Thursday, February 1, 2018

Court Forces Doctors to Refer Patients to Doctors Who Will Kill Them in Assisted Suicides

 INTERNATIONAL   ALEX SCHADENBERG   JAN 31, 2018   |   5:23PM    TORONTO, CANADA
Sean Fine, Justice writer for the Globe and Mail reported that Ontario’s Divisional Court (3 – 0) decided that doctors in Ontario, who oppose killing their patients, must provide an effective referral to a physician who will kill their patient.  Click here to view the decision.
Effective referral means a referral for the purpose of the act. Fine reported that Justice Herman Wilton-Siegal wrote that:
“The evidence in the record establishes a real risk of a deprivation of equitable access to health care, particularly on the part of the more vulnerable members of our society, in the absence of the effective referral requirements,”
Paula Loriggio reporting for the Canadian Press stated:
the divisional court said that though the policy does limit doctors’ religious freedom, the breach is justified.
Fine reported that Albertos Polizogopoulos, an Ottawa lawyer representing 4700 doctors who were challenging the Ontario regulations argued that the effective referral mandate violates the freedom of conscience and religion protected in Section 2 of Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms:
“Our position is doctors who opposed assisted suicide or physician-assisted death are put in a position now where they either need to violate their conscience and their religious and moral belief or face being disciplined by the college – and that’s not a good place to be,”
…most provinces do not require referrals to willing physicians. Alberta, for example, co-ordinates requests and referrals through a centre that patients can call on their own. The faith groups do not object to referring patients to the centre. Manitoba has a team of physicians willing to help the severely ill end their lives. Ontario has now set up a co-ordinating centre but faith doctors say they are still concerned that they are responsible for an “effective referral.”
Fine reported that this case is the first to test the constitutional rights of doctors who object to assisted death on grounds of conscience. and the decision comes as doctors opposing assisted suicide struggle to find a middle ground. Some hospitals run by Catholic, Jewish or other religious groups have declined to offer assisted dying. In those cases, patients are transferred to other facilities.
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Fine reported that, as of December 31, Ontario’s chief coroner has recorded 1,030 deaths by physician-assisted death in Ontario.
The Supreme Court of Canada struck down the previous law on assisted dying in February 2015. The court said nothing in its ruling compelled physicians to provide assistance in dying. It added that it was up to governments and regulatory colleges to reconcile the Charter rights of patients and physicians.
Parliament legalized assisted death on June 17, 2017. The legislation stated in its preamble that doctors have a right to freedom of conscience, and are not required to perform or assist in the provision of an assisted death.
The decision by Ontario’s Divisional Court will need to be appealed.
LifeNews.com Note: Alex Schadenberg is the executive director of the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition and you can read his blog here.

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Liberal Media Disgustingly Accuse Adoptive Couple at Trump’s State of the Union of Coercing Baby’s Mother

