The Telegraph ^ | 21 April, 2011 | Martin Beckford
Posted on Wednesday, April 27, 2011 9:11:52 AM by AustralianConservative
Elderly people in the Netherlands are so fearful of being killed by doctors that they carry cards saying they do not want euthanasia, according to a campaigner who says allowing assistant suicide in Britain would put the vulnerable at risk.
[...]
In an article published on BMJ.com on Friday, Mr Fitzpatrick wrote: “Disabled people, like others, and often with more reason, need to feel safe. Thus eroding what may already be a shaky sense of safety in medical care poses a further threat to disabled people’s wellbeing...and life itself.”
He cited the experience of Baroness Campbell of Surbiton, the disabled founder of Not Dead Yet, who was once told by doctors that they “presumed” she wouldn’t want resuscitation if she experienced complications during treatment.
[...]
He mentioned the comments of Lord McColl made in the House of Lords that in the Netherlands, where euthanasia has been officially legalised and regulated since 2002, doctors found the cases increasingly easy to carry out while “many elderly people in the Netherlands are so fearful of euthanasia that they carry cards around with them saying that they do not want it”.
This was a reference to the Dutch Patients’ Association (NPV), which has 70,000 members of whom at least 6,000 have “living will declarations” stating that they do not want euthanasia if they are taken into hospital or a nursing home.
Other Dutch people, however, make written declarations of their “will to die”.
Mr Fitzpatrick concluded: “These discussions are complex, involving deep moral questions that cannot and must not be treated as though they were merely matters of fact with clear and obvious answers that everyone must share, as though logic dictated it.
“The lives of many disabled people depend on resisting attempts to introduce a law legalising the intentional act of killing.”
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
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