EVERYONE HAS 'THE 'RIGHT TO DIE' AND NO HUMAN AGENCY CAN PREVENT IT (letter to Dom Post, August 31)

Sympathy for Lecretia Seales and for her husband Matt, deprived of the one person who was everything to him, naturally runs high. Theirs is a very sad story.

 

But was she really deprived of “the right to die”? It seems to me it’s not possible for her or anyone else to be deprived of that right. Everyone has ‘the right to die’ and in the final analysis no human agency can prevent it.

 

It’s not even the “assisted dying” that Matt Vickers and Geoffrey Palmer want. What they really mean is “the right” for someone to ask someone else to end their life.

An an academic in the field of ethics, Professor Theo Boer of the Netherlands argued in 2012 that ‘a good euthanasia plan’ would result in a relatively small number of deaths. Now, with refreshing common sense, he admits that the very existence of a euthanasia law turns assisted suicide from a last resort into a normal procedure - as witnessed by the 200,000 abortions annually in the Netherlands today.  The law Vickers and Palmer want is, in the Netherlands, he says, “on the way to becoming a default mode of dying for cancer patients”.

 

Vickers and Palmer of course, are principled people - but how principled, especially when there’s a question of material gain, are the rest us?

 

ECE IS PARTLY THE AUTHOR OF ITS OWN MISFORTUNES (Letter to Dom Post, August 24)

Two generations ago, I’d have read that Kindies need more male teachers (August 23) and asked, why? Because naturally and historically, in our culture children up to the age of five have needed only female ‘teachers’ - their mothers.

Now I ask whether early childhood education (ECE) might be partly the author of its own misfortune. Economic and ideological pressures on women to find paid work and pass that teaching role on to ECE must contribute to the stress which results in the breakdown of parental relationships and men abandoning their role as fathers.

‘Children under 5 learning about gender stereotypes’ has a subtext which to me reads as children learning values which may be quite alien to those of their parents.

It’s a warped society which in effect forces men out of their homes and away from their children and wants to pay other men to be their ‘fathers’. What’s needed is not political support so much as moral support for parents, the kind of moral support which comes only from friendship with Christ. . 

WE NEED RESEARCH INTO THE SPIRITUAL MALAISE OF OUR NATION (Letter to Dom Post, August 17)

“Booze-trackers touted”on the front page, and “Cancer risks from alcohol” on the op ed page (August 16). That’s a fair reflection of the huge concerns around alcohol consumption in today’s society.

 

Research into its effects, and ways of managing its effects, take up many column inches in almost any magazine or newspaper you pick up. It seems to me that what we desperately need is research into the causes of alcohol consumption – in other words, the cause of the spiritual malaise of our nation.

 

Here of course the churches have a role to play, but will the secular media allow their voice to be heard?

WE MAY AS WELL READ THE WOMEN'S WEEKLY (Letter to Dom Post, August 13)

Combined with a pic of Lecretia Seales, the beautiful poster girl for assisted suicide, your headline Thousands want say on euthanasia (August 12) implies, as euthanasia is illegal, that thousands want euthanasia.

 

They most emphatically do not. Three to one of the 1800 submitters to the petition for an inquiry oppose euthanasia. What’s wanted is analysis, but going by your article it seems we’re not going to get it.

 

You say David Seymour’s bill is likely to “languish indefinitely”. The euthanasia petition “demanded” the committee examine public opinion into ending lives which are “unbearable”.

 

Spare us the plaintive violins, and opinion pieces masquerading as reportage. We may as well read the Women’s Weekly.

PARLIAMENTARY INQUIRY INTO KEIFT'S PETITION WAS GROSSLY INCOMPETENT (Letter published in Dom Post, August 11)

The grief of having your baby snatched (Call for forced adoption enquiry, August 9) is beyond imagining.

But Hillary Kieft, who lost her grandchild and the possibility of any others when her teenage daughter Ariana was taken from school for a botched abortion resulting in infertility for life, would want to warn them that a select committee inquiry could be a waste of time.

The inquiry into Kieft’s petition, which called for parents to be notified when their 15 year-old daughter wants an abortion, sought evidence from vested interests such as Family Planning (read Abortion Provider) but incredibly, excluded any group representing parents - who polls showed were in favour of notification - and were gulled by data that was manifestly incorrect.

Why should these women, so unjustly bereft of their babies, now subject themselves to the arduous process of an inquiry which may prove, like that of the Justice and Electoral Reform Committee into parental notification, to be grossly incompetent?

THE LOVE LETTER TO HUMANITY (Letter to Sunday Star-Times, August 8)

"It’s quite a nice thing,”says Dr David Galler (A love letter to humanity, August 7), when your loved one is dying, to turn to religion. What a masterpiece of understatement.

 

If everyone turned (converted) to genuine religion - which means loving your neighbour because you love God – Sunday Star-Times wouldn’t be running stories like ‘Secret Police List of NZ’s Bad Bars’.

There’d be no ‘ ‘Cheating’ truckies’. There wouldn’t be a ‘School board in race row’. Not even ‘A tangled web’.

 

As Alexander Solzhenitsyn pointed out, we have forgotten God. The ‘love letter to humanity’ we all need to read is the Bible.

ARE THINGS NOT BAD ENOUGH ALREADY? (Letter to Dom Post, August 1)

Thank God someone in Parliament - NZ First’s Barbara Stewart (Better strategy needed to cut suicide rate, August 1) – is demanding changes to the current “Suicide Prevention Strategy” which is demonstrably not working.

Because Act’s David Seymour’s  misguided strategy of legalising assisted suicide will only make matters worse. In the Netherlands, since euthanasia was legalised in 2002, suicides have risen 25%.

 

Legalising assisted suicide sends the message that lone suicide is okay; there is also ample evidence to suggest that suicide is contagious, especially among youth. Are things not bad enough already?