A SUBMISSION OPPOSING EUTHANASIA

When I get started on euthanasia I find it hard to stop. But eventually I managed to shoe-horn my submission against David Seymour's utterly stupid Bill into one A4 page - see below. Feel free to copy what you want of it! 

This is my submission opposing the End of Life Choice Bill.

My brother Martin du Fresne died in 2009, 4 years after a diagnosis of motor neuron disease. For him it was a good way to die. It got him a lot of attention. He felt cherished as an outpatient of St Mary’s Hospice, Auckland. He gradually lost his physical capabilities, but not his mental acuity or sense of humour. Family and friends enjoyed his company and were edified by his way of “assisted dying” (which is not a synonym for “assisted suicide”).

The euthanasia argument is predicated on emotion. Proponents are either afraid of illness or disability themselves, or know of someone who died a painful death. And the media, always in search of a sob story, highlight cases like Lecretia Seales’, who despite apparently dying without pain was touted as the perfect poster girl for David Seymour’s campaign.  

Many caring New Zealanders are suckers for a case like Seales’, and want to ‘do something’ about it. But our hospices and associated services and advances in palliative care are already doing it, by ameliorating pain and offering medication to palliate suffering which while perhaps hastening death does not cause it.

David Seymour’s Bill reads like one devised over a glass too many of sauvignon blanc. Its passage would mean virtually anyone aged 18+ would qualify for euthanasia – until the age limit is inevitably challenged as discriminatory, and then we’d have open slather.

If someone requesting assisted suicide is traumatised by an overwhelming life event - as would-be suicides often are - they’re not likely to be ‘rational’, but in the sacred name of ‘choice’ their request would be rubber-stamped, denying them healing and a chance of normal life.

A diagnosis of ‘irremediable’ illness sometimes proves wrong - by the patient continuing to live, or science finding a cure. And how can you define the subjective term, ‘unbearable’? In A Streetcar named Desire, Blanche du Bois claimed her situation was ‘unendurable’. If Tennessee Williams were writing today in Oregon, he could have Blanche put down. But all she needed was care and compassion – qualities offered to all nearing the end of their lives, by our beautiful hospices.

When it costs the state so much to keep people alive, how many of the elderly, handicapped and chronically ill would not think their duty was to die? And how many of their heirs would encourage that decision? ‘Safeguards’ don’t work. The mental creep from preserving life to dispensing with it which inevitably follows euthanasia is beyond law making or breaking.

In countries with ‘safeguards’ people are dying without request; they’re not in uncontrolled pain; newborns and the mentally ill are killed. Lethal injections in mobile suicide clinics are all the go; body parts are harvested. The subliminal message is, the death of these people is more valuable than their life. Review of statistics in these countries has caused the UK, Scotland, most of the US and Australia to reject euthanasia. New Zealand must do the same.