Assisted Decision-Making (Capacity) Bill 2013

The first stage of a new Bill known as the ‘AssistedDecision-Making (Capacity) Bill 2013’ (Number 83 of 2013), was presented to the Dail (Irish Parliament), on July 17^th, by Alan Shatter the Minister for Justice and Equality.

This bill permits a third party to make life and death decisions in respect of the life of another who has become mentally incapacitated.

Certain provisions of the bill are a cause for concern such as those set out in sections 4, 25, 41, and 70.

Section 4 (2), (a), (b), and (c):

           

(2) Notwithstanding any other provision in this Act, the High Court, and not the court, shall have jurisdiction relating to every matter in connection with—

(a) non-therapeutic sterilisation,

(b) withdrawal of artificial life-sustaining treatment, or

(c) the donation of an organ,

where the matter concerns a relevant person who lacks capacity.

Section 25 (a) (vi), (vii):

(a) may, without prejudice to the generality of section 23(2)(b), authorise a decision-making representative for the relevant person to make decisions on behalf of the relevant person in respect of any one or more than one of the following matters:

(vi) whether or not the relevant person may travel outside the State;

(vii) granting or refusing consent to the carrying out or continuation of a treatment of the relevant person by a healthcare professional;

  

Section 41 (2) (b):                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          

(2) A personal welfare decision—

(b) extends to giving or refusing treatment by a person providing healthcare for the donor other than refusing life-sustaining treatment.

Section 70 (1), (a), (b):

(1) In this Part— 10 “adult” means a person who—

(a) as a result of an impairment or insufficiency of his or her personal faculties, cannot protect his or her interests, and

(b) has reached 18 years of age;

These issues are a cause for concern for patients in Irish hospitals bearing in mind that following the 1993 Bland judgement in the UK deliberate killing by dehydration became more prevalent. The Bland judgement actually opened the door to euthanasia permitting doctors to dehydrate and starve to death certain mentally incapacitated patients. What the UK Mental Capacity Act does, through its provisions such as, advance decisions, lasting powers of attorney together with the re-definition of "best interests" and "medical treatment", is to extend the principles of the Bland decision to all mentally incapacitated patients.

Reform of the law on decision-making capacity, according to an Explanatory Memorandum published with the newly proposed Irish legislation, is one of the actions required to enable the State to ratify the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and the Bill gives effect in the State to the Hague Convention on the International Protection of Adults. The Bill also provides for the establishment of a new statutory office, the Office of the Public Guardian, which will supervise decision-making assistants, co-decision- makers, decision-making representatives and persons holding enduring powers of attorney.

The Explanatory Memorandum for the new Irish legislation explains that the background and purpose of the Bill is to reform the law and to provide a modern statutory framework that supports decision-making by adults and enables them to retain the greatest amount of autonomy possible in situations where they lack or may shortly lack capacity.

The Bill changes the existing law on capacity, shifting from the current all or nothing status approach to a flexible functional one, whereby capacity is assessed on an issue- and time-specific basis. The Bill replaces the Wards of Court system with a modern statutory framework to assist persons in exercising their decision-making capacity.

The Memorandum says the Bill provides a statutory framework enabling formal agreements to be made by persons who consider that their capacity is in question, or may shortly be in question, to appoint a trusted person to act as their decision-making assistant to assist them in making decisions or as a co-decision-maker who will make decisions jointly with them.

The Memorandum continues by saying that the Bill also provides for the making of applications to court in respect of persons whose capacity may be in question to seek a declaration as to whether those persons lack capacity and for the making of consequent orders approving co-decision-making agreements or appointing decision-making representatives.

The Memorandum also explains that Bill provides for protection from liability for informal decision-makers in relation to personal welfare and healthcare decisions made on behalf of a person with impaired capacity where such decisions are necessary and where no formal decision-making arrangements are in place. It modernises the law relating to enduring powers of attorney.

We shall continue to monitor the progress of this Bill as it goes through the various stages in the Dail

ABC link explodes in Asia; cover-up continues in the West

National Right to Life (NRL) have published a new and very interesting article by Dr Joel Brind on the link between abortion and breast cancer with a special focus on the recent Bangladesh study published in the Journal of Dhaka Medical College.  

Dr Brind writes:

Some epidemic diseases are caused by bacteria, the smallest of living things. Some are caused by viruses: rogue bits of DNA or RNA; non-living, but nonetheless infectious bits of destructive information. We are all familiar now, of course, with computer viruses that act in the same way.

Breast cancer, on the other hand, is one of those “epidemic” diseases believed not to be infectious. But infectious bits of destructive information are viruses indeed, and they don’t need computers to be carriers. The bad information can be in any language.

Suppose one were to introduce cigarettes to a population that had never smoked, along with the instruction: “Smoking cigarettes is not harmful to your health.” That sentence, embodying false and destructive information, would—just like a molecular virus—surely cause an epidemic of lung cancer in due time, would it not?

Here’s another example: “Abortion does not increase your breast cancer risk.” This particular strain of the “safe abortion virus” can be traced back to at least 1982 in Oxford, England, and it has now spread worldwide.

