Thursday, 5 May 2016

HELLBENT ON ASSISTED SUICIDE (Letter to Sunday Star-Times, May 5)


David Seymour and Jacinda Ardern (Time we got serious about assisted dying, April 1) are hellbent (I use that word advisedly) on what is actually assisted suicide. ‘Assisted dying’ is what happens in hospices, hospitals and rest homes. Nobody in New Zealand is ‘beyond the help of palliative care’.
 
In effect, Seymour and Ardern suggest normalising suicide, when youth suicide is already a huge concern. For the frail elderly and chronically ill whose maintenance is expensive, they want what would inevitably become not the right but the duty to die. They want doctors, whose purpose is to preserve life, to be able to end it.
 
In Holland, 97 dementia sufferers have now been killed by their doctors. The number of mentally ill patients killed in a year has trebled. Regulator Theo Boer, formerly an advocate for euthanasia, now says the Dutch were ‘terribly wrong’ to think they could control it.

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