Tag Archives: Nurse

News

Court says nurse who was forced to perform late-term abortion can’t sue

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Story here from LifeSiteNews. (H/T Mary)

Excerpt:

Today the Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that a Catholic nurse who was forced by a New York hospital to participate in an abortion does not have the right to sue her employer.

Administrators at Mt. Sinai Hospital had threatened Catherine DeCarlo with disciplinary measures in May 2009 if she did not honor a last-minute summons to assist in a scheduled late-term abortion. The hospital insisted on her participation in the procedure on the grounds that it was an “emergency.”

Lawyers for DeCarlo, however, have pointed out that the procedure was not classified by the hospital as an emergency, and the patient was apparently not in crisis at the time of the surgery.

DeCarlo claims that her participation in the abortion led to serious emotional trauma. She also claims that hospital administrators later attempted to coerce her into signing an agreement to participate in abortions in the future.

The hospital had reportedly known of the Catholic nurse’s religious objections to abortion since 2004.

Alliance Defence Fund (ADF) attorneys had filed two suits in the case – one federal, filed in July 2009, and another state, filed earlier this year. The federal suit claimed that Mt. Sinai ignored federal laws prohibiting coercion while receiving hundred of millions of dollars in federal funding.

In January the case was dismissed by the United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York, at which point it was appealed to the Second Circuit.

However, in today’s ruling the court found that there is no right to private action or private remedy under the statue cited by DeCarlo in her suit – the so-called “Church Amendment.”  (Read the decision here.)

That amendment protects health care workers working for federally-funded entities from being discriminated against because they refused to perform abortions on religious or conscience grounds.

In other news, pro-abortion nutter attacks pro-life display with metal pipe and gets arrested when he turns to attack pro-lifers, too. Hey – anti-life is pro-violence. That’s their view.

Sorry if blogging is a little light lately. I am having fun reading Mary’s frequent debates on Facebook. It’s really fun!

News

New study analyzes the legalization of euthanasia in Belgium

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Wesley J. Smith analyzes a new peer-reviewed paper in the Canadian Medical Association Journal.

First an introduction to euthanasia:

Belgium has followed the Netherlands in jumping off a vertical moral cliff by embracing legalized euthanasia.  The awful consequences that I predicted are now coming to pass; a steady increase in the number of cases, inadequate reporting, and a large percentage of non voluntary euthanasia deaths.  Thus, I am anything but surprised by the study I analyze below, which echoes an earlier one reported here at SHS, that nearly as many Belgian euthanasia killings are non voluntary as of those that are voluntary (the concept of “voluntary” in this context being highly problematic, but let’s not deal with that here).

Why might that be? Euthanasia consciousness rests on two intellectual pillars–that killing is an acceptable answer to human suffering, and radical individualism in which we all own our bodies and have the absolute right to do what we wish with it, including make it dead.   But interestingly, the latter idea–often reduced to that most effective of all soundbites, “choice”–turns out to be far less robust than the acceptance of active killing as a proper method of ending suffering.  In other words, once a society accepts killing as the answer to suffering, the request element becomes increasingly less important as doctors assume they are doing what is best for the patient by extinguishing their lives.

But does the new research paper justify his concerns? The paper finds that nurses administered life-ending drugs without the patient’s consent in 120 cases, as compared with 128 cases where the patient requested the drugs.

The paper says:

When the patient can no longer communicate, nurses are, by the nature of their work, more directly confronted with the patient’s suffering and may therefore wish to take a more active role in life-ending acts. We also have to consider that the administration of life-ending drugs without the patient’s explicit request may have included situations of terminal sedation or an increase in pain alleviation, in which the delegation by physicians to nurses to administer the drugs is considered common practice. Finally, although about half of the nurses’ reports indicated that there was no explicit request from the patient, it should be stated that the physicians and nurses probably acted according to the patient’s wishes.

The paper is here. (PDF)

Commentary

Are coerced abortions and euthanasia part of Obama’s health care plan?

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The Heritage Foundation writes about it here. (H/T ECM)

Excerpt:

Earlier this year, President Obama moved to overturn the “conscience clause” regulation issued by the Bush Administration. The regulation provides for the enforcement of federal conscience protections, including the Church Amendments, for health care workers.

New concerns also surround the President’s health care reform legislation making its way through Congress, which would allow mandatory taxpayer funding of abortion. During mark-up of the Kennedy-Dodd health care bill, the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee approved provisions to require insurance plans to contract with organizations that perform abortions. In addition, several amendments were rejected that would have preserved states’ laws regulating abortion, prohibited federal funds from being used for abortions, and provided conscience protections for health care providers for not providing abortions.

Click here for a fact sheet assessing President Obama’s administrations’ impact on families.

The Maritime Sentry has the latest Michele Bachmann video on that topic:

That’s coerced abortion, at least in the sense that doctors and nurses would be coerced to perform them against their moral beliefs, as well as in the sense that pro-life taxpayers would be forced to fund what they regard as murder. But what about coerced euthanasia?

Ed Morrissey posted this video at Hot Air.

Consider this American Thinker article about how socialists cut costs by rationing health care to the elderly. (H/T ECM)

Excerpt:

Consider what happens in the Netherlands to elderly people. The Netherlands legalized “assisted suicide” in 2002, no doubt in part for compassionate reasons. But also to save money. There is only one money kitty for medical care in the socialist Netherlands. When you get old, the question is asked, either explicitly or by implication:

Do you deserve to live another year compared to young refugees from Somalia, who can use the same euros to have many years of life?

There’s only so much money available. The Netherlands radio service had a quiz show at one time, designed to “raise public awareness” about precisely that question. Who deserves to live, and who to die?

But nobody debates any more about who has the power to make that decision. In socialist Europe the State does. It’s a done deal.

I think we can expect that this is just the beginning of Obama’s plans to make sure that the elderly don’t use more than their “fair share” of health care services. Remember, Obama recommended that the elderly take painkillers rather than pay for life-saving operations. And if his bill passes, he’ll be running the show – and he’ll have to cut an awful lot in order to pay for the nine trillion dollar cumulative deficit he’s supposed to rack up by 2019.