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What we weren’t told about Terry Pratchett’s ‘award-winning’ euthanasia documentary

What we weren’t told about Terry Pratchett’s ‘award-winning’ euthanasia documentary | NRL News Today: Fantasy novelist Terry Pratchett won a Bafta for his ‘documentary’ Choosing To Die, in which he followed a man with motor neurone disease to Switzerland in order to film him killing himself at the Dignitas facility. The man’s wife, who was clearly very uncomfortable about the whole event, but went along with it out of deference to her husband, was prevented from comforting him as he died by one of the facility staff.

At a recent meeting where Peter Saunders of the Christian Medical Fellowship was speaking a woman told him  she had always supported assisted suicide before seeing the film, but that watching it had caused her to change her mind. She now strongly opposes a change in the law.

'via Blog this'

'He drinks a liquid, falls into a deep sleep and dies' on national television

The BBC will next week air a controversial documentary where a motor neurone disease sufferer takes his own life. Sitting on a sofa with his wife at his side, viewers will see Peter drink a liquid, fall into a deep sleep and then die. The five-minute sequence, filmed at the Dignitas clinic in Switzerland, is part of a forthcoming BBC2 program fronted by Sir Terry Pratchett. The corporation has defended its decision to film Peter's last moments as part of its exploration into the realities of assisted death. Daily Mail

Get to Know: Apostrophe'

Apostrophe' is an online magazine about and for people with disabilities. Check out the article about Shepherds College on page 56.

Actor Patrick Stewart: Assisted suicide should be a ‘right’

Actor Patrick Stewart: assisted suicide should be a ‘right’ | LifeSiteNews.com: Patrick Stewart of Star Trek fame has come out as a proponent of assisted suicide. In an interview with the Sunday Times yesterday the actor expressed his support for Dignity in Dying, a group campaigning for a change to the UK law banning assisted suicide, saying the choice to have an assisted death “should be a right.”

Music from the Heart

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Student News Team Launches "Brave Old World"

Student News Team Launches "Brave Old World": Ten student reporters from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism produced a series of in-depth multimedia investigative reports on the elderly, depicting the complex dimensions of aging. The project involved comprehensive research to address a subject of growing importance to Americans: to show how communities may adapt to meet the needs of a growing elderly population. These informative segments include:

• “How We Live Now,” a series of six video portraits showing the places and circumstances in which seniors are carrying out their days.
• “Growing Old in Three Minutes,” short videos drawing from the latest science, which demonstrate the impact of aging on the body’s senses.
• “What We Know About Dementia,” a report on the impending crisis, including interviews with Alzheimer’s patients themselves.
• “Welcome to Elderland,” an animated illustration of how communities can adapt to an aging population."

Euthanasia: The musical

It had to happen: a musical about euthanasia. Of course, nearly every film coming out of Bollywood is a musical, but director Sanjay Leela Bhansali has tried to make Guzaarish (The Request) a lush melodrama with Hrithik Roshan and Aishwarya Rai in the lead roles.

The plot, as in most musicals is not the most important element. An impossibly handsome Goan magician - the world's greatest - becomes a quadriplegic attended by an impossibly beautiful and devoted nurse. After 14 years in a wheelchair, he wants to die. His mother, an apprentice magician, and an old flame enter the plot as well. It culminates in a courtroom drama. With dancing. And songs. BioEdge.org

Get to Know: I Am Music for Life

“I Am Music For Life” is a radio program that plays exclusively pro-life music. Peter Jorgensen writes: "It is my mission to have music that is; pro-life, pro-family, pro-adoption and pro-support of single parents as an alternative to abortion, played for as many listeners as possible. I started I Am Music for life in March of 1991, and it’s played on Saturday evenings at 9 through a Christian radio station in Cohoes, NY (WHAZ 97.4 FM). 

"The current airing of the programs costs $100/ month. I’m asking for your support in this endeavor, and as support is received, I will have the program played in more and more areas throughout this wonderful God-fearing country of ours."

Movie: Make Way for Tomorrow

This sensitively rendered and sentimental movie, shown recently on Turner Classic Movies, explores themes that will resonate with the "sandwich generation."

A devoted couple faces the harsh economic realities of growing older. Four of the five children of septuagenarian couple Barkley and Lucy Cooper gather to learn that their parents have lost their house. Expecting the children will soon find them a permanent home, Barkley and Lucy each go to live with a different child. Lucy unwittingly disrupts the home life of her well-meaning son George and his wife Anita by interfering with Anita's career as a bridge teacher and causing George and Anita's reckless daughter Rhoda to stop bringing her male friends home. When Rhoda's promiscuity leads the family to the brink of scandal, Anita convinces George to investigate the possibility of putting Lucy in a home for the aged, as efforts to unite Barkley and Lucy in the home of daughter Nellie Chase have foundered on the resistance of Nellie's husband. Three hundred miles away, Barkley's presence has so distressed his mean-spirited daughter Cora that she distorts a doctor's report to convince the family that Barkley must live in California with his daughter Addie. Resigning herself to permanent separation from Barkley, Lucy agrees to enter a home for the aged. The couple spends five joyous hours together in the city before the train to California separates husband and wife forever.

