Parents defend his decision

From the [UK] Times, [UK] Guardian and BBC News:

Police are investigating the death last month of a promising young rugby player who had been injured earlier in a training accident. Dan James died after traveling to a Swiss euthanasia clinic.

His parents, Mark and Julie James, defended his his decision to take his own life, saying that their son was “an intelligent young man of sound mind” who was “not prepared to live what he felt was a second-class existence.”

James was said to have been destined for a professional playing career when he was left paralyzed from the chest down after his spine was dislocated in a training session in 2007.

James is believed to be one of the youngest Britons to have traveled to Switzerland for an assisted suicide, a practice that is outlawed in the UK.

See earlier post here.

See also: Why my son had the right to die, by the mother of Dan James — [UK] Times

(Times photo)

Sarah Wootton (left), writing in the [UK] Guardian, says British philosopher Mary Helen Warnock is wrong to say that people with dementia are a burden to society and have a “duty to die.” She says Baroness Warnock’s position provides a much-needed opportunity for society to debate this taboo subject. An excerpt:

We are all living longer and impressive medical advances mean more of us will be diagnosed with terminal illnesses as well as complex medical conditions. As a consequence, we will need to radically address the way we care for and treat people nearing the end of their lives. Essentially we’re going to have to rethink the end of life.

Sarah Wootton is chief executive for Death in Dying, which advocates for greater personal choice at the end of life.

From the AP/Chicago Tribune:

An appeals court in Wisconsin has ruled that the wife and daughter of a man who committed suicide can inherit his estate even if they assisted him in killing himself.

Edward Schunk of Stanley, Wis., had non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and died of a self-inflicted shotgun wound. His wife and daughter allegedly drove him home from the hospital and gave him a loaded shotgun.

Under Wisconsin law, a person who “intentionally kills” another cannot inherit; the court found that the law does not extend to those who assist in suicide. Boston College Law Professor Ray Madoff, an expert in inheritance law, said she has never heard of a similar ruling in the nation.

From ABC News:

Ethicists and Alzheimer’s advocacy groups are expressing outrage over a comment made by a British philosopher this week that people with dementia have a “duty to die” to minimize the burden they place on their families and society.

Baroness Mary Helen Warnock made the remarks in an interview with the Church of Scotland’s Life and Work magazine. “If you’re demented, you’re wasting people’s lives — your family’s lives — and you’re wasting the resources of the National Health Service,” she said. The comment echoed an article titled “A Duty to Die?” that she had written for a Norwegian periodical.

“We dispute the fact that if you have dementia or some part of Alzheimer’s that you cannot have a quality lifestyle,” noted Paul Williams, director of public policy for the Assisted Living Federation of America. “We’ve seen in the last 10 years that these residents have been able to have the most independence and the quality of life that can be expected of them. … Just because you have a memory disease [doesn't mean] that we let you die and we can kill you.”

From ABC News and the [Eugene, Oregon] Register-Guard:

A 64-year-old Oregon woman was notified by her insurer that it would not pay for the $4,000-a-month drug that her doctor had prescribed for her lung cancer. The Oregon Health Plan instead agreed to pay for assisted suicide drugs, at a cost of about $50.

“It was horrible,” Barbara Wagner (above) told ABCNews.com. “I got a letter in the mail that basically said if you want to take the pills, we will help you get that from the doctor and we will stand there and watch you die. But we won’t give you the medication to live.”

Critics of Oregon’s decade-old Death With Dignity Law — the only one of its kind in the nation — have been up in arms over the indignity of her unsigned rejection letter. Even those who support Oregon’s liberal law were upset.

Wagner’s doctor had prescribed the drug Tarceva to slow the cancer’s growth, predicting that it would give her another four to six months of life. The insurance plan declined to fund the drug because it does not meet the “five-year, 5-percent rule” — providing a five percent survival rate after five years.

(Photo from the Eugene, Oregon, Register-Guard)

From NPR:

The health care system of the Netherlands reflects what is described as the nation’s pragmatic and stoic social attitudes about birth and death. The Netherlands has legalized euthanasia, permitting doctors to help patients die by giving them a lethal dose of medication.

“You could say it’s very much accepted by the general population that people can decide at the moment you would like to take steps to die and that you could help them,” says Paul Schnabel, a sociologist at Utrecht University.

It’s acceptable for people with painful conditions, such as cancer, to decide when they want to step out of it rather than prolong their medical treatment, he says. Ultimately, the health care system ends up saving money.

From the New York Times, [UK] Times:

A maverick German politician has helped a healthy 79-year-old woman to kill herself, prompting a criminal investigation and sparking a new national debate over assisted suicide.

Bettina Schardt was neither sick nor dying, but had difficulty getting around, no family and few friends. She feared that she might need to move into a nursing home.

Ms. Schardt’s suicide – and Mr. Kusch’s energetic publicizing of it – have set off a national furor over the limits on the right to die, in a country that has struggled with this issue more than most because of the Nazi’s euthanizing of at least 100,000 mentally disabled and incurably ill people.

… The larger lesson of Ms. Schardt’s solitary death may have to do with the way Germany treats its old.

“The fear of nursing homes among elderly Germans is far greater than the fear of terrorism or the fear of losing your job,” said Eugen Brysch, the director of the German Hospice Foundation. “Germany must confront this fear, because fear, as we have seen, is a terrible adviser.”