Pro-LIFE NEWS

Vol. 13 No.3 - Spring Edition 1996                                  Print Post Approved - 33L385/00042

Contents:

- President Appeals to Parliament
- Editorial
- Body of Evidence unearthed on the dark world of Dr Death
- It is not true that there are no good causes- ending abortion is one
- Muslin Stand
- World view

The public and political discussion on euthanasia continues. At the time of writing this article there seems to be a view among some Parliamentarians that the Andrew’s Bill should not proceed. Such an action would put to the test at an early stage the collective moral fibre of our elected parliamentary representatives, even before the key issue is debated. The issue is of national and international significance and impacts on all Australians.

Should the issue not be debated in the Parliament then it would probably be the only place within Australia it has not been debated. There is a strong view that the Northern Territory legislation "Rights of the Terminally Ill Act" is inept and deserves to be invalidated by the Parliament of Australia. Considered views world wide deem it unwise and dangerous to legislate on euthanasia. The Andrew’s Bill needs to run the due process, and not be sidelined. The Northern Territory Act needs to be sin-binned permanently, not the Andrew’s Bill.

That the Northern Territory legislation creates a provision for prescribed medical professionals to put to death another human being is abhorrent. Even now capital punishment is unacceptable in Australia. It is equally unacceptable for the healers of our society to become the cause of unnatural death. Politicians should not empower themselves and the healing profession with such authority and then enshrine the matter with the mantle of legislation. Should the national Parliament defer the issue perhaps the doctors involved in the procedures under the NT Act will be worn down by their unpalatable role and persevere with palliative care of the terminally ill.

 

14 October 1996

Dear Members of Parliament

I write on behalf of all members and supporters of Pro-Life Victoria, a community organisation dedicated to upholding and promoting the intrinsic value of human life.

The Northern Territory euthanasia legislation "Rights of the Terminally Ill" is inept and deserves to be invalidated by the Parliament of Australia. I hope you and your fellow parliamentarians to support the Bill put forward by Mr Kevin Andrews, Member for Menzies.

To create a provision for prescribed medical people to put to death another human being is adhorent. Capital punishment continues to be unacceptable in Australia. It is equally unacceptable for the healers of our society to become the cause of unnatural death.

Considered views world wide deem it unwise and dangerous policy to legislate on euthanasia. So it should be for the whole of Australia. Perhaps the quality of medical care needs to be addressed to better support the terminally ill.

Yours Sincerely

David Millie M.B.E.
President, Pro-Life Victoria

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Had former Chief Minister Marshall Perron introduced capital punishment into the Northern Territory, a possibility he once considered, Melbourne’s Sunday Age editorial, Terry Lane’s columns and Neil Mitchell’s occasional column would be as full of cries to overturn such legislation as they are currently full of claims the Andrew’s Bill to overturn Northern Territory euthanasia legislation is "absolutely immoral". September 29’s edition argued "if there is a right to life there must also be a right to death". There is no guaranteed "right to life" in this country. No paper has argued this more strenuously in their strongly pro abortion editorials than The Age newspapers. There is no such thing as a "right to die". Death is the inevitable outcome of being born.

To justify his pro-euthanasia position, Terry Lane claims, without reference to the opinion poll he quotes or the wording used, 75% of Australians support euthanasia. The fact that the push for euthanasia has never come from those major organisations supporting the aged, sick and disabled leaves one to suspect it must only be coming from newspaper editorials and demonstrably inconsistent columnists. In his column "Thou Shalt Not Kill", May 1996, Neil Mitchell, writing against capital punishment admits "In a sense, I’m arguing against democracy because there is little doubt most people support the return of capital punishment. But at times good government must resist populism." It’s interesting how he now claims "majority support" as justification for his push for euthanasia.