Media Incompetence

No, a German court did not legalize assisted suicide, as the BBC reported! It allows patients to refuse unwanted medical treatment, a different matter factually, ethically, and in the ultimate cause of the patient’s death. Secondhand Smoke

Roadside Controversy Looms With 'Right to Die' Billboards

Final Exit Network is putting up billboards to let you know that you have the “right to die.” The controversial non-profit announced plans to put up billboards along highways in California, New Jersey and Florida, promoting what president Jerry Dincin calls “the last civil right of the 21st Century” -- the right for a person to determine his or her own death in certain medical situations. The billboards, which will feature the slogan “My Life, My Death, My Choice,” are reportedly funded in part by volunteer donations to FEN. Newsfeed

Decision to Pull Plug on Gary Coleman Contradicted Living Will

Former Diff'rent Strokes star Gary Coleman's ex-wife decided to "pull the plug" on her husband after a head injury, contradicting his desires as expressed in a living will signed several years earlier, according to reports. LifeSiteNews

The US heavy metal band Fear Factory tackles the controversial theme of assisted suicide in its recent song “Final Exit,” which takes its title from Derek Humphry’s 1992 book. Here are some lyrics:

Your life no longer has any value
Let them tell you what your own life is worth
There is no compassion as life fades away
This self deliverance the choice you have made

BioEdge

Gary Coleman's Wife Mentions Terri Schiavo in Comments About Pulling Plug

Gary Coleman's ex-wife said in a new interview that she pulled the plug on the actor last week because she didn't want him ending up like Terri Schiavo. Shannon Price said, "Be in my situation. I mean, look what happened with Terri Schiavo. I always think of her case, always, when it comes to this. Gary was gone, and he would have died sooner or later anyway from that. I don't want people to be so hard on me, thinking I had to pull the plug too early. He wouldn't have made it anyway. His heart would have just given out." Pro-life blogger Jill Stanek reminds us, however, that Terri was never on life support -- she merely had assistance eating and drinking. LifeNews

Assisted suicide: why now?

A hundred years ago when people did die in agony from such illnesses as a burst appendix, there was little talk of legalizing euthanasia. But now, when pain and other forms of suffering are readily alleviated and the hospice movement has created truly compassionate methods to care for the dying, suddenly we hear the battle cry “death with dignity” as “the ultimate civil liberty.”

In fighting assisted suicide since 1993, I have often pondered the “why now” question. I’ve found two answers: First, the perceived overriding purpose of society has shifted to the benefit of assisted suicide advocacy, and second, our public policies are driven and defined by a media increasingly addicted to slinging emotional narratives rather than reporting about rational discourse and engaging in principled analysis. Add in a popular culture enamored with social outlaws, and the potential exists for a perfect euthanasia storm.

The prevent-suffering-at-all-costs agenda is harnessed by assisted suicide advocates through publicizing heart-rending stories of seriously ill or disabled patients who want to die. Illustrating how potent this emotional narrative has become, even the ghoulish Jack Kevorkian is being remade into a big softy concerned solely with relieving suffering. Indeed, none other than Al Pacino sympathetically portrayed Kevorkian in the recent HBO movie, You Don’t Know Jack.

Ignored by the script writers and the media, the real Kevorkian was the mirror opposite of compassionate. In his 1993 book Prescription Medicide: The Goodness of Planned Death, Kevorkian made his ultimate purpose chillingly clear, calling assisted suicide “a first step, an early distasteful professional obligation” toward obtaining a license to engage in human experimentation.

Writing further: “What I find most satisfying is the prospect of making possible the performance of invaluable experiments or other beneficial acts under conditions that this first unpleasant step can help establish — in a word, obitiatry — as defined earlier.” (“Obitiatry” is the word Kevorkian coined to describe experimenting on people as part of the practice of human euthanasia.) That the media depict Kevorkian as caring rather than self serving tells us how far awry we have been pushed by the collective desperation to avoid suffering by whatever means necessary. Wesley Smith

Get to Know: Caregiver Media Group

Caregiver Media Group is a leading provider of information, support and guidance for family and professional caregivers. Founded in 1995, we produce Today's Caregiver magazine, the first national magazine dedicated to caregivers, the "Sharing Wisdom Caregivers Conferences," and our web site, caregiver.com which includes topic specific newsletters, online discussion lists, back issue articles of Today's Caregiver magazine, chat rooms and an online store. Caregiver Media Group and all of it's products are developed for caregivers, about caregivers and by caregivers.

Kevorkian: Assisted suicide 'discussed to death'

Jack Kevorkian, the man known as "Dr. Death," says assisted suicide has been "discussed to death." The assisted suicide advocate said Thursday the HBO biographical movie You Don't Know Jack is unlikely to inspire much action but he's delighted and honored by the "superbly done" film about his crusade. Breitbart

HBO Movie on Jack Kevorkian Premiers Saturday

The new HBO movie glorifying the life of assisted suicide advocate Jack Kevorkian starring Al Pacino premiers on Saturday. You Don't Know Jack, the biopic on the man who was eventually imprisoned for killing a disabled patient on national television, is already drawing criticism. Attorney and author Wesley J. Smith says the movie presents a revisionist history of Kevorkian and his killing more than 120 people in assisted suicides. LifeNews