The awful news is it is now poised to claim the lives of millions of women in the world’s most populous nations. Let me explain why.

The ABC link essentially has two prongs. First, it is universally accepted that having a child decreases a woman’s risk of breast cancer, because the maturation of the cells in the breast into milk-producing cells renders them less susceptible to becoming cancerous

Second, pregnancy hugely increases the number of breast cells vulnerable to cancer. A live birth provides enough time for these “progenitor cells” to differentiate into more mature, more cancer-resistant cells.

Therefore, abortion leaves a woman’s breasts with more places for cancer to start than were there before the pregnancy began.

This latest study has the dubious distinction of showing by far the strongest ABC link ever observed: Women in Bengladesh who had an abortion were found to have a 20-fold increased risk of developing breast cancer!

Why such a high relative risk? That’s because almost all women in Bengla Desh get married and start having children before they are 21, and breast-feed all their children as well. Consequently, breast cancer has been almost unheard of in Bengla Desh, until recently. [1]

Even a very conservative estimate results in some deeply troubling numbers for the world’s most populous nations. If abortion doubles a woman’s breast cancer from say, 2% to 4% lifetime risk that would add 2% lifetime risk. There are over a billion women in India and China alone. Two percent of a billion is 20 million! With a mortality rate of 50% (It’s a lot higher in Asia than in the US), that makes 10 million women dying of breast cancer because they chose abortion!

Numbers like that are daunting enough to get the attention of top researchers at Harvard, who, 5 years ago in the flagship journal of the National Cancer Institute (NCI) acknowledged: “China is on the cusp of a breast cancer epidemic”. Of course they do not mention abortion. Instead they lament, “some risk factors associated with economic development are largely unavoidable” and call “for urgent incorporation of this disease in future healthcare infrastructure planning.” That mainly means mammograms and treatment facilities, not stopping the “virus” (denying the link between having an induced abortion and an increased risk of breast cancer) that spreads the “safe abortion” myth.

That the “virus” continues to be spread is evidenced by a ABC denial study from Denmark just published this past April. Christina Braüner and colleagues, published their finding:”Our study did not show evidence of an association between induced abortion and breast cancer risk.”

This is not surprising because the way the study was constructed it was incapable of showing whether that is true or not. Specifically, they took a highly selected group of Danish women who were healthy until at least age 50 and only looked at their medical history for about 12 years after they joined the study.

Hence, even an average woman in the Danish population who’d had an abortion, would had to have survived cancer-free for almost 3 decades before even being eligible for the study! On top of that exclusion of most of the vulnerable population, they further restricted the study to only women who had at least one child, thus eliminating the women most at risk (since not having children is a strong risk factor for breast cancer).

One wonders when the world will finally wake to the unfolding breast cancer pandemic beginning to unfold before our eyes. The power of denial “viruses” continues to amaze.

______________

[1] Relative risk measures in the other Asian studies have been a bit more like those more commonly observed, e.g., 3.4-fold in Sri Lanka, 2.4 and 2.1 in two Chinese studies, 1.9 in an Indian study, 1.6 in an Iranian study and 1.3 in a Turkish study. (A relative risk greater than 1 indicates increased risk, e.g., 1.3 means 30% greater risk, 3.4 means 240% increased risk, etc..

The variation is great from county to country because the measure is relative, i.e., it depends on how common the disease is if abortion were not a factor. So in the Western world, the average is about 1.3 (a 30% increased risk), whereas it is more like 2 in Asia, where lifetime breast cancer risk is typically less than 2% if abortion were not a factor.

Joel Brind, Ph.D., is a professor of Biology and Endocrinology at Baruch College of the City University of New York. He is a co-founder and Board Member of the Breast Cancer Prevention Institute, having conducted ABC-link research since 1992, and a long-time contributor to NRL News.

Victory! Court Issues Permanent Injunction Against Derzis’ Illegal Birmingham Alabama Abortion Business

Operation Rescue reported on August 8th that Judge Joseph L. Boohaker issued a permanent injunction today barring abortionist Bruce Norman from operating an abortion clinic at the location of the former New Woman All Women abortion facility in Birmingham, Alabama. Judge Hoohaker also enjoined clinic owner Diane Derzis from referring abortion patients to the Birmingham office. The injunction should close the illegal abortion business permanently.

The decision was the result of a law suit filed by the Alabama Department of Public Health alleging that Derzis and Norman were operating an illegal abortion clinic without proper licensing on the site of an abortion clinic that had been closed due to the hospitalization of 3 abortion patients in one day and the subsequent discovery of 76-pages of health code deficiencies that presented a danger to the public.

Today’s ruling represents a victory for pro-life groups, including Life Legal Defense, which filed an amicus curiae brief on behalf of CEC for Life and Operation Rescue in support of the ADPH suit. The groups worked together to expose abortion abuses at the clinic and filed complaints that resulted in the original closure of New Woman All Women last year.

“We are excited with the ruling and pleased with the fact that Derzis and Norman were finally caught red-handed operating outside the law. This will be the second time in less than a year that we have worked along-side local pro-life activists to close this dangerous abortion operation,” said Troy Newman, President of Operation Rescue. “We are thankful that women will now be protected by the permanent injunction on Derzis and Norman. We hope this will be the end of their schemes to evade the laws.”

