Slow and stealthy euthanasia
In July, this report came out of Great Britain.
A British “end of life” care protocol approved for use by the National Health Service (NHS), has created a systematic, and legal, method of euthanising elderly and disabled patients, even while “mercy killing” remains officially illegal, says a prominent expert in elder care. The “Liverpool Care Pathway” will be used to eliminate patients deemed to be “blocking beds” in the increasingly financially strapped public health system.
For years, Dr. Adrian Treloar, a psycho-geriatrician and senior lecturer at the Greenwich Hospital and Guys’, King’s and St. Thomas’s Hospitals in London, has been sounding the warning that the NHS has an unofficial system in place to authorise the killing of vulnerable disabled patients with an unwritten policy of “involuntary euthanasia” by deep sedation and dehydration.
Now, there’s more to that.
A BBC report has revealed that physicians in the UK are increasingly seeing and using “continuous deep sedation” as a form of “slow” euthanasia. Adam Brimelow, BBC News health correspondent, writes that the use of continuous deep sedation, also known as “terminal sedation” is becoming more common in the UK and may be the way physicians are skirting the law prohibiting direct euthanasia.
As bioethics expert Alex Schadenberg says:
“A lethal injection is quicker, but in fact the ethics are no different. Both intend death.”
New Zealand GP Dr. Philip Harrison had first-hand experience with this practice when his own father was ‘treated’ thus, as the BBC News reported in that original piece.
“I don’t know what the legal term is but to me it was as near to a form of murder that I had come across,” he said.
