18 May, 2016

Pinki Virani, author of Aruna’s Story, wants Passive Euthanasia Act renamed to The Aruna Act

The award-winning author has written a personal plea to the Union Health Minister, Dr J P Nadda, to rename the Passive Euthanasia Act as The Aruna Act.

  

A year after Aruna Shanbaug passed away in ward no.4 of civic-run KEM Hospital in Mumbai after spending 42 long years in a vegetative state, the Union Ministry finally came up with a draft bill on passive euthanasia recently and has even called for comments from the public via emails before June 19, 2016. Over the last few years, Shanbaug has become the face of the euthanasia debate and patients’ rights in India and she’s also seen as the inspiration behind the draft bill.

Shanbaug, who worked as a nurse, was brutally sodomised and choked with a dog-chain by a ward boy in the basement of the hospital in 1973. The attack cut off the oxygen supply to her brain and resulted in partial blindness and at the age of 25, she was left to languish in a semi-coma state without any friends or family members to look after her. Since then, she was taken care of by the nurses of the hospital along with activist and author Pinki Virani until she finally succumbed to pneumonia on May 18, 2015. Click here to readAruna Shanbaug’s story.

Virani, a National award winning author of the book ‘Aruna’s Story: The True Story Of A Rape & Its Aftermath’, was one of the first people to respond to the to the draft bill on passive euthanasia by writing a personal plea to Dr J P Nadda, the Union Health Minister.

In her four page long letter to Dr Nadda, Virani has requested that the Passive Euthanasia Law should be renamed as ‘The Aruna Act (Terminally-Ill Patient Protection in Passive Euthanasia).’

‘A woman so wronged, who died so broken, a human being who received no justice at all  – can her anguish at least be validated with the Law, which she has started, in her name as Aruna’s Act,’ asks Virani, who also questioned a clause in the draft bill. She plans on sending a detailed and section-by-section suggestions on the Passive Euthanasia Law to Dr Nadda and his IAS officers on Aruna’s birthday which falls on June 1.

‘Her first (legal) death anniversary is today but she died as a living, breathing human being on the night of November 27, 1973 itself,’ says Virani.

In 2009, after Aruna  spent more than 36 years in a semi-coma state, Pinki Virani approached  the Supreme Court (SC) of India to file a euthanasia petition to decrease Aruna’s feeds systematically as per international practices in passive euthanasia. While her plea was dismissed, in 2011, the SC allowed passive euthanasia but ruled against ‘active euthanasia’, where a lethal injection is administered to end lives of patients with terminal illness.

Source: www.thehealthsite.com

18.05.2016

You don’t have to be great to start, but you have to start to be great

Zig Ziglar