Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide

When autonomy trumps sense: the costs of refusal to allow withdrawal of life support.

by Dominic Wilkinson
June 25, 2008

In Canada this week, an 84 year old man died after 9 months of treatment
in an intensive care unit. He had severe brain damage and multi-organ
failure, but his family sought a legal injunction to prevent doctors in
the intensive care unit from withdrawing life-support. Over the course
of his long intensive care stay, intensive care beds at a major trauma
centre were closed so that nurses could used instead to support his
care, and three doctors resigned from the hospital in protest at being
required to provide what they felt was ‘unethical’ treatment.

Legal Abortion Time-Limits: Arbitrary Limits Harm Women

by Practical Ethics
May 26, 2008

By Dr. Lachlan de Crespigny, Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, University of Melbourne

The vote by the British parliament to keep the upper legal limit on abortion at 24 weeks was headline news around the world. An article in The Economist (1) considers that the British were spared America’s abortion wars partly because Britain is less religious than America, but also because abortion laws are made in Parliament, where shades of grey can be debated, not in the courts, where black or white usually prevails.

Interestingly much of the debate was about ‘viability’ – the minimum gestational age at which a newborn is said to be capable of surviving with modern intensive care facilities. This is a simple across-the-board week count. But the survival rate of newborns also depends on many other factors, including where they are born (2, 3), fetal health including the presence or absence of an abnormality (which remains lawful where the child will be ‘seriously handicapped’), plus the condition of the newborn. While around half or so of 24 week newborns in Britain may survive, many or most of the abortions at around that gestation are of problem, or unhealthy, pregnancies.

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