Reading Terry Lane’s bitter sectarian attacks in his column "Let no one block life’s ultimate exit" (Sept.29) must cause a sense of deja vu for anyone who has participated in "life" debates these past 23 years. In his book "Aborting America," former abortionist Dr. Bernard Nathansan recalls fellow founding member of the National Association for Repeal of Abortion Laws Larry Lader, plotting with him. "Historically, every revolution has to have its villain. It doesn’t really matter whether it’s a king, a dictator, or a tsar, but it has to be someone, a person to rebel against. It’s easier for the people we want to persuade to perceive it this way it’s got to be the Catholic hierarchy." Like Larry Lader, Terry Lane attempts to make the Catholic hierarchy the villain. Where in his column or The Sunday Age editorial, is there any acknowledgment that euthanasia opponents range from Colleen McCullough, across other Christian churches, the Jewish Association of Rabbis of Australia and New Zealand, the Islamic Council, Aboriginal activists, 91% of callers to a Melbourne Vote Line, "Should Victoria introduce euthanasia laws," the Australian Medical Association, Sir Gustave Nossal, to Labor Lefts? Where is there admission of the fact that Northern Territory Labor Member for Macdonnell, Neil Bell, who moved the bill to repeal Marshall Perrons euthanasia legislation, was a not a Catholic? What of the concerns of outspoken surgeon Malcolm Fisher of Sydney’s Royal North Shore Hospital, and psychiatrist, Professor Frank Varghese both atheists? Terry Lane claims:The arguments put forward against assisted suicide by interfering sectarians are infantile. First, that this will open some sort of floodgate of murder as such people are pressured by impatient relatives to hurry up and shuffle off this mortal coil. What sort of opinion do these people hold of their fellow human beings?... This is a wicked calumny on ordinary human beings who can be counted on to feel the same love, pain and compassion as any fully paid-up Catholic." Professor Varghese would tell him just how venal human beings are capable of being. He would remind him that when the trucks left the institutions carrying the handicapped and intellectually disabled to the gas chambers, it was doctors and nurses who cheered. And that the man most wanted for war crimes today, Radovan Karadzic is a member of the medical profession.

On the one hand Terry Lane applauds Jeff Kennett, Liberal Premier of a State with a grave economic crisis in its hospitals, who repeatedly speaks on-air of his visits to nursing homes full of people "past their use-by date," for supporting euthanasia. On the other he berates Liberal backbencher Kevin Andrews for not persuading his mates "to put health care higher up the list of priorities." I suggest that is just what Mr Andrews is doing, promoting care not killing.

The editorial claims "Thousands of doctors have quietly put to sleep patients who could no longer bear the pain and distress of an incurable illness". As a trained nurse I have been around many hospitals for a long time. I have not seen this happen, because it doesn’t happen. Do editorialists ever read their own newspapers? Drs. Nell Muirden, Maria Pisasale and Helen Austin, clinicians who have cared for terminally ill patients for over 15 years, have patiently and painstakingly explained away the myth that morphine hastens death. "Despite an extensive and sustained international campaign by the World Health Organisation which published guidelines in 1986 and 1996, many people (including some doctors) believe they are causing or hastening the death of patients by using these drugs" they wrote (The Age Sept. 11)

Terry Lane expresses his disappointment that Tim Fischer, whom he "admired for his stand on gun control" opposes mercy-killing. Might not Mr Fischer be disappointed in Terry Lane, who having supported the withdrawal licences for shooters to kill, now supports licence for doctors to kill?

Neil Mitchell, interviewing Dr Keith Woollard, President of the AMA curtly dismissed his concerns about doctors being expected to kill with a "But it wouldn’t be the doctors responsibility. He’d only be the technician." I wonder if Neil Mitchell would interview an executioner of capital punishment in the same obsequious manner he interviewed euthanasiast Dr Philip Nitschke? Would he regard an executioner as a mere "technician" I find it hard to believe an executioner would find his way on to a guest spot of the Neil Mitchell Show!

The media hype, encouraged by and surrounding Neil Mitchell’s trip to Darwin on Day One of the Northern Territory’s euthanasia legislation was followed elsewhere by stories of inspiring Palliative Care Centres such as Mt Olivet in Brisbane, of the stoic courage of the terminally ill and the heroic dedication and care of doctors and nurses who staff them. If Neil Mitchell had been so concerned about the lack of care for the dying before the introduction of euthanasia, where were his stories of visits to hospices, his campaign for better Palliative Care? I’d be more impressed if he’d ever used his profile to promote and inform his listeners of the alternative to mercy killing.

In his April 2 1995 column "Seven Cheers for the right to die" Terry Lane wrote "How I choose to end my life is none of (Mrs Tehan’s) business, nor the Premiers, nor any politicians, nor the mealy-mouthed Australian Medical Association." But in his April 19 1995 column, "Profanity rules in the shadow of saints" he wrote, with awe of the sacrifice Maximillian Kolbe made of his life for a fellow prisoner in Auschwitz, Francis Gajowniezek. Kolbe’s gesture was the antithesis of the philosophy Lane expounded in his earlier column. Allowing doctors licence to kill anyone puts at risk the lives of others. History has proved this. Doctors started killing their patients in Germany long before Hitler’s rise to power. They created the ‘climate’ for Auschwitz and Kolbe’s terrible death.