 NATIONAL   KATIE YODER   JAN 31, 2018   |   5:01PM    WASHINGTON, DC
What on earth is wrong with people? Instead of celebrating an adoptive couple’s touching story, highlighted at the State of the Union, some media began a rumor that the parents coerced one mother to hand them her child. And, as they bashed the president for not saying more, they themselves left out key details.
The fact is, because Donald Trump liked the story, a whole swath of the left automatically hate it. Add in some liberals’ passionate lectures about identity, privilege and power, and they’re doing their best to make a compassionate human act into yet another oppressive outrage.
On Tuesday night, Albuquerque policeman Ryan Holets, and his wife, Rebecca, attended the State of the Union as guests of the president and first lady. During his address, President Trump told the parents of five that they “embody the goodness of our Nation.” That’s because last year the two adopted a little girl named Hope, whose mother was addicted to drugs.
The president told the story:
Last year, Holets was on duty when he saw a pregnant, homeless woman preparing to inject heroin. When Holets told her she was going to harm her unborn child, she began to weep. She told him she did not know where to turn, but badly wanted a safe home for her baby.
“In that moment, Holets said he felt God speak to him: ‘You will do it – because you can.’ He took out a picture of his wife and their four kids. Then, he went home to tell his wife Rebecca. In an instant, she agreed to adopt.
Both conservative and most liberal media praised the “powerful” story. But others, like Splinter and Slate, baselessly accused Holets of pressuring the birth mother, Cyrstal Champ, to give up Hope.
Beginning with its headline, Univision-owned Splinter (formerly Fusion), mocked the Holets Tuesday evening as a “nice white couple taking a homeless addict’s baby.” Then Editor and writer Katherine Krueger charged Holets of showing Champ a photo of his own family in order to “guilt her into giving up her baby.”
Rather than support her claim, she went on to cherry-pick a December CNN story of the adoption. “Cherry-pick,” meaning she ignored the part where CNN reported that Crystal “emotionally told Holets that she desperately hoped someone would adopt her baby” before he offered to do just that.
Instead, Krueger cited Champ’s reaction when Holets warned her she could harm or kill her unborn baby with heroin.
“I was like, how dare you judge me. You have no idea how hard this is,” Krueger cited Champ telling CNN. Krueger again left out that, in the same report, Champ also called the Holets a “light in this world” and added that “there needs to be more people like Holets and his wife and their family.”
Turning her attention to Trump, Krueger called it “jarring” that the president didn’t mention Champ “who remains on the streets without a lifeline” while “journalists and politicians praise the selflessness of the couple.”
But Krueger participated in the very thing she accused President Trump of: not telling the full story – easily accessible online. In particular, she left out that Hope’s birth parents, Crystal Champ and Tom Key, are at a rehabilitation center in Florida. And that the Americans can help the couple via a GoFundMe page set up by Holets.
“While they have a full scholarship for the live-in rehabilitation center they are currently at; we need to provide them with housing after they graduate the program,” Holets wrote.
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And, in a video on the crowdfunding site, Holets added that he has “kind of adopted Tom and Crystal” as his “brother and sister” and speaks with Tom regularly.
Tom “calls me every day to tell me how blessed he’s been,” Holets revealed. “But I’m the one that really feels blessed – by Tom, by Crystal, by Hope.”
But others, like Slate, followed in Splinter’s footsteps. “Trump Didn’t Bother to Say What Happened to the Biological Mother in His Cop Adoption Anecdote,” its Wednesday headline bashed.
Inside, writer Christina Cauterucci covered the “very bizarre story that, if you happened to be only half-listening, kind of sounded like it glorified a police officer for stealing somebody’s baby.”
Like Krueger, she accused Holets of showing Champ a family photo before he “convinced her to allow him and Rebecca to adopt her fetus.”
(Again, that’s not what CNN reported. Or The Washington Post. Or Holets himself.)
But Cauterucci continued to suggest that Champ didn’t willingly let Hope go.
“[T]he power dynamics of the Holets’ situation are cause for concern,” she continued. “A woman in dire poverty who’s just been caught by a cop with illegal drugs is not in a position, free from undue pressure, to willingly surrender custody to her fetus.”
And, she added, “without any more details than what Trump offered, it’s hard to imagine a cop asking a pregnant woman with a needle in her hand for the rights to her forthcoming child without some degree of coercion.”
Hard for her to imagine, that is. Yes, that’s Cauterucci’s interpretation of the president’s speech, where he said Champ told Holets “she did not know where to turn, but badly wanted a safe home for her baby.”
Then again, Cauterucci expected nothing less than the “slippery ethics” embedded in the GOP “which treats women as mere tools of reproduction.”
“We don’t know if Ryan Holets helped connect her with programs that could get her housing or treatment for addiction if she wanted it,” she complained. “She didn’t even get a name in Trump’s story.”
But that’s something Cauterucci (and all Americans) can easily solve with a simple Google search. Something it appears she didn’t do.
She even suggested that Hope’s story could have been used to show how Americans need “better access to contraception,” among other things. Presumably so that babies like Hope don’t happen.
“Trump offered no policy implications alongside the anecdote,” she concluded. “To Republicans, Hope Holets’ biological mother is merely the villain in the story of a heroic cop.”
And to her, it would seem, Holets is the villain.
But others in the media appreciated the story for what it was: a sign of hope. David French of the National Review called it “one of the most powerful pro-life moments I’ve seen in a presidential address.”
Even feminist Bustle agreed.
“Regardless of party affiliation, everyone should agree that their decision to open their arms to a baby shows the goodness in humankind,” editor Hillary E. Crawford added. “And right now, it seems like people need every glimpse of hope they can get.”
That includes Krueger and Cauterucci. If only they could see it.
LifeNews Note: Katie Yoder writes for Newsbusters, where this originally appeared.

