Italy’s highest Court has handed down a ruling in favour of a right-to-die activist which says euthanasia and assisted suicide is not always a crime. According to the judgment, those people who facilitate the suicidal intention of a patient kept alive by treatments and suffering from an ‘irreversible pathology’ should not be punished. The…
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Fifteen years after euthanasia was legalised in the Netherlands, over a quarter of all deaths in 2017 were ‘induced’, according to a report in The Guardian newspaper. In the report, journalist Christopher de Bellaigue traces the history of euthanasia in the Netherlands from when it was introduced for extreme cases to now being applied…
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A doctor has been charged with unlawfully ending a patient’s life in the first case of its kind since euthanasia was legalised in the Netherlands in 2002. The nursing home doctor, who remains anonymous, administered a lethal injection to a 74-year-old dementia patient despite the fact that her will was ‘unclear and contradictory’. Prosecutors…
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The UK Supreme Court has rejected an attempt to legalise assisted suicide. The ruling by Lady Hale, Lord Kerr and Lord Reed upholds the decision by the Court of Appeal, which rejected the same arguments in June 2018. The Supreme Court’s decision means that Mr Conway’s case cannot proceed any further in the British…
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A teenager is recovering after a bleed on the brain left her with ‘locked-in’ syndrome. Miranda Meldrum suffered a near-fatal stroke in April last year, aged 13, leaving her almost completely paralysed. ‘Locked-in’ syndrome leaves people with fully functioning minds but with little or no ability to communicate. The condition is frequently used by…
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One church pastor on the channel island of Guernsey tells us about the recent decision to reject proposals to introduce assisted dying. If the proposals had gone ahead, pressure for similar measures in the UK would have seriously increased. For twelve weeks during February to May this year, the usually quiet, safe island of…
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Professor Jerry Coyne is an evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago, a prominent critic of creationists and author of Faith vs. fact: why science and religion are incompatible.1 In his blog (which goes under the name ‘Why Evolution is True’), he recently argued for the euthanising of severely disabled new-born babies.2 Coyne asks, ‘If…
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