The other country where euthanasia for children is legal—Colombia
The long process of legalisation began in 1997
Colombia is not a nation that one associates with end-of-life debates, but it is one of the few which has legalised euthanasia – even for children over 6 years old. Perhaps the issue has flown under the radar because many Colombians are Catholics or Evangelicals for whom euthanasia is anathema.
The process began in 1997 when Colombia’s Constitutional Court ruled that ending lives in certain circumstances was not illegal. In Sentencia C-239/97 it stated: “Nothing is more cruel than to force a person to survive in the midst of shameful suffering, in the name of other people’s beliefs.”However, this still left the legal status of assisted suicide and euthanasia in a legal limbo. Activists could not be sure that they would not be prosecuted.
And then, in 2017 (Sentencia T-544) the Court ordered the Department of Health and Social Protection to issue regulations which would “guarantee the right to death worthy of children and adolescents”. So on March 9, 2018, the Department of Health and Social Protection issued Resolution 825 which allowed euthanasia for children over 6. The Department explained that before that age children cannot grasp the idea of their own death. However, children between the ages of 7 and 12 are allowed access euthanasia with the approval of their parents. Children between 12 and 14 can access it even if one parent disagrees. After 14, no parental involvement is needed, provided that all the requirements for euthanasia are fulfilled.
Like adults, the child must have an incurable condition, have unmanageable pain and the mental capacity to consent. “Doing this for children is a whole new world,” Ricardo Luque Nunez, a doctor and bioethicist who is an adviser to the Colombian Ministry of Health and oversees this issue, told the Globe and Mail.
According to official records only 40 people have taken advantage of Colombia’s euthanasia regulations. Unofficially, there may be many more. As in other countries, activist doctors who are impatient with red tape take the law into their own hands. One doctor claims that he has “provided euthanasia” to almost 400 people, including more than 30 children.
Colombian voters have had no say in this momentous legal change. “We have not had a big national debate about this, and I’m not very happy about it,” says a former Colombian health minister. “We need a public debate: We are not Belgium or Holland – this is at odds with people’s beliefs and mode of thought.”
This website provides links to a number of international articles and documents pertaining to euthanasia, assisted suicide advance directives, disability rights, pain control and more.
This article by Michael Cook was originally published on MercatorNet under a Creative Commons licence. The original article can be found here.
Euthanasia: False Light
International Task Force on Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide (2009) This video looks at euthanasia and assisted suicide through the eyes of five people — three patients, a doctor, and a hospice nurse, all of whom speak from their hearts, not from a script.
The only person that I trusted was my doctor. And to have my doctor walk into the room and say, “I’m going to give you the choice to just end all this right now.”
Patient
And it’s a lot easier to push people out of the picture then to actually get involved with them and suffer with them. Which, by the way, is what the word compassion means. It means it means to suffer with. If you kill somebody, there is no ‘with’. You’re not compassionate if somebody’s dead.
We are really grateful to God for all he is doing in the city of Hastings. A good number of the Pastors in the city gather together once a month on a Tuesday morning to pray, study the Word of God and fellowship.
There have been monthly gatherings where we have had leaders representing 20 different churches present, crossing many different denominational lines. There is a growing sense of unity amongst the leaders of the churches, where we are not threatened by one another but are praying for each other, helping one another and choosing to speak well of one another.
Outside of our monthly gatherings, we hear reports of Pastors meeting with other Pastors to encourage one another and learn from one another. Some great friendships and levels of trust have developed and are developing, where we genuinely want to see each other blessed and see our city transformed by the Gospel of Jesus Christ. We have had a number of stories of churches blessing other churches in the city, even financially!
One testimony which has happened in the last 2 years is that one church was given $30,000 by another church in the city.
This gave the church that received the finance the final resources they were trusting God for to buy a building!
So God used one church to answer the prayers of another church to the tune of $30,000. God is certainly at work in our city and surely these are all the seeds for a city-wide and even region-wide revival!
Changes are occurring in Northland – In the last six months, the Māori led Churches of Northland have been blessed by the Holy Spirit and have come into a wonderful oneness of fellowship and ministry.
