From: covici@ccs.covici.com (John Covici)
Newsgroups: misc.handicap
Subject: States, Courts, Clamor For Euthanasia Solution
Date: 6 Apr 92 21:22:20 GMT
Reply-To: covici@ccs.covici.com (John Covici)
Organization: Covici Computer Systems
X-Fidonet: Split

Index Number: 20810

States, courts clamor for euthanasia
solution
by Linda Everett

As the economic crisis intensifies, state
officials, judges and lawmakers are exhibiting a
willingness to relinquish any state's interest in
preserving life, in favor of laws and policies that
enforce involuntary euthanasia. Behind the media focus on
myriad state prescriptions to expand access to health care
are scores of state proposals that increase the ways
medical facilities can kill anyone who allegedly ``wants''
to die through advance directives, and which expand the
authority of physicians and facilities to kill outright
any patient they think ought to die.
   While the nation is still being brainwashed by
prime-time television movies that canonize those who arrange a
parent's suicide (Patty Duke in ``Last Wish'') and families
who starve their relatives to death (Frontline's ``The
Death of Nancy Cruzan'' on PBS), county-owned nursing homes
in New Hampshire are rigorously enforcing a policy that
denies admittance to indigent elderly patients who refuse
to sign a ``no code'' or do-not-resuscitate agreement. The
policy saves county funds by forgoing staff training and
equipment needed in cardio-pulmonary resuscitation. County
officials say they wanted to give residents the best
choices for a good quality of life. This translates to no
choices, as the staff stand by while patients arrest,
gasp, turn blue, and die. Indicative of the trend is New
Jersey's State Bioethics Commission, which has initiated
``study'' on how the state can make death-by-starvation
decisions for legally incompetent patients in state
institutions.

              - Avalanche of death bills -
   The sheer breadth, numbers, and sweeping enforcement
powers of pro-death bills flooding state legislatures
signal one thing: Desperate officials have gone into a
malthusian frenzy, willing to utilize as many ways as
politically feasible to eliminate whole layers of their
own constituency. This is no exaggeration. Under the
euphemism of ``patients' rights,'' some legislatures have
proposed eight or more bills that call for patient
starvation, involuntary euthanasia, lethal injections,
prohibiting emergency personnel from resuscitating certain
patients, having one's living will noted on one's driver's
license, killing wards of the state, and giving health
maintenance organizations and community group homes the
right to oust patients who insist on medical treatment. In
the process, the United States has come the closest it has
ever been to enacting laws that would enforce the same
Nazi practices that even Adolf Hitler knew could not
easily be voted into law.
   Iowa, New Hampshire, and Maine all had bills
introduced in the current session to make legal
physician-assisted or medically-assisted
``suicide''--exactly what the post-World War II Nuremberg
Tribunals condemned as genocide. Where bills do not pass,
they serve to create a public forum for Hemlock Society
activists to acclimate voters to a Nazi perspective. If
the death mob can persuade you--and the medical
profession--that illness makes your life less ``useful'' or
``worthy,'' you'll not fight state or court policy to kill
those with a ``poor quality of life.'' More importantly,
such bills serve to legitimize ``mercy'' murderers like
Michigan's Jack Kevorkian.
   Other states are adapting their existing ``living
wills'' or ``durable power of attorneys'' statutes to
President George Bush's ``Patient's Self-Determination
Act,'' which went into effect December 1991. The Bush law
mandates that every health facility receiving federal
funds must ``educate'' new patients about the facility's
and state and federal ``right to die'' policies. The
Euthanasia Society, known as the Society for the Right to
Die, worked with federal agencies to develop the
brainwashing guidelines. Beneath the ``rights'' rhetoric is
the testimony presented for this law that expressly states
that while patients and their families can refuse any and
all medical treatment, doctors have no obligation to
provide what they consider ``unethical'' or ``futile''
treatment. This loophole handily converts ``right to
die'' to a duty to die, and is the basis for the latest round of
state legislation.

