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.
