Choosing Starvation and Dehydration, the M.O. of Despair

The End Game

I take Communion on Sundays to six people at a nursing home. Five are suffering from Alzheimers or dementia. One is a lady with many physical problems, but as sharp as a tack mentally. The staff at the nursing home are wonderful. They treat everyone with kindness and gentleness. I have seen an aide spend half an hour patiently feeding a patient who can't remember how to use a fork. That same patient usually smiles when I sing "Jesus loves me..." before I give her Communion. Another Catholic resident is a former organist who can still sit down at the piano and play all the old hymns. We went through a hymnal one day singing half a dozen songs together. He remembered how to play and sang all the words accurately. But he often says things that, in the eyes of the world, would be labeled "crazy." He lives in Alzheimers World most of the time.

Palliative Care or Monstrous Barbarism?

I've written before about the new approach to palliative care. It used to mean keeping a patient comfortable and providing them all they needed to end their life naturally without suffering. But today, palliative care is just as likely, perhaps even more likely, to mean starving and dehydrating someone to death while drugging them so the "caregiver" can pretend the victim isn't suffering. But now the Josef Mengeles working in some hospices want to take the step a little further. They want to study their victims while they kill them.

Writing at his blog on the First Things website, Wesley Smith tells us, It Takes a Long Time to Starve a Severely Disabled Infant to Death by Withdrawing Medically-Supplied Nutrition. Reporting on material presented at the 18th International Congress on Palliative Care he shared the participants' findings on removing "artificial" nutrition and hydration (presumably tube feeding) from sick infants. Hal Siden, MD, from Canuck Place Children’s Hospice in Vancouver, British Columbia presented a case series showing that some infants can live much longer than expected - almost a month after food and hydration are removed: