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?
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