We previously listened to Rick Santorum as he suggested to religious college students that a vote for him might keep them from being devoured. Now it appears it may also protect you from being snatched up by crazed euthanizing Dutch doctors who will send you to the Nether Regions unless you are wearing a bracelet. He also appears to relish the good old days when abortions in America were regulated to “the shadows.”
Santorum told voters that (1) ten percent of all deaths in the Netherlands were by euthanasia, (2) people have to wear bracelets now to be sure not to be euthanized at hospitals, and (3) 50 percent of euthanasia is performed “involuntarily.”
Before any of our statisticians demand to be euthanized, let’s correct a few of these facts.
The bling-bling of death is hard to figure out. Clearly people can wear bracelets with their blood type or other instructions like do not resuscitate — as they do in this country. However, such bracelets are not needed in the Netherlands and Santorum’s comments appear to come as a surprise to people in that country.
The ten percent figure is a bit bizarre. While growing, the number of people choosing euthanasia remains small and less than 3%. In 2010, 136058 people died in the Netherlands and only 3136 did so through euthanasia. That is roughly 2.3% of the total deaths.
In 2009, the annual report on euthanasia showed 2,636 cases of euthanasia — or 2 percent of all Dutch deaths. Over 80 percent were cancer patients and more than 80 percent of the deaths occurred in the patient’s home — not in those bureaucratic hospitals dispatching everyone who comes in with a slight fever without their bracelet.
As for those 50% of cases dispatched against their will, the Dutch law is extremely strict. It now only requires consent but a waiting period. If a doctor dispatches someone without their consent or satisfying the tight controls, he is charged with murder.
The doctor must document that he or she confirmed that the patient requesting euthanasia or assisted suicide is making a voluntary and informed request. The record must also show that the patient was suffering unbearably and was fully informed about the prospects. Then a second doctor must examine the patient and supply a second written opinion on the satisfaction of the criteria. The government found only nine cases in 2009 of a doctor failing to complying with the strict criteria. There was no mention of a bracelet.
As for the claim that abortions were once forced to occur “in the shadows,” the part is entirely correct. It is just unclear why that is a positive image even for those who oppose the right to choose.
Putting aside these tiny factual disagreements, it is good to finally see a politician willing to take on our greatest threat: the Dutch. Dutch propagandists like Rembrandt, Vermeer and Van Gogh have already infiltrated our schools and museums. Our leaders (except Santorum) are deaf to the growing sound of their wooden-shoe stomping, marzipan-eating hordes. I for one will be on the ramparts with Rick wearing my do not euthanize bracelet before I eat a single herring from the hands of our Dutch overlords.
Santorum and Bachmann suffer from the same fatal flaw — neither does their homework before making public comments regarding important science-related issues, societal topics, and historical events.
Lord knows we certainly don’t want our national leaders to be eloquent, scientifically literate, and generally well-informed about the world in which we live. Much better to derive scientific theories based on the teachings of the Bible, and to form national public policy based on the rumors, gossip, and unverified anecdotal accounts described in supermarket rags and online blogs.
Interestingly, there is a group of people in the Netherlands who wear ‘do not resuscitate’ bracelets, quite the opposite of what Santorum said. Coincidently, just before he made his remark, there was a elderly woman in the news who had those words tattooed those on here chest.
IGNORANCE IS BLISS IN OUR COUNTRY ISNT IT?? THE U.S.A., IN ALL ITS GLORY, JUST OPEN YOUR MOUTH, IGNORANCE TUMBLES OUT!! MAKES ME SO PROUD OF MT COUNTRY!!
