France: Euthanasia Bill Defeated in Senate Vote

From Alex Schadenberg at the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition:

(On January 25th) the Senate in France defeated a bill to legalize euthanasia by a vote of 170 to 142.

The euthanasia bill was sponsored in the French Senate by Jean-Pierre Godefroy (Parti Socialiste), Alain Fouché (UMP) and François Autain and Guy Fischer (Parti communiste-Parti de gauche).

The bill would have allowed euthanasia for people with disabilities, those with chronic conditions and people who are defined as terminal.

Interestingly, no English-speaking news source has covered this story.  As a bilingual Canadian, Alex pulled the news off of a French news source so we monolinguals could know about it.  I'd bet there would be all kinds of English language coverage if the vote had gone the other way.  Funny how that goes.

You can read the rest of Alex's blog entry here.  --Stephen Drake

Belgium's Bountiful Harvest - of Organs of Disabled People Killed Under Medical Supervision

From Michael Cook at Mercatornet, comes this newest development from Belgium.  Apparently, some doctors in that country are so excited about this that they put together a powerpoint presentation about the practice at a national conference:

A group of Belgian doctors are harvesting “high quality” organs from patients who have been euthanased. This is not a secret project, but one which they described openly at a conference organised by the Belgian Royal Medical Academy in December.


In a PowerPoint presentation, Dirk Ysebaert, Dirk Van Raemdonck, Michel Meurisse, of the University Hospitals Of Antwerp, Leuven And Liège, showed that about 20% of the 705 people who died through euthanasia (officially) in 2008 were suffering from neuromuscular disorders whose organs are relatively high quality for transplanting to other patients. This represents a useful pool of organs which could help to remedy a shortage of organs in Belgium (as everywhere else).

Though disturbing, this really isn't surprising.  Truly terminally ill people - at the end of a deadly disease process - tend not to have usable organs (suitable for transplant).  Younger people with disabilities - spinal cord injury and neuromuscular conditions, for example - generally have organs that are healthy and suitable for transplant.

One has to wonder what kind of pressures - subtle or otherwise - will people with disabilities experience in Belgium as they are increasingly seen as viable donors, and maybe more "useful" dead than alive when their organs are seen as more valuable than they themselves are.  --Stephen Drake

h/t to Wesley Smith at Secondhand Smoke.