Showing posts with label euthanasia. Show all posts
Showing posts with label euthanasia. Show all posts

Monday 15 July 2019

Brain damage and dementia perhaps not glamorous enough to allow patients to live

In reply to Vincent Lambert died on Thursday at 8.24am

Are brain damage and dementia not glamorous enough to allow patients to live, because the intellectual impairment really does make all of us uneasy about our own stupidity?

In a collective opinion page on April 18, 70
 “doctors and professionals specialized in the care of persons with cerebral palsy in a vegetative or pauci-relational state”
said about Vincent Lambert that
 “it is obvious that he is not at the end of life”.
Auestion might be:
When is a person at the end of his life?
And how far can or may we go when we see an animal or human being in a certain state which does not seem a "good living" state?

When we see an animal suffering a lot we do not let it continue to suffer, but in the case of a human being what are we willing to do? And can one say the brain-damaged French man who was in a state of impaired consciousness for 11 years, Vincent Lambert,  was suffering? When we saw life pictures of him we could not have that impression, even saw moments him laughing.

The doctors decided to stop hydration and nutrition, while keeping him as comfortable as possible while he could die of thirst and starvation. Would we let an animal starve to death?
How does it come we as human beings do not find it horrible to have an other human being die of thirst and hunger? Was it than not better to have the man sedated out of his mind?

We don't starve animals to death because it's inhumane.
How on earth can this be allowed to be done to a human being?

In such instances is it than not better to bring a person in a deep sleep and have him to die in that sleep?

Vincent Lambert died on Thursday at 8.24am

Michel Houellebecq and Pope Francis are two names seldom found in the same sentence. Yet they are united in decrying the death of Vincent Lambert, the disabled French nurse who died this week after having his food and water removed.

Vincent Lambert, the brain-damaged French man who was in a state of impaired consciousness for 11 years while his family fought over his medical care, died on Thursday at 8.24am. After getting approval from a court, doctors stopped giving him food and water. It took him nine days to die.

Although his wife claimed that Lambert had said that he would not wish to live in such an impaired state, there were no written instructions with his end-of-life wishes.
French media have reported that his parents plan to sue his medical team. While euthanasia is illegal in France, doctors are allowed to put terminally ill patients into deep sedation until death. Lambert’s parents have argued that, while severely handicapped, their son was not “terminally ill”.


Being the head of the Catholic Church, Pope Francis’s views are, and are supposed to be, predictable, this can not be said about France’s most acclaimed and controversial novelist, Michel Houellebecq. He wrote

"Vincent Lambert was in no way prey to unbearable suffering, he was not suffering any pain at all (...) He was not even at the end of life. He lived in a particular mental state, the most honest of which would be to say that we know almost nothing …

It was strange when we saw pictures of that man laying in his be, seeing him react on words, we can wonder in what way he would be conscious or to be considered alive?

In how far can we go into a human's mind and go to decide for him or her? In a certain way the doctors and his wife decided to allow nature to take its course. But should they have kept feeding him?


Like America’s Terri Schiavo case, this has provoked controversy around the world. Thousands upon thousands of people in “vegetative states” in nursing homes could be at risk of having their hydration and nutrition withdrawn if doctors and courts accept the reasoning behind the decision to allow Lambert to die.

Reactions to his death show that France is as divided as ever.
 “It is a real relief for us,” 
said François Lambert, Lambert’s nephew.
 “Vincent had been the victim of irrational medicine for years. It had to stop.”
Unsurprisingly, Pope Francis tweeted:
 “May God the Father welcome Vincent Lambert in His arms. Let us not build a civilization that discards persons those whose lives we no longer consider to be worthy of living: every life is valuable, always.”

