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April
07
  11:31:29 AM

Wrong way to relieve pain

Disguised as compassion, the euthanasia movement is trying to invade the health care system to help end suffering. By ending lives.

We know this, but Wesley Smith explains more in this article from my bioethics file. It’s getting more and more timely.

The movement’s first target was the hospice, a specialized form of care for the dying created forty years ago in the United Kingdom by the late, great medical humanitarian Dame Cicely Saunders. Determined to treat what she called the “total pain” of dying patients, Saunders’ great innovation was to bring a multidisciplinary team to the task of ensuring that their physical pain, existential suffering, spiritual needs, and mental health are all properly attended.

Saunders believed that suicide prevention, when needed, is an essential part of the package, crucial to fulfilling a hospice’s call to value the lives and intrinsic dignity of each patient until the moment of natural death.

It’s needed now more than ever.



 
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