Denise Cameron

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reprinted from The Ausrtalian Thursday October 10, 1996

The US Supreme Court is set to rule on the constitutionality of voluntary active euthanasia. Robed Lusetich reports from Los Angeles on further disquiet about the world’s best known practitioner.

Only the United States Supreme Court can stop Dr Death from killing again. To the beat of the Death March of Saul and with the macabre Dr Jack Kevorkian leading the way, the US has come to the final fork in the road to "physician-assisted suicide".

The Supreme Court will this session, make one of the most far-reaching decisions of its history when it rules on the constitutionality of terminally ill patients committing suicide at their doctor’s hand, known in Australia as voluntary active euthanasia.

And no one will be looking to see which road the US will take with greater interest than the Grim Reaper himself, Kevorkian.

This disturbing man - who appears to have more in common with Joseph Mengele than Mother Teresa - has somehow succeeded in spinning his image into that of a compassionate deliverer of innocents from unspeakable pain: a man fit for canonising.

Americans look at his cold eyes surrounded by dark circles, and that perpetually gloomy expression and do not see a troubled individual, obsessed with death and killing, but instead an eccentric old man trying to do good in the face of government interference.

To be sure, the suffering of a dying loved one is hardly a pleasant experience. But the road down which Dr Death is luring his society has at its core a much much worse fate.

Just a cursory examination of the messenger will reveal the true nature of his message. A recent book, Appointment with Doctor Death, by Detrait reporter Michael Betzold, has received wide attention in recent months, including in these pages. It chronicles a study of a man who, in other times, would not be allowed to walk free in society much less become a role model.

During his medical residency, Kevorkian, says Betzold, donned a black arm band and volunteered to work the night shift because he realised more patients died at night the "death rounds", he called them. He also carded a camera with him because he wanted to photograph the eyes at the precise moment of death. Yet Kevorkia, who not surprisingly chose pathology as his discipline, swears he is not obsessed with death.

Kevorkian’s artwork also offers a window into the man. His paintings are filled with detached organs, severed heads, blood maggots, bullets, skulls, suffering, cannibalism and other assorted cheerful subjects. His rendering of Christmas depicts Father Christmas’s boot stamping on a baby lying in a fireplace.

Indeed, religion is unquestionably Kevorkian’s favourite target: in a painting entitled Give Us This Day, a half-man, half-baby is shown eating the flesh o a decomposing corpse. (He maintains that Jesus Christ would have been much better off dying in the back of his rusty van, suffocating on carbon monoxide, than suffering on the cross.)

When he worked at Pontiac General Hospital, Kevorkian allegedly experimented with transfusing blood from corpses into live patients. This Frankenstein-like toying left one patient, Neal Nicol, with such a severe case of hepatitis that his eyeballs turned orange. On the subject of blood, Kevorkian - who tried to organise an exhibit of Adolf Hitler’s paintings - supposedly mixed his with that of a cadaver and used it to paint the frame for one of his artworks. It seems inconceivable, in the wake of this pathological behaviour, that the 75% of Americans who support Kevorkian’s killing spree really know in whom they are putting their faith.

Since his third acquittal in May of violating Michigan’s ban on assisted suicide, Kevorkan has been clocking up corpses - "medicides" as he calls them. He even did four in one week.

"He really feels he’s off and running, and no one can stop him," says University of Michigan constitutional law professor and assisted suicide scholar Yale Kamisar. "It’s unlikely that he’ll ever be convicted unless he makes a mistake." He may just have made such a mistake when he facilitated the ending of Rebecca Badger’s life - his 33rd ‘assist’. Badger, a 39 year old mother of two who was depressed and in pain, told Kevorkian she had multiple sclerosis and did not want to live. The problem was that her autopsy revealed she did not have MS but was dead, nonetheless.

Five weeks after that death, 42 year old Judith Curren was helped to die after telling Kevorkian she suffered from chronic fatigue and immune-deficiency syndrome, as well as the muscle disorder fibromyalgia. Wrong again. No sign of any disease was found. The medical examiner said that she was most likely worn out from carrying around 122kg on a 1.55 frame. Furthermore, she suffered from depression and took potentially addictive psychiatric drugs.

When Kevorkian was questioned on these miscues, he replied that "it has nothing to do with lethality. It’s quality of life."

Already, the goal posts have been moved. We have begun sliding down the "slippery slope" to Kevorkian heaven (or is it hell?), where anyone who feels down can just opt to kill themselves.