Together with this, there are hopeful signs, towards a merging of Māori led Church leaders with the non-Māori Church leaders, in the leadership of the Northland wide Leaders’ Gathering, held every three months since 1986, in Te Punawai-Moerewa Christian Fellowship centre, Moerewa.
The November Leaders Gathering was a demonstration of this flowing together and resulted in much joy and thanksgiving.
A second-way change is occurring in the North, is that God is granting an increasing number of miracles to confirm the preaching of the Gospel. God is granting increasing faith, to believe for, and expect the miraculous.
Village Church, Hikurangi, is a Church where many are being saved, and where miracles of healing are frequent. Last Sunday afternoon, at Kowhai Park, Kaikohe, Village Church held an evangelistic- healing gathering, with miraculous healings and people responding to Jesus. Recently, a long-time friend of mine, who had a serious condition of osteoporosis in his vertebrae, was prayed for in his Church, in Doubtless Bay, (Baptist), and the subsequent x-ray revealed that there was no osteoporosis. As he was being prayed for he felt a warm glow go down his spine.
In the last two years at Te Punawai-Moerewa Christian Fellowship Centre, Moerewa, there has been a fourfold increase in the people of the town using the Church facility, as a place of social interaction for many events and fellowship. The community and the Church are meeting together daily. Moerewa Christian Fellowship was established by Howard Edwards in 1979-80, and “Howie” and Vicki pastored the Church until recently when they transferred the pastoral responsibility to Laurie and Glenda Anderson. Howie and Vicki have picked up our itinerant role in the North visiting many Churches.
It was a privilege to celebrate all Ken and Dorothy Bassett have done in Northland at our last gathering of the year. [2017]
Over 120 pastors and leaders gathered from around Northland to honour Ken and Dorothy for their 40 years of ministry.
Shaun Foster
Frontline Church Keri Keri
King’s Daughters, Northland
“King’s Daughters, Northland” meets alternate months (on a Friday evening) at Kerikeri Baptist Church and its vision is to unite and to encourage local Christian women in faith and life. It aims to allow them space to come together to hear God’s Word, to worship, pray, be creative, and to develop and strengthen friendships.
For the other months (also on a Friday), it hosts a “DVD & Prayer Ministry” evening. There, women can be inspired, challenged, and encouraged by Christian international speakers via DVD
King’s Daughters began In November 2016, celebrating our unity as women of God
Since then, the gatherings have seen on average a hundred women from different churches and towns across Northland, New Zealand, come together for a time of worship, encouraging testimonies, fellowship, creativity and prayer ministry.
The Churches of Greymouth enjoy the benefit of a number of long-term clergy and pastors who have formed good friendships and relationships with one another combined with newer clergy and pastors who are keen to connect ecumenically. The result is a strong sense of ecumenical unity that plays out in joint activities, responses to issues and good fellowship and prayer at our Minister’s Association meetings.
One example of how that sense of unity has worked out long-term has been the annual Combined Churches carol service in the local Regent Theatre which has been running for close to thirty years and is a feature for many in the community’s Christmas celebrations, Christian or otherwise. It’s always a good night of singing, dance, drama, humour and a poignant message towards the end with three to four hundred in attendance.
A more recent example of our unity was our coming together this year (2017) for the new Alpha Film Series where many of the churches were involved from hosting the starting dinner to providing venues for courses. We share leadership across the churches and joined forces for the Holy Spirit Day. We were blessed to see quite a number of people growing in their faith, experiencing healings and more.
The town has struggled economically over the last few years but the consistency and unity of the town’s churches have I believe been a point of stability for our community.
Rev Tim & Nicky Mora
In 1999 the Anglican Church of Greymouth and Kumara appointed a new youth worker by the name of Nicky Mora. Her husband Tim had just arrived in the Parish as a trainee priest and both had had experience in youth work.
Very quickly under their joint leadership, the youth group grew and expanded into a community-based youth project for the young people of the Grey District with administration and oversight support provided by the church.
The church’s support also includes the provision of “The Shed,” a multi-purpose youth activities centre with an amazing range of facilities. The project has been very successful with around 20% of the High School aged young people in the Grey District currently on the total roll.
The project was put in place because it was recognized that on the Coast young people can miss out on opportunities and don’t always have the support they need to get through the teenage years and the struggles that brings easily. It was in recognition of this that the Greymouth Churches Community Youth Project was established and gathered together an amazingly dedicated team of volunteers.