Surprisingly, Michel Houellebecq, the controversial and internationally acclaimed nihilist novelist, agreed with the Pope. He was scathing in his criticism of how Lambert’s death had come about. In an op-ed in Le Monde, he attacked the French Minister for Health, Dr Agnès Buzyn, for using Lambert as a symbolic battering ram to open a breach in attitudes towards the severely disabled.
“I admit that when the Minister of ‘Solidarity and health’ had appealed in to the high court, I was stunned. I was sure that the government in this case would remain neutral. After all, [President] Emmanuel Macron had declared, not long before, that he did not wish to interfere; I thought, stupidly, that his ministers would be on the same line.
"Vincent Lambert was in no way prey to unbearable suffering, he was not suffering any pain at all (...) He was not even at the end of life. He lived in a particular mental state, the most honest of which would be to say that we know almost nothing …
"Dignity cannot be (altered) by a deterioration, as catastrophic as it may be, in one’s state of health. Or is it that there has been, indeed, a 'change in attitude'. I do not think there is any reason to rejoice, "

Wednesday 16 August 2017

The Vatican really doesn't want Belgian Catholics to perform euthanasia

In May the Broeders van Liefde (Brothers of Charity) in Boechout by Antwerp, announced it would allow doctors to perform euthanasia at its 15 psychiatric hospitals in Belgium, one of only two countries — along with the Netherlands — where doctors are legally allowed to kill people with mental health problems, at their request.
In reaction to that proposed idea Pope Francis I ordered them stop offering euthanasia in its psychiatric hospitals and warned them if they wanted to continue their idea they would be expelled from the Roman Catholic Church.

The Christian brothers would not offer euthanasia so easily but would have it only performed if there would be “no reasonable treatment alternatives” and that such requests would be considered with “the greatest caution.” for the first time it is that Catholic brethren express euthanasia to be an ordinary medical practice that falls under the physician’s therapeutic freedom and that the people running a hospital, psychiatric or medical centrum should listen to the medics.

But it seems that the Belgian charity’s administrative headquarters in Rome are not pleased with their Belgian confraters. They issued already a statement in May, arguing that allowing euthanasia “goes against the basic principles” of the Catholic Church, but it looks like the brethren in Belgium want to put foot.
Some weeks further now we still do not know what the the Belgium charity is going to do.

Mattias De Vriendt, a spokesman for the Belgium charity, said the charity’s hospitals had received requests from patients seeking euthanasia recently but could not say whether any procedures had been performed.

The vast majority of patients seeking euthanasia in Belgium have a fatal illness like cancer or a degenerative disease. While the number of people euthanized for psychiatric reasons accounts for only about 3 per cent of Belgium’s yearly 4,000 euthanasia deaths, there has been a threefold increase in the past decade.

Critics have previously raised concerns about Belgium’s liberal approach to euthanasia while advocates say that people with mental health illnesses should be granted the same autonomy as those with physical diseases.

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Thursday 22 July 2010

A philosophical error which rejects the body as part of the human person

A great deal of what is morally wrong with modern culture, as well as the lion’s share of the personal unhappiness it engenders, is caused by a philosophical error which rejects the body as part of the human person.

There has been a growing cultural shift in the understanding of the body from something that is deeply personal and constitutive of who we are to something purely instrumental, to be employed as our own disembodied consciousness sees fit.
English: Neural Correlates Of Consciousness
English: Neural Correlates Of Consciousness (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

This drift into philosophical dualism with respect to the human person has been, quite literally, deadly. It leads directly to the use of the bodies of others as sexual objects, contraception, homosexuality, genetic engineering, sterilization, sex-change operations, embryo harvesting, abortion, and euthanasia — all of which manipulate or discard the body. It causes persons to be profoundly disaffected from themselves, leading to unrealistic expectations, stress, self-mutilation and even suicide. It leads to all these ills and more because it misunderstands what it means to be a man or a woman with a vocation to love rooted in our bodily nature as human persons.

Read more >Listen to Your Body!

The philosophical dualism which defines the person in terms of his consciousness, while defining the body as an instrument to be manipulated, lies at the heart of what is called “the new morality”. Those old enough to recall the rapid moral shift which took place beginning in the 1960’s will also recall that the thirst to embrace the new morality was driven primarily by sexual desire; the new morality was, in effect, a rationalization for sexual licentiousness (generally called “liberation”). This same effort to rationalize has rather obviously been the engine of nearly all non-orthodox moral theology over the past two generations, just as it has been the cause of most of the rejection of Church authority—and indeed of many of the scandals that have weakened that authority—during the same period. 

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2013 update:
 
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