-people-killed-EVERY-DAY-assisted-suicide-Belgium-euthanasia-cases-soar-27-cent-year-alone.html#ixzz336fKhrzH
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A friend of mine entered hospice 3 weeks ago. I went to visit him. He spoke most coherently and was walking without difficulty. I went back three days later and he was in a coma. He died two days later. I was speaking with the family about his rapid departing. Our conclusion is that the cause of death was not cancer but dehydration. The hospice nurse did not give him any fluids. Just my observations.
ReplyDeleteDehydration is a nasty death.
DeleteI can already see the lawsuits and headlines:
ReplyDelete"Doctors euthanize minority group members three times more often than members of non-minority groups."
Loevy and Loevy are salivating.
In order to usher in the Brave New World of the radicals currently running our Federal Govt, our Federal Bureaucracy, our increasingly federalized education (brainwashing) system, our media, etc....the idea is to hasten their vision of the world. As such, the older generations are statistically, whiter, more traditionally religious, and conservative. Every death in that generation helps set the stage. Teddy (Burp) Kennedy, who was the architect of the current immigration mess promised at the time, in 1965, that the demographic makeup of America would not change. It has drastically....and our country is becoming less and less white and more "diverse" with every census. While all should be welcomed here the incessant cult of "diversity" has become a club with which the leftist "check your white privilege at the door" radicals are using to undermine the entire fabric of this once strong, but now faltering country.
ReplyDeleteThe current administration has one objective. That is the creation of chaos and the elimination of European values from our culture.
DeleteSick stuff. What happened to "do no harm?" Christ taught us to serve the sick, not kill them.
ReplyDelete