Bioethics News

The role of nursing is being extended and there is no reason why, with the correct training, nurses cannot carry out surgical abortions. “The pro-abortion lobby claim that so-called safe, legal abortion was necessary to safeguard women’s health yet, having achieved legal abortion, the pro-abortion lobby now wants to remove safeguards by getting nurses to do doctors’ dirty work for them.”

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Texas’s six-year-old “futile-care” law is one of two in the country that allow a hospital’s ethics committee to declare the care of a terminally ill patient to be of no benefit and to discontinue care within a certain time frame. The patient’s family or guardian must be informed in advance of the ethics committee meeting and must be allowed to participate. The family must also be given 10 days to find a medical facility willing to accept their terminal relative.

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The woman and tens of thousands like her who undergo illegal abortions in Mexico each year are at the nexus of a furious cultural debate gripping this nation, which allows abortion only in limited cases, including rape and when the mother’s life is in danger. Abortion opponents cite cases such as hers as evidence that abortion should be further curtailed; abortion rights advocates argue that the procedure should be decriminalized so that women have access to safe abortions.

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Patients with terminal illness are being heavily sedated by doctors before their deaths in a form of “slow euthanasia”, research suggests. A poll of nearly 3,000 doctors found that almost one in five had administered infusions of drugs to keep patients unconscious for hours or days at a time. Guidelines for care at the end of life emphasise that doctors should always act in a patient’s best interests and act within the law, which prohibits euthanasia or actively helping someone to die.

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One in 30 foetuses aborted for medical reasons is born alive, a 10-year study at 20 UK hospitals has found. Abortion is allowed in Britain up to the 24th week of pregnancy. Beyond this, a termination is only sanctioned if the baby has a severe disability or if the mother’s life is at risk.

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A 30-year-old woman who is terminally ill has launched a campaign to overturn Britain’s euthanasia laws by compelling her doctors to increase her dose of morphine and let her die. She has been told she has a year to live but doctors have been unable to control her pain.

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On Wednesday night, Britons could watch Mr. Ewert’s death on television, in a film showing how he traveled to a clinic in Zurich in 2006 and took a fatal dose of barbiturates. Broadcast on Sky Television, the film, “Right to Die?” is said to be the first broadcast on British television of the moment of death in a voluntary euthanasia case.

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New guidelines over whether people would face prosecution over assisting suicide place closer scrutiny on a suspect’s motivation. Director of Public Prosecutions, Keir Starmer, said whether a person acted “wholly compassionately” and not for financial reasons was important. But he made it clear the advice does not represent a change in the law and does not cover so-called mercy killing.

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A man with “locked-in syndrome” has begun legal action, asking the director of public prosecutions to clarify the law on so-called mercy killing. Tony Nicklinson, 56, wants his wife to be allowed to help him die without the risk of being prosecuted for murder.

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Conflicting wishes and demands regarding end of life care are a common – but not often discussed – problem, with no clear solution. A recent article in the New England Journal of Medicine by three doctors from Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital illustrates the emotional dilemma.

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