       - Virginia--most advanced euthanasia law -
   Early in 1992, Virginia Gov. Douglas Wilder
announced a plan to tax hospitals in the state .5% of their
gross receipts--{not profits}--taken in over the next two
years to help to avoid, as he put it, having to throw
the disabled on the streets. While that plan collapsed,
the Virginia Assembly proposed another. Despite vigorous
opposition, the Assembly passed the most advanced
euthanasia law in the country. Should Governor Wilder sign
the Health Care Decisions Act, a new era of state law will
have begun, one which mirrors directly Hitler's October
1939 euthanasia decree, giving doctors permission to kill
institutionalized patients ``considered incurable according
to the best available human judgment'' (Hitler's words).
   Under the new law, the extermination of severely
handicapped individuals, including wards of the state, can
be carried out by the same doctors, guardians, and
committees charged with protecting them. The bill
specifically says it is applicable to patients in
psychiatric and mental retardation facilities, who are
incapable of making their wishes known and who have no
``reasonable expectation of recovery.'' That sweeping
category could encompass a myriad of conditions brought on
by disease, head trauma, stroke, or age. That's not
surprising: Virginia, after all, has a history of allowing
such barbarities, including sterilization of persons
deemed genetically inferior, during the 1920s' heyday of
the American eugenics movement. The bill is so blatant
about targeting incompetent patients, that the Feb. 20
lead editorial of the {Richmond Times-Dispatch} says in
``Who Chooses Death?'' that with this bill, ``... the state
may be on the verge of endorsing--with scarcely any
debate--involuntary euthanasia.''
   Virginia already has a Natural Death Act that lets
individuals, besieged by horror stories about terminal
illnesses, sign directives to indicate what medical
treatment they do or don't want should they become
incompetent, or to appoint an agent to carry out those
treatment wishes. People think leaving a directive with
explicit instructions for life-saving treatment and daily
nutrition will guarantee they'll receive it. Not so: Even
those who choose not to sign a directive, assuming that
decision will signal that they want life-saving treatment,
are not safe, because this bill, like others, explicitly
rules out that assumption. Once patients are diagnosed as
``terminally ill'' or in a ``persistent vegetative state,''
their instructions to withdraw or withhold treatment are
activated. But no matter how much a patient or family
wants life-saving or life-sustaining treatment and daily
nourishment, this bill allows doctors to deny it if they
feel it ``medically or ethically inappropriate'' to treat or
feed the patient. The ethic of saving human life is
supplanted by the ``ethic'' of cutting state costs or making
managed care and health maintenance organization profits.

              - Washington state--again! -
   Just months after voters defeated the Hemlock
Society's assisted suicide initiative in November,
Washington legislators amended the state's Natural Death
Act. Contrary to its alleged protection of patients'
medical treatment rights, the bill lets anyone deny
life-sustaining and life-saving treatment, including food
and water, to patients with directives. Like the Virginia
law, it promotes policies that constitute outright medical
fraud. When a patient is called ``terminal,'' this no longer
indicates that a patient's death is ``imminent.'' Now, it means
the patient is ``in the process of dying''! Anyone, because
of accident, disease, or disability, who is comatose,
unresponding or in a non-communicative state, is labeled
``terminally ill''--and ``in the process of dying.'' People
with severe handicaps, who laugh at jokes, respond to
commands, or use devices to signal what they want, are
often misdiagnosed or wittingly labeled as ``permanently
unconscious,'' ``hopeless,'' or in a ``persistent vegetative
state''--all medically unscientific terms meant to
discourage treatment and influence you to see them as
inhuman. As has been documented (``Medical Advances Expose
Euthanasia Lobby Lies,'' {EIR} Vol. 18, No. 40) these
people do recover if allowed--and if fed. With appropriate
rehabilitation, they even flourish. Yet the Washington
bill states that the ``permanently unconscious condition
may cause loss of patient dignity''--so, it suggests such
patients be starved to death to spare them the indignity
of their condition!
   Involuntary euthanasia laws will move rapidly with
court rulings like that of Massachusetts' highest court.
On Jan. 6, the Supreme Judicial Court upheld a lower court
ruling giving a state hospital ethics committee permission
to starve to death a 34-year-old profoundly retarded ward
of the state. ``Jane Doe,'' a 24-year resident of a state
facility was diagnosed in a ``persistent vegetative
state''--the catch-all phrase used by the death mob to
pronounce a person ``not worthy of life''--or, in this case,
of the state resources to sustain it. The decision comes
just as Massachusetts has started to shut down more than a
third of its state hospitals that care for patients like
Doe.
   Doe was never capable of making any decision about
her care, but the justices ``substituted'' their ``judgment''
for her, saying if she were competent, she'd want to be
starved to death. Therefore (as ludicrous as it sounds),
maintaining a feeding tube against her wishes ``robs her of
the right to determine her course of care.'' And, ``Doe's
right to self-determination must prevail over the state's
interest in preserving life for all.'' One has to agree
with one of the three dissenting justices, who stated: ``If
this is not involuntary euthanasia, or worse, it is hard
to know what it is.''

>From Executive Intelligence Review V19, #15.

----
Please respond by e-mail as I get very far behind in reading this
newsgroup.

         John Covici
          covici@ccs.covici.com