The lovely ladies of the Country Women’s Association (CWA) will debate euthanasia next month in Bateman’s Bay, NSW.
“They (local members) were sort of divided,” Ms McNeish said. “I personally think it should be legalised to give people the option.”
Ms Mudge agreed with Ms McNeish.
“It should be a case by case situation,” Ms Mudge said.
…and that last sentence really cuts to the core of the problem.
Because if it’s a “case by case” situation, who’s making the call from one case to the next? A representative of the Government, that’s who, who happens to be a medical doctor.
People often think that by supporting “euthanasia” they’re supporting greater freedom: the freedom to choose when to die. They’re not. They’re supporting an intrusion of government into intimate aspects of people’s lives. They’re supporting the right of Government-appointed experts to make decisions that should only be made by the people themselves.
Ladies of the CWA, people already have the option to die. It’s really not that hard. What you’re really asking for is the State to get involved in things that they have no business sticking their grinning bureaucratic noses into.
And in Europe, the debate is on. From Belgium:
Buried on inside pages, small newspaper stories reported a survey of paediatric intensive-care nurses. It emerged that they had witnessed two dozen infants and children being given lethal drugs to speed their deaths. That amounts to involuntary euthanasia, which is illegal (though Belgium, like the Netherlands, has legalised euthanasia for consenting adults). Asked if the law should be changed to allow the ending of minors’ lives, 89% of nurses in the Belgian study said yes.
What do you think Mrs Mudge? Belgium nurses want to start killing babies and children legally. Should they be assessed on a “case by case” basis?
London University studies estimate that one in 500 deaths in Britain involve voluntary euthanasia, and one in 300 involuntary euthanasia. That amounts to 3,000 deaths a year, outside any legal framework.
The very fact that experts are using the term “involuntary euthanasia” shows the problem. Effectively, one in 300 deaths are at the hands of a doctor without the consent of the person dying. We could use the old-fashioned word for non-consensual killing, which long ago was called “murder.”
Some worry that legal euthanasia creates a slippery slope towards state-sponsored killing. Legalisation has not made euthanasia more common, Dutch experts insist: the main effect is to improve communication between doctors, patients and families.
The main effect is to improve communication? That claim sounds… unbelievable. I’d love to see the data to back it up.
I’m all for the right to live or die as you please. If some people want to take life-threatening risks, like smoking, mountain climbing, or visiting hostile nation states, then go for it. If they simply want to end their life, then it’s their decision. Sure, everything possible should be done to help them, convince them otherwise, and in general try to get them to stick around. But in the end, suicide should not be a crime.
However, euthanasia – doctors “assisting” people to die, should never be legal. Here’s why.
1) Conflict of interest. Once the doctor gets into the death game, he or she is caught in a vise of conflict of interest. On the one hand, the doctor is supposed to support life and health at any cost, yet on the other hand, is supposed to kill where necessary. The two roles just can’t work together in the one individual.
2) It’s not the doctor’s role. There are lots of personal and social issues that are verboten to doctors. Take sex for example. A patient might come to a doctor and say “I’m sexually frustrated. I can’t get any release from this living nightmare.”
Well, a doctor has the power to help them – they could rip off their clothes and have sex with the patient immediately, thereby solving the patient’s very serious problem of frustration. But they can’t do that. It’s against the rules. It’s beyond the doctor’s jurisdiction. It’s exactly the same situation for euthanasia. A doctor can assist, but it’s outside their jurisdiction. They can prescribe medications for various sexual dysfunctions, but they can’t get involved in actually relieving the discomfort itself. Likewise for the discomfort of living.
Doctors are for putting stitches in cuts and diagnosing irritable bowel syndrome. Their job is not to weigh in on matters of living and dying, or help patients with novel solutions to their unhappiness, whether it be a hand job or a lethal injection.
3) Gives doctors too much power. Euthanasia expands the role of the doctor in dangerous ways. They assess, “case by case.” They end lives. They play God. And this can have an insidious, corrosive effect on their attitude to patients. What doctors need to be is single-minded champions of life and health.
4) It’s against the Hippocratic Oath. The oath that doctors take – the Hippocratic Oath – holds that they “do no harm.” Destroying an organism’s ability to function (i.e. killing it) is the ultimate harm.
5) The slippery slope is real. Just listen to the Belgian nurses mentioned earlier, who want to euthanase minors, or bureaucrats who would like to see senile people euthanased because they are wasting resources, or consider a situation where one in 300 deaths is “involuntary euthanasia.”
6) Death isn’t a cure. Sure, a truly free society will let people make bad decisions, and sadly, that might even involve the ending of life. But that’s just a tragic consequence of free choice. Let’s not delude ourselves that it is a remedy or a cure.
The state needs to stay out of euthanasia. We don’t need doctors, social workers or bureaucrats making decisions about whether we should live on a “case by case” basis.
The job of doctors is to keep us alive. They need to leave the dying part to us.