The aims of the project are to provide weekly and other programmes and activities that meet the needs of the young people in the Grey District in a safe and controlled environment.
These programmes include social, recreational and skills learning activities. Camps and outdoor wilderness activities (often subsidized). We involve ourselves in community initiatives and run social justice projects. We are members of the West Coast Youth Workers Collective, network with DCYFS, the High Schools, the police and District Council and have twice been awarded the supreme Trustpower Award for overall best community project in the Grey District.
A new audio Bible read and recorded in a Kiwi voice has been released by Bible Society New Zealand in partnership with Rhema.
Read by Rhema long-time announcer Andrew Urquhart, The Kiwi Audio Bible, took a marathon five years to produce with Andrew recording in weekly slots of four hours at a time. The playing time for the Bible from start to finish is nearly 80 hours. Preserving Andrew’s vocal cords was vital both to the Bible recording and his broadcasting commitments. But the biggest challenge for Andrew was reading 2 Kings with the endless lists of unpronounceable Hebrew names. He said some of his personal favourites were Sepharvaim, Meshullemeth and especially Seraiah son of Tanhumeth the Netophathite.
“I was sometimes relieved when they were killed off, only to have them referred to again as the father of such and such in the next genealogy!,” he quipped.
Another challenge was ensuring voice consistency. If a name was pronounced a certain way in one chapter it had to be the same when it appeared next. Project Producer Rev. Ross Browne, who is experienced in speech and drama tuition and radio play production, ensured Andrew found the keyword and accurate emphasis for each verse. For Andrew, this helped him engage with the meaning of the text.
Overall, Andrew said reading the entire Bible out loud was an amazing privilege he would recommend to anyone. The book he enjoyed reading the most was Isaiah, which he described as an epic poem.
“It was fantastic to read out loud, whole chunks at a time. It was great to hear some of those treasured verses in Isaiah back into the context of what was being said in the book overall.”“I think this is such a wonderful resource, especially for people who want to be able to spend more time in God’s Word but find it difficult to find space in their busy schedule. By having the Bible on a USB stick they can redeem the time spent commuting or exercising, bringing the Bible into their everyday routine,” commented Andrew.
The Kiwi Audio Bible (New Living Translation) comes on a USB stick and is available at Bible Society New Zealand and Manna for the special introductory price of $14.99. For more details or to order phone Bible Society on 0800 424 253 or buy online at Manna manna.co.nz
One of our goals was to prayer walk all the streets in Tauranga. We came close to covering the whole city, whole suburbs that have been covered, with a few areas across the city left.
Unity and Prayer
For many years praying pastors have met on Thursday mornings with these scriptures in mind, John 17:20-23 “Father make us one……” and Isaiah 62:1-10 “…..for ‘Tauranga’s’ sake, we will not remain quiet, till her righteousness shines out like the dawn…..”
So when Stephen Hanson shared the vision of ONEVOICE, there was immediate agreement and support.
This initiative saw over four thousand believers from at least 22 churches come together from a number of denominations across our city.This included 5 well attended, Sunday night gatherings. There was a special theme for each night. The feedback through the course of the month, and since, was that a greater sense of unity was cultivated in our times together, and the desire expressed by many to continue to meet in 2018. One pastor said ‘we are growing up in love together’.
One Sunday night we had 11 invited guests representing the people of Tauranga in central government, local government, education, the police, and one of our local iwi. Pastors and leaders gathered around these men and women during the meeting and prayed for each of them. It was an incredible opportunity to bless and encourage these people. We received messages of thanks from a number of them the following week. The final Sunday evening saw dozens of spiritual fathers and mothers individually pray and bless many hundreds of people.
Each week throughout the whole month, we held 3-weekday worship and prayer meetings.
These were followed up with fellowship and teaching sessions. Some of the intercessors from different churches have continued to meet weekly to pray for the city. Others have been sharing the gospel and praying for people in the streets.
One of our goals was to prayer walk all the streets in Tauranga. We came close to covering the whole city, whole suburbs that have been covered, with a few areas across the city left.
We’re greatly encouraged by what is taking place in our city among the Body of Christ, and consider it a tremendous blessing and privilege to serve our city in this way.