The problem with too much red meat
By doubling down on culture war politics, Rick Santorum may be doing Mitt Romney a big favor
BY STEVE KORNACKI
http://www.salon.com/2012/02/21/the_problem_with_too_much_red_meat/singleton/
Thanks, Rick Santorum! No, really
Your backward views are alerting American voters about GOP extremism on issues of health and privacy
BY JOAN WALSH
http://www.salon.com/2012/02/22/thanks_rick_santorum_no_really/singleton/
Excerpt:
OK, it’s true: Rick Santorum didn’t sponsor Virginia legislation to require that women seeking abortion undergo an ultrasound – and in cases of very early pregnancy, when a fetus is hard to see, a creepy and intrusive transvaginal ultrasound. But seven states have already passed ultrasound requirements for women seeking abortion. The Virginia bill is galvanizing opposition nationally at least partly due to the climate of crazy that’s been fomented by Santorum’s backward candidacy.
The man who calls contraception “a license to do things in a sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be” went from being a failed Pennsylvania senator, Mr. “Man on Dog,” to GOP presidential frontrunner over the last month. Now he’s crusading against prenatal testing because he claims it encourages abortion (when in fact most prenatal testing helps women help babies who develop in utero health issues) and claiming President Obama’s policies will ultimately send Christians to the guillotine. (By the way, I apologize for harping on the way Protestants have persecuted Catholics in the U.S., because Santorum reminded me of some of the reason why, with his charge that mainline Protestant churches are a Satan-sponsored “shambles” that are “gone from the world of Christianity as I see it.”) He and Mitt Romney, who’s trying to match him outrage for outrage, having been chasing women voters away from the GOP in droves over the last couple of months.
Into that polarizing political climate came the news that Virginia Republicans want to go where no politician of any stripe belongs: up the vaginal canal and into the uteruses of pregnant women who are seeking an abortion. The bill already passed the state Senate, and clearing the House of Delegates seemed a mere formality, especially given that Alabama, Arizona, Florida, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas already have ultrasound requirements. A mere formality, that is, until people began paying attention.
Now, for two days straight, the Virginia House of Delegates has postponed its vote on the bill. More than a thousand protesters lined walkways to the state Capitol to silently protest the bill on Monday, and their powerful statement seemed to still resonate on Tuesday. The bill is expected to pass eventually, but with every day, the national backlash against the measure helps its opponents’ chances. On MSNBC’s “Politics Nation” Tuesday Virginia Delegate Kaye Kory urged the media to keep paying attention. Gov. Bob McDonnell, who supports the bill, is often mentioned as a GOP vice presidential nominee, and his office has emitted a few warning signs of alarm over the last couple of days. As far right as Republicans have lurched, it can’t be helpful for McDonnell to find his Virginia GOP accused of supporting state-sanctioned rape for forcing unwilling women to submit to vaginal penetration in order to exercise their legal right to an abortion.
AWOOOGAH!!! Conservatives Start To Sound The Alarm Over Rick Santorum’s Extremism
BENJY SARLIN & EVAN MCMORRIS-SANTORO FEBRUARY 21, 2012
http://2012.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/02/aooogah-conservatives-start-to-sound-the-alarm-over-rick-santorums-extremism.php?ref=fpnewsfeed
Excerpt:
Republicans are staring down the increasingly real possibility that Rick Santorum could snatch the presidential nomination away from Mitt Romney and with it any idea that they could mount serious opposition to President Obama in the fall.
As a result, many have started to hit the panic button, and they’re doing so in a way you probably wouldn’t have expected from the GOP, which still counts evangelicals among its strongest and most reliable base vote. Nevertheless, the freakout is evident from the Romney-allied Drudge Report homepage right through to radio host Laura Ingraham’s national airwaves.
Rick Santorum, conservatives and his opponents started to say Tuesday, is just too dang extreme.
The key bullets from Tuesday, when the story really started to emerge:
• The Drudge Report’s powerful homepage banner spent a full day blasting out a 2008 Santorum speech at Ave Maria University in Florida in which the former Pennsylvania Senator told the crowd that Satan is trying to destroy the US. Drudge sold the story as “developing”, but Right Wing Watch had pretty much the whole thing reported last week.
Drudge is generally seen as a friendly outlet for Romney, and the timing of the less-than-flattering story — coming just a week before the primaries in Arizona and Michigan — was dead-on for someone hoping to derail Santorum’s momentum.
