Gov. Jim Douglas opposed to the change
By Gudrun Schultz
BURLINGTON, Vermont, February 23, 2007 (LifeSiteNews.Com) - The Vermont legislature is set to begin a week of debate on assisted suicide, following the introduction of a House bill that would see Vermont follow Oregon in authorizing doctors to prescribe lethal medication.
A bill mimicking Oregon’s physician-assisted suicide law was presented in the House early in the 2007-2008 legislative session. Entitled “Patient Choice and Control at End of Life,” House Bill 44 was signed by five sponsors including two Democrats, a Republican, a Progressive and an independent. Debate on the volatile issue will open Friday with presentations from leaders on both sides of the argument before a House committee, the Associated Press reported earlier today, as well as a public hearing to gain a sense of public opinion on the issue.While observers say there is more support for assisted-suicide legislation in the legislature this year, opposition is significant and many Representatives have said they are undecided or opposed.
Advocates for the disabled have been among the strongest objectors, led by the Vermont Coalition for Disability Rights.
“This bill is an insurance bill to protect doctors and insurance companies from any responsibilities if a ‘request’ for physician assisted suicide goes wrong,” the Coalition’s legislative branch said in a statement.Language issues remain a key factor in the suicide debate, with assisted suicide activists steering clear of using the term “suicide” in an effort to increase public support for the practice. While “assisted death” or “death with dignity” have been favorite substitute terms among euthanasia proponents, activists in the Vermont debate have retreated even farther from the term “suicide”, substituting the phrase, “Patient choice and control at end of life.”
Vermont Gov. Jim Douglas said while he supported the concept of death with dignity, he was opposed to doctor-assisted suicide.
“We need to make it dignified, we need to make it pain-free,” Douglas said. “But to empower physicians--who take an oath to alleviate pain and do no harm--to hasten death is a step in the wrong direction.”
The Vermont Right to Life Committee has said one week of debate is not sufficient to address the issues before the bill goes to vote by the committee. “This is not a simple little bill,” Mary Hahn Beer worth, with Right to Life, told the AP. “This is a sea change in public policy.”
Read full text of House Bill 44:
http://www.leg.state.vt.us/docs/legdoc.cfm?URL=/docs/2008/bills/intro/H-044.HTM
See related LifeSiteNews coverage:
Oregon Switch to “Softer” Assisted Suicide Language Fueled by Efforts to Increase Public Support
http://www.lifesite.net/ldn/2006/nov/06110807.html
‘Right’ to be Dehydrated Key Right to Die Strategy
http://www.lifesite.net/ldn/2006/sep/06092103.html
“Religious Right” most feared by Euthanasia Movement
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Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide
html"http://www.lifesite.net/ldn/2005/oct/05102603.html
Atheists' Attacks on Bush Administration’s Faith-Based Initiatives Hurting the Poor
Anti-religious groups claim program is evidence of the establishment of a “theocracy”
By Hilary White
WASHINGTON, February 23, 2007 (LifeSiteNews.Com) – The Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF), a lobby group working since 1978 to abolish government-supported expression of religious belief, is preparing to make oral arguments in the Supreme Court for its high-profile lawsuit against the Bush administration’s faith-based social initiatives. The Foundation will argue, beginning February 28, that the Administration violated the Establishment Clause by organizing national and regional conferences at which the faith-based organizations were allowed to discuss how they can meet the social needs of their communities. The tone at some of these conferences, the Foundation complains, resembled a “revival” meeting at which typically participants pray and openly acknowledge the existence of God. Since their start in 2001, the government’s Faith-Based Community Initiatives have been under steady attack by anti-religious groups who claim that the program is evidence of the establishment of a “theocracy.” The government’s claim, however, is that smaller organizations run by churches and other local religious groups are better placed to help and understand the needs of individuals than are large, top-heavy government bureaucracies. Research by the Pew Forum on Religion in Public Life has found that “a solid majority of Americans (66%) favour allowing churches and other houses of worship to apply, along with other organizations, for government funding to provide social services.”
The FFRF, a “national association of nontheists,” says its goals are to “promote freethought (sic) and to keep state and church separate.” The group supports a totally secularized public environment as well as euthanasia, under the rubric of “death with dignity,” and unlimited publicly funded abortion.
The Foundation’s litigation successes in the past have included the abolition of a state Good Friday holiday, the ending of bible instruction in public schools and the removal of Ten Commandments monuments and crosses from public land.
The results of some of their public interest lawsuits, however, have been decried as a campaign against freedom of religious expression that has backlashed on the poor. The Associated Press quotes Jordan Lorence of the Alliance Defense Fund (ADF), a group filing briefs in support of the government’s initiatives, who said of the group, “They are successful in the sense that they have disrupted government funding for faith-based initiatives. But real people with real problems are no longer getting help because of some of their lawsuits.”
The suit’s plaintiffs are the group co-founders Anne Nicol Gaylor and her daughter Annie Laurie Gaylor and the latter’s husband and co-president Dan Barker, a former evangelical preacher who abandoned Christianity in 1984.
The Foundation maintains a sign in the Wisconsin State Capitol during the Christmas season, which reads: “
At this season of the Winter Solstice may reason prevail. There are no gods, no devils, no angels, no heaven or hell. There is only our natural world. Religion is but myth and superstition that hardens hearts and enslaves minds.”
Euthanasia Advocates Deny Meaning in Suffering Says COLF Director
Their claim to be interested in relieving suffering, called “pretense” and “aberration”
By Hilary WhiteOTTAWA, February 23, 2007 (LifeSiteNews.com) – The director of Canada’s Catholic Organization for Life and Family (COLF), warns that those campaigning for the “right to die” could be leading the country towards an established obligation for elderly and vulnerable people to commit suicide.
In an interview with Zenit Catholic news agency, Michèle Boulva said that the doctrine of total personal autonomy “threatens the common good of society because it has consequences not only for the person who chooses to die, but for the whole society.”
“Our perception of the value and dignity of every human life would change. As a consumer product, human life would lose its value as its ‘expiration date’ approaches.”
She warned that in Canada, an aging population and “improved health care is a perfect recipe for the promotion of euthanasia and assisted suicide.” Signs are growing in those countries whose medical systems are publicly funded that euthanasia is increasingly being promoted as a method of cost reduction. Instead of capitulating to the demands of euthanasia advocates, Boulva said, governments should provide structures to support friends and relatives of sick and vulnerable people to help them “assume their responsibilities toward their sick loved ones, grown old and dying.”
COLF has produced a pamphlet, “Living, Suffering and Dying...what for?” that aims to help families find meaning and value in life in the midst of suffering. Boulva said that although the publication is addressed to Catholics, it is of interest to all those “seeking happiness and the meaning of existence and suffering. We conceived it in the context of a de-Christianized society which needs to rediscover its roots.”
“Some voices today are using individual freedom to call for the “right to die” when illness seems to make life too heavy a burden. This brings up the question of the purpose of existence and the purpose of suffering. Christians find the answer to these questions in the Gospel. It is there that they understand they are not the masters, but the stewards of their lives,” the pamphlet reads.
Boulva, who has been with COLF since 2004, said to Zenit that while euthanasia promoters claim to be interested in relieving suffering, this is a “pretense” and “aberration.” The sick, she said, “who ask for death do not always do so because of their suffering. For many it is a cry for help against loneliness, before the sentiment of feeling that they are a burden for others.” She said, “The response to their cry is an attentive presence full of human warmth and love. They need care, to be heard, the affection of their loved ones, and of the caring staff to endure their suffering with dignity.”
Read the COLF pamphlet, Living, Suffering and Dying...what for?
http://www.colf.ca/
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