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by Paul Johnson - reprinted from The Spectator, August 17 1996

Abortion is the most difficult and important issue facing advanced societies today It is the most difficult because the arguments on both sides are immensely strong and at the heart of them is an unresolved emotional and moral dilemma: should we listen to the pleas of a desperate distraught women or the unarticulated cries for mercy of an unborn living creature? It is important for two reasons. First, there is the sheer scale of the killing, from which we try to avert our gaze, and the communal heartlessness it represents. The modern abortion culture is a frontal assault on the sacredness of human life. It is no accident that the first country to adopt it was Stalin’s Soviet Union, where 30 million adults were also done to death in horrific circumstances. Doctors in the West, operating under the laws legislating abortion, have now killed more living creatures than Hitler, Stalin and Mao Tse-tung put together. One west Midlands abortionist using a particularly brutal suction method is said to have polished off more human creatures than did Eichmann.

The last tale maybe folklore. No one knows. In Britain abortion is the least explored major activity today. Investigation reporters’ are not allowed to touch it. Television which gets its cameras into every other intimate secret refuses to take them into the abortion clinics and the refuse bins and incinerators where bodies of once living creatures are disposed of Walls of euphemism surround the subject. Just as dispatching a Jew to a Nazi death-camp was officially termed ‘sending east’ so today the house rules of some publishing houses do not allow authors to refer to an ‘unborn child’ - the term ‘foetus’ must be used. So we are ignorant of modem abortion and meant to be ignorant and perhaps want to be ignorant. But in our hearts we know just as ordinary Germans knew in the early 1940’s that something horrible is going on amongst us on a colossal scale.

The second reason why abortion is the most important issue facing us is that it is a test case for all the moral problems which will arise in the 21st century as the new scientific revolution enables us for the first time to manipulate life. If we do not put the unborn child into a protective envelope which is morally sound and legally workable then it seems to me unlikely that we will solve any of the far more complex dilemmas which advancing medical technology will shortly thrust upon us. The life principle is too fundamental to be left to the medical profession. What doctors in Nazi Germany and psychiatrists in Soviet Russia were prepared to do as a matter of routine makes us realise the doctors as a profession cannot necessarily be trusted to do right. When the story about the aborted twin broke last week I was shaken by the comments of some of the doctors who seemed astonished at the fuss and did not appear to grasp that a moral issue had arisen. The whole subject of medical ethics and especially the philosophical principles which underline them is marginalised at universities. It is either not studied at all or tends to fall into the hands of lawyers and sociologists who are as confused as the doctors about the deeper moral issues.

Yet abortion is essentially a moral issue, just as slavery was. Both revolve around the value we attach to human life. Entire civilisations lived with slavery for centuries but ultimately its inescapable immorality had to be recognised and the political consequences accepted whatever the cost. It is no accident that abortion is now the biggest single issue in American politics and will remain so until it is dealt with. For the United States which is at bottom a highly moral and idealistic society went through the same experience with slavery in the 19th century. A powerful case for slavery could be and was made and enforced by the huge special interests which had grown up around it. Time and again the subject bubbled up angrily and broke the political surface and then subsided again as yet another compromise was thrown over it. It seemed in everyone’s interest to avoid a showdown. But the issue was morally too important for that. It would not go away and in the end it involved the United States in a war which killed a million people and destroyed a society and way of life forever.

The price America had to pay was enormous but America decided it had to be paid. Today it is hard to find any American even in the south who would not agree that slavery had to be ended even at the cost of civil war.

The Americans will eventually prohibit abortion just as they once prohibited slavery and for the same reasons. Slavery was tolerable only when it was shrouded in ignorance euphemism and deception. The more you knew about its realities the more its ugly facts were uncovered the higher the gorge rose. The decisive moment in America came when Harriet Beecher Stowe in Uncle Tom’s Cabin brought the horrible essence of slavery home to millions of readers in an emotional form they found irresistible. They had to read her novel and they did. After that everyone knew. They could no longer plead ignorance and sooner or later they were bound to act. The case against abortions has yet to find its Harriet Beecher Stowe. But it will. Then the people will force politicians to move whatever the lobbies say. I hope for the sake of our national honour that Britain acts before the United States as we did with slavery. It is notable here that every time the truth about the nature of abortion breaks the surface as it did in the case involving the killing of a twin, more and more people including doctors themselves ask questions about the morality of the whole evil business.