Ed Kilgore noted that Drudge wasn’t the only generally pro-Romney conservative to call out Santorum for extremism Tuesday. Jennifer Rubin took Santorum to task for his comments about women in combat, women working outside the home and this weekend’s meltdown over Obama’s “theology”:
“In short, Santorum on social issues is not a conservative but a reactionary, seeking to obliterate the national consensus on a range of issues beyond gay marriage and abortion.”
• But it wasn’t just people with generally nice things to say about Romney who were raising the concern that Santorum may just be too far out there for the modern GOP. Conservative radio talker Laura Ingraham hosted Newt Gingrich on her show Tuesday, and spent much of the eight minute interview berating Santorum for causing the conversation to veer away from economic issues in favor of discussions of pre-natal testing.
I have decided that Mr. Santorum’s comments on a broad variety of issues share two characteristics. First, he is very sloppy with facts. Second, he has no understanding of the notion of causality.
Mike S.
I’m as my earlier post shows, and my deceased wife Kerstin, are on the same page as you. She had been operated four times, had both chem and rad therapies, etc.
Mine has been long (cancer and heart) but not terminal, although her process was shared intimately by us two, not in words but in understanding anyway.
I’ve met both understanding and worse as you have. We have a saying which I’m sure is common there: you have to be a damn strong sick person to survive the medical system.
Just wanted you to know, we understand. No reply necessary.
What Mike said! The family and the doctor should be the ones making these decisions. Not idiots like Rick Santorum. Isn’t he the anti-abortion guy whose wife had an abortion to save her life?
This is “The Big Lie” as is most of the numbers thrown around by GOP candidates in the past few cycles. Our media is so infected with dyscalcula, that they never really challenge this.
Rick Santorum’s ‘Involuntary Euthanasia’ Claim Outrages Dutch [VIDEO]
By Melaine Jones
2/20/12
http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/301702/20120220/rick-santorum-euthanasia-netherlands-dutch-backlash.htm
Excerpts:
Rick Santorum’s claim that the Netherlands advocates mass murder through involuntary euthanasia has prompted a furious backlash from the Western European country, with local news sources calling the Republican a “crazy extreme” candidate making up facts to stir up his political base.
“Rick Santorum Thinks He Knows the Netherlands: Murder of the Elderly on a Grand Scale” fumed the headline of the newspaper NRC Handelsblad on Saturday.
The article references an interview, barely played up by the American press, in which Santorum claims that euthanasia makes up “10 percent of all deaths” in the Netherlands,” and that many of those people were essentially murdered by the state.
“Half of those people are euthanized involuntarily, because they are old or sick,” Santorum told social conservative leader James Dobson earlier this month in an American Heartland Forum.
*****
Statistics Tell a Different Story
In reality, public statistics, which have been recorded since the practice was legalized in the Netherlands in 2002, report that roughly 2 percent of all deaths in the country are due to euthanasia. The idea of “involuntary euthanasia,” meanwhile, is baffling to residents of the liberal state, implying as it does patients wheeled off to die the moment their vitals drop.
But after incredulity came anger, and plenty of it.
“Rick Santorum is an archconservative,” the piece, translated by Dutch blogger Bertine Moenaff, begins. “The most conservative of all the candidates in the Republican primary race. He loathes abortion and euthanasia.”
“So now, he loathes the Netherlands,” the article continues with an acid wit. “Because in the Netherlands, we kill the elderly like there’s no tomorrow.”
The author, credited as Niels Posthumus, accused Santorum of shoveling on “baseless ‘facts'” to support his erroneous conclusions.
“This man is really imaginative,” Posthumus concludes. “It would be a laughing matter, if he weren’t in the race for the Republican nomination to take on Barack Obama in the race for the presidency of the most powerful country in the world.”
Caught bits and pieces of this on my new medium the radio,last night;
February 16, 2012, 9:00 PM
The Electoral Wasteland
By TIMOTHY EGAN
Timothy Egan on American politics and life, as seen from the West.