Judge Boohaker noted in his 22-page ruling that he considered that Norman’s testimony about the number of abortions done at the Birmingham office was contradictory and was actually more than the 30 abortions per month limit for unlicensed facilities. The judge also took issue with Derzis’ abortion business referring abortion clients to Norman at the Birmingham office, noting that the referrals held the office out to be an abortion clinic.

This decision comes one day after Norman was involved in an abortion emergency at Derzis’ Jackson Women’s Health Organization, Mississippi’s last remaining abortion clinic.

“Norman essentially shipped his injured patient off to the ER where someone else was forced to clean up his mess,” said Newman. “We pray that the judge that is blocking Mississippi’s hospital privilege requirement will follow Alabama’s lead and protect the public from Derzis and Norman’s shoddy and dangerous abortion practices.”

Doctor’s right to object to abortions is “not absolute” – Department of Health

The Journal reported Friday August 9^th that according to a statement by the Department of Health the rights of medical personnel to object to carrying out abortions must not interfere with the wellbeing of a patient.

The Journal article continues:

This week a member of the board of the Mater Hospital, Fr Kevin Doran, said that the hospital “can’t carry out abortions because it goes against our ethos”.  He was echoed by fellow board member, and a nurse tutor at the hospital, Sr Eugene Nolan.

Sr Nolan said that the situation facing the hospital was “very, very grave”. The Mater is listed as one of 25 appropriate institutions named in the Protection of Life During Pregnancy Act where abortions may be carried out in order to save the lives of pregnant women.

‘No provision for institutional objection’

Yesterday, there was a suggestion that the Mater may be able to refuse to carry out a termination due a late removal of a line in the act that stated no institution could refuse to carry out a termination.

That, however was denied by a Department of Health spokesperson who spoke to TheJournal.ie today.

“The Act does not provide for conscientious objection by institutions.

“Section 17 of the Protection of Life During Pregnancy Act 2013 clarifies that professional health personnel (medical and nursing personnel) with a conscientious objection will not be obliged to carry out or assist in carrying out lawful terminations of pregnancy, unless the risk to the life of the pregnant woman is immediate, i.e. in an emergency situation.

However, an individual’s right to conscientious objection is not absolute and must be balanced against the patient’s competing rights, particularly the right to life in the case of a medical emergency.

“In such cases where a doctor or other health professional has a conscientious objection to undertaking a required medical procedure, he or she will have a duty to ensure that another colleague takes over the care of the patient as per current medical ethics,” said the spokesperson.

“These provisions make it clear that this right is limited to persons involved in the delivery of the treatment only.”

Church message ‘increasingly counter-cultural’, says Coadjutor Archbishop of Armagh

The Irish Times reported 12 August that Coadjutor Archbishop Eamon Martin of Armagh has asked “why shouldn’t a Catholic politician, or lawyer, or teacher, or person of any profession for that matter, be able to confidently and unapologetically express their sincerely held faith-based arguments in the public square without fear of ridicule or being branded a bigot or against freedom?”He said, “Surely the mark of a truly pluralist society is one which will allow people of all faiths and none to express and act upon their conscientiously held views, particularly on a matter as critical as the upholding of all human life.”
Archbishop Martin, who will succeed Cardinal Seán Brady as Catholic Primate of All Ireland, was delivering the annual St Oliver Plunkett address in west Belfast last night as part of Féile an Phobail celebrations there.

Abortion legislation
He said “the recent debate surrounding the introduction of abortion legislation in the South has illustrated how much our message is becoming increasingly counter-cultural”.
He noted that “strong arguments indeed” were presented by the church but that “some were on the attack immediately pointing to the child abuse scandals and the church’s abysmal record of protecting the lives of children in the past, as if that means we should not attempt to speak up for the protection of the most innocent human life in the present”.
Others had pointed out “that the bishops being a group of aging celibate men have no right to interfere with a woman’s right to choose what she wants to do with her body”. And there were the arguments, “made by several senior politicians that, whilst bishops are entitled to their views, they as politicians have to legislate for all the people, for the public good”.

‘Faith outside the door ’
This “implied that somehow access to abortion is for the public good, but even more significantly, that politicians themselves, even if they be practising Catholics, must leave their faith outside the door when they are entering the legislative chamber”.
He felt “it would hugely impoverish our faith if we were to compartmentalise it or exclude it completely from our conversations and actions in the public square. But I believe that it would also impoverish society if the fundamental convictions of faith were not permitted to influence public debate.”
Where the North was concerned, he said, “We are only ‘tiptoeing’ towards a shared and reconciled future . . . We all have a responsibility to help avoid a relapse into violence, especially in the most deprived areas across our communities where residents feel they have won little from the peace.”
More generally, “We know that many people feel they can no longer trust our message because they have been hurt and betrayed by their experience of church in the past.”
He said “I do not think that the dark cloud of abuse shall lift easily, but perhaps that is how it should be – given that many of those whose trust was so cruelly betrayed shall carry their hurt to their graves . . . The least we can do is never to forget.”