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Abortion Activist: It’s Okay to Kill Babies in Abortions Because They Don’t Feel Pain Until Birth

 OPINION   DAVE ANDRUSKO   JAN 31, 2018   |   7:02PM    WASHINGTON, DC
We all know the French adage, “the more things change, the more they stay the same.” Never, ever was that more true than in listening to the pro-abortion drivel on display yesterday in the Senate as Democrats successfully prevented Republicans from cutting off a filibuster of the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act. (Sixty votes were needed to “invoke cloture” so there could have been an up or down vote.)
But I was wrong. There is a worse example of recycling myths, fables, and fairytales about fetal pain. I didn’t notice it at the time but evidently Maggie Fox of NBC News had read twitter posts from a “doctor” and decided to interview him after the Senate vote.
By way of preface, Fox can be very perceptive reporter, but less so when she wanders into politics. For example, “the doctor just explained late-term abortion—on Twitter” is Dr. Daniel Grossman.
Grossman is not some ordinary M.D. He is a nearly full-time abortion apologist who composes such convoluted half-truths it takes five times as much space to rebut them as for him to compose them.
For example, he tells Fox
“I really feel like it’s important for policymakers, legislators, to use the best available scientific evidence when they are making policy related to health. I also think it’s important for them to listen to the patients that are affected by this healthcare and neither of those things were done related to this recent bill.”
Small problem. Everything—everything—he told Fox is wrong. Demonstrably wrong. Wrong in the sense of being debunked years ago.
For instance, using data from the pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute, we’ve already posted many times (and again today) that they understand that the reasons women have “late abortions” are not (as Grossman says)
for many reasons…including a late diagnosis of a severe fetal abnormality that means it would not survive after birth, or be in severe pain.
Women may also need an abortion to save their lives.
“Many reasons,” yes, but reasons having to do with relationship problems, having other children, suffering from depression, or denying to themselves they are pregnant/putting off a decision.
Grossman, for example, wrote and talked a lot about abortion clinic closings in Texas, but never fully disclosed why they closed, something our own Dr. Randall K. O’Bannon did in much detail on these pages.
But the principal gaffe—and it is colossal—is his breezy assurance that “Research has shown a fetus does not yet have the capacity to experience pain until at least the third trimester, and unlikely until birth.”
Keep up with the latest pro-life news and information on Twitter. 
Birth?! Yikes. This is so over-the-top, so at odds with research as to be almost laughable. Grossman is presumably relying on the infamous August 24, 2005 study in JAMA authored by pro-abortion activists, a canard which NRLC, among others, demolished more than a decade ago.
But you kind of understand why Grossman says this nonsense when he adds, “There is some data to suggest that the fetus is kind of in a semi-anesthetized state throughout all of the pregnancy and that all of the perceptions are blunted.”
He’s probably referring to a 2010 “Fetal Awareness” paper issued by Britain’s Royal College of Obstetrics and Gynecologists (RCOG). As one neurologist said of the notion that the unborn child is not fully awake, “This belief has not been a topic on the radar screen of fetal pain discussions in recent years, and appears to come out of left field. It is hard to avoid the impression that the authors view this new proposal as a kind of scientific trump card.”
As so it goes. Grossman is sloppy and Fox can’t be bothered to even alert her readers to Grossman’s status as an abortionist and abortion apologist (or even correctly identify Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell as a Republican, not a Democrat).
LifeNews.com Note: Dave Andrusko is the editor of National Right to Life News and an author and editor of several books on abortion topics. This post originally appeared in at National Right to Life News Today —- an online column on pro-life issues.

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