TAGS:
ELECTIONS, PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION OF 2012, REPUBLICAN PARTY, VOTER REGISTRATION AND REQUIREMENTS, VOTING AND VOTERS
In barely a century’s time, the population of the United States has more than tripled, to 313 million. We are a clattering, opinionated cluster of nearly all the world’s races and religions, and many of its languages, under one flag.
You would not know any of this looking at who is voting in one of the strangest presidential primary campaigns in history. There is no other way to put this without resorting to demographic bluntness: the small fraction of Americans who are trying to pick the Republican nominee are old, white, uniformly Christian and unrepresentative of the nation at large
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/16/the-electoral-wasteland/#more-121283
As someone who within the last two years has been on the verge of death let me insert a point from my own personal experience and from those who had similar experiences though from different maladies. The experience of being in a hospital for months, in and of itself is a form of torture. This is not a comment on a particular hospital’s quality of care, but the hospital experience itself. I’ve had extensive stays in a variety of hospitals ranging from municipal to elite and the nature of normal hospital procedures is such that as a patient infantilization, humiliation and sheer degradation are the rule. In saying this I am far from expressing bitterness because my life was saved time and again. My point merely is that to organize such a large, labor intensive operation, while assuring quality of care is a daunting task, that perforce makes it difficult to individualize service needs to a particular patient.
Even as I write this I shudder with the remembrance of my various experiences, life saving as they were and won’t belabor you with the details, save to say they have left me in a state where experiencing personal, physical humiliation is no longer difficult for me, been there and felt that. This is a preamble to stating that were I in the position of having a terminal illness, as we all will be one day, I would prefer to be left to live out my remaining time away from the emergency ministrations of a hospital, trying to add days to what would be at that point an excruciating life. Stopping aggressive medical care, at the patient or family’s behest, is hardly the same as euthanasia.
I dont know if anyone has mentioned this but I think he got those “stats” from Robert Bork’s book “Slouching Toward Gomorrah”. In it he has a section on a handicapped man being bullied by his wife and a doctor to drink the hemlock. I also think it aired on a TV news show. The man was from the Netherlands.
Piet,
Not using you as a whipping boy, but allow me to clarify……
You say; “—-count the data points for “no treatment or stopping treatment with death as an explicit purpose” (10261), —–”
That is a major item quantity-wise. And that is just what it is meant to be.
In effective care systems, much palliative care can be done in the home.
My wife was there until her last two days, enjoying being not treated as medical “package”, resting in her own home, surrounded by things she loved.
When the doctor said it was time, she agreed to be moved to the hospice.
The doctor there said simply that it would only be a continuation of the previous care, ie palliative care. Ease the process but no attempts at resuscitation.
Now that is only how one case was handled, but some generalizations can be gained, with reservation as to what qualifies as palliative.
So most are far gone when they arrive at the hospice or acute hospital.
Thus no alternative other than the choice mentioned above is possible medically speaking. So while explicit, it is NOT euthanasia.
But you were willing to let Santorum to interpret the figures that way.
You were supporting facts, he doesn’t give a damn about them.
Piet,
Your figures are perhaps correct. Thanks for them.
The point is you have not made a COMPARISON with American hospital practices, including hospices. Most of the categories you gave, particularly the first one, are found as causes routinely in America (and Europe) in terminal cases.
There are terminal conditions where death is inevitable, the body and the sedated mind is suffering as organs stop working, and the humane thing to do is not euthanasia—-rather just stop support systems, ie not prolonging the agony.
In medical shorthand these are given as the categories you listed.
There is no callousness there, nor euthanesia. There is only the detachment which allows dealing with death intimately and stlll be effective under such conditions.
I have as a patient, non-terminal, watched the terminal process for two and half months, of cancer patients from practically being in the same room.
And the care they were given as well.
Let us use facts factually. Which is what most politicians do NOT.