Canada
Quebec Health Minister Gaetan Barrette said families of caregivers will be given $1000 to help look after dying relatives saying he hopes to see the percentage of Quebecers with chronic diseases who die at home increase from 11 per cent to 20. “We will never see a situation where everybody will end their lives at home,” he said announcing $10 million in new palliative care improvements. Quebec’s Medical Aid in Dying law, Bill 52, comes into effect Dec. 10 … Amy Hasbrouck, founder of Toujours Vivant – Not Dead Yet, was elected vice president of the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition. Hasbrouck, a lawyer and disability rights activist, was one of the leading voices against Quebec’s medical-aid-in-dying law … The Peel District School Board has coopted the support of four imams to promote the board’s 12-page “Facts Matter” booklet promoting the province’s new sex-ed curriculum to parents. The board says it is necessary to counter misinformation about the curriculum. Imam Zahir Bacchus, who teaches at a private Muslim school, claims “we can take that back to our community and understand it a bit better, to offset some of the rumours” about the curriculum. … Ontario Health Minister Eric Hoskins announced that individuals seeking gender-reassignment surgery will no longer need a referral through the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, indicating that candidates for sex-change operations will no longer be required to go through a psychological evaluation. The rationale for the move is to shorten the wait-time for surgery, which now stands at two years. NDP MPP Cheri DiNovo called it a “wonderful first step” but added that more surgeons should be trained to do the complex surgery.
United States
The Supreme Court of the United States announced Nov. 13 that it would hear Whole Women’s Health v. Cole, a challenge to the 2013 Texas law that requires abortion facilities to have hospital-grade facilities and abortionists to have admitting privileges within 30 miles of their abortion facility. Current Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton says the law “raised the standard of care for all abortion patients,” while the Whole Women’s Health said these are a smokescreen for the actual goal of closing abortion facilities. The Center for Reproductive Rights says that because of the law, 23 of the state’s 42 abortion facilities have closed in the past two years and that if allowed to stand another ten will close. In June, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the law could stand as it was not the job of the judiciary to second-guess the legislature. The Supreme Court decision is expected next June. It is the first time since 2007 that SCOTUS has heard an abortion case, when it upheld a federal ban on the partial-birth abortion procedure … Pro-life Republican governors Bobby Jindal (Louisiana) and Scott Walker (Wiscosin) and former Texans governor Rick Perry have all dropped out of the Republican presidential primaries … Planned Parenthood tweeted “Every child deserves the opportunity to live up to their God given potential. @HillaryClinton, #blacklivesmatter.” Online activists noted that irony that PP eliminates the lives of hundreds of thousands of preborn children every year, a disproportionate number of them black babies.
International
The German legislature passed a law that permitted euthanasia for “altruistic motives” but not “business” reasons in a 360-233 vote supported by members of both the governing Christian Democrats and opposition Left Party. The new law will allow euthanasia on an “individual basis” but prohibit doctors from killing patients for reasons of costs, in which case doctors could face three years in prison. Chancellor Angela Merkel supported the new law. Former justice minister Brigitte Zypries said the law is confusing as it could be difficult to delineate altruistic and business reasons … Facing labour shortages and declining economic fortunes, the Xinhua news agency reports that Red China will liberalize the country’s 1980 one-child policy to permit couples the right to have two children. The easing of the one-child policy which has been enforced by coercive abortion and forced sterilization, seeks to “improve the balanced development of (China’s) population.” During the 35 years the one-child policy has been officially enforced, there have been approximately 350 million abortions in the country, resulting in an aging population and declining workforce. Furthermore, due to the desire for a son, sex-selective abortions has resulted in a surplus of 20-40 million marriage-age males. Reggie Littlejohn of Women’s Rights Without Frontiers issued an open letter to Chinese Premier Xi Jinping saying that it is not enough to replace the one-child policy with a two-child policy but rather “official, state-sponsored forced abortion … should be eradicated from the face of the earth” because it has “caused more violence toward women and girls than any other official policy on earth.”