The first thing we need to do is to break the habit (I do not say conspiracy) of silence in the media. We need to learn in print and experience on our television screens exactly what goes on in the abortion industry and what its ‘products’ look like in life as well as in death. We also need doctors nurses and other people involved to confess frankly what they feel about their work and how they reconcile what they do with their consciences. None of this will happen unless individual men and women in the media show persistence and determination. Perhaps Channel 5 due to come on air in the new year will enter where its seniors fear to tread. Perhaps the Daily Mail the most pro-family national newspaper will take the plunge and campaign for the end of legal abortion at will. What is sure is that 40 years after the first night of Look Back in Anger it is quite untrue to say that there are no good causes left.

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¬ A doctor unafraid of publicly to show his respect for the right to life of unborn children: Muslim, Dr Majid Katme and his daughter, 15 year old Jinan, at the London pro-life chain. Picture by Canoe Rayes.

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Daughter returns mother’s love - A remarkable story of love returned has been celebrated at a mother-and-daughter birthday party in Christchurch.

The May 24 party in South New Brighton marked the birthdays of Mavis Boyd, aged 88, and her foster daughter, Wendy Blackler, aged 21.

It also celebrated 21 years of hard work, achievement and love, wrote Christchurch Press reporter Sinead O’Hanlon in a front-page report published the next day.

Mrs Boyd fostered Miss Blackler when she was 67, and Miss Blackler was a two-day-old infant with Down’s syndrome, born to 14 year old parents who could not keep her.

It was to be a short-tern arrangement. The sickly baby was not expected to live a week. Mrs Boyd agreed to take the baby home to give her a few days of love before she died. Under Mrs Boyd’s constant care, the baby girl’s health began to improve. After two weeks of being drip-fed, she learned how to suck from a bottle.

"Once she began to suck, I knew she would be all right and I knew she would stay with me," Mrs Boyd said. During Miss Blackler’s childhood and teenage years, the Press reported, Mrs Boyd constantly encouraged her to push past limitations imposed by Down’s syndrome.

Miss Blackler grew into a happy, confident and independent young women who enjoys life.

Now the tables are turned. Mrs Boyd’s health is declining while her daughter blooms. Several years ago Mrs Boyd became blind and now she has trouble walking.

Miss Blackler took over the role of care-giver and looks after her mother’s every need. She cooks, cleans and does the shopping. In between, she attends special classes at Riccarton High School.

Each women says she does not know where she would be without the other.

reprinted from Humanity (N.Z.)

Calls for changes to Abortion Law - For the first time in many years a number of national newspapers have started to call for a re-examination of the Abortion Act and principles underlying it.

The calls followed the publication of "Fetal Sentience" which received widespread notice in national newspapers; the campaign to outlaw partial-birth abortion; and news that around 3,300 embryonic babies were to be destroyed because their "shelf life" had lapsed. The cases of the twins, one of whom was killed by a needle through the heart and left to mummify beside its living brother or sister until natural birth has added to growing and intense public concern.

In applauding the publication of "Fetal Sentience" the Daily Mail leader said: "Not since the Abortion Act of 1967 has there been such a pointed challenge to public attitudes on this most deeply controversial of issues. It is no longer possible blithely to assert that a fetus feels nothing."

The Daily Mail also tackled the glib assertion that anaesthetics should be administered to the unborn before termination, adding:

"But that raises the question of whether sentient beings should be treated as disposable. The moral confusion is deepening."

In a leader the Daily Telegraph stated that the rights of an individual "must rest on a belief that human life from the moment of conception is sacred and has its own inalienable rights. At its worst, failure to accept this principle has led, notably through the 1967 Abortion Act to a subordination of the unborn child to parental convenience. As that Act nears its 30th anniversary, it is time for Parliament to look again at the fruits of liberal social thinking, and reassert the rights of the most innocent and defenceless dorm of human life."

"It is essential that pro-lifers take up this call with their local MP’s" said John Smeaton, National Director of SPUC. "Three factors - sentience, the call for the abolition of partial birth abortion, and the realisation that 3,300 ice’ babies would by law have to be destroyed in one day has made many people start to think again".

In referring to the fact that IVF clinics may face prosecution if they continue to preserve without parental consent those embryos who have been stored up to the legal limit of five years, a second leader in the Daily Telegraph warned that society was crossing a further moral Rubican. "These new legally approved killings mark a further change in the way we think about human life and human beings" it said. "The state is not only permitting destruction but ordering it."

"There is no doubt that the whole abortion anti-life ethos we are facing abortion, the killing of Tony Bland and the idea that society may create and freeze embryonic humans - are all underpinned with the same moral disregard for the value of human life" continued John Smeaton.

reprinted from Human Concern Summer 1996

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