Wednesday, 27 January 2016

EUTHANASIA 'DEBATE' IS PREVARICATION AND PRETENCE (Letter to Dom Post, January 27)

  
 
Today’s Dominion Post makes a sham of the euthanasia ‘debate’.  

Two large pix show Helen Kelly - a woman with whom all your readers will sympathise - who on page one talks nicely about dying slowly, but ‘supports giving the dying a choice’. And on the opinion page there she is again, with your headline, ‘Dying slowly does have its advantages’, again slyly cloaking Kelly’s pro-euthanasia position in a cloak of prevarication and pretence.
 
All these column inches are ‘balanced’ by a very small photo on page 5, held by sad parents (looking off-camera, a classic turn-off) of a woman who died naturally of cancer some time ago. The nearest hospice could surely have provided a more up-to-date account of acceptance of natural death, and your story carefully avoids making any explicitly anti-euthanasia statements.
 
Similarly biased reportage was very likely the means used by the media to the end of allowing euthanasia in the Netherlands - where it has meant the end of thousands of lives without their consent.

 

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