Euthanasia Advocate Once Again Reveals His Hand

The following article was published by HOPE Australia.

David Sandford is 84 years old, and describes himself as being “in pretty good health.”

Even so, he went online and ordered a copy of a book written by Australia’s most prominent euthanasia advocate, Philip Nitschke. He had to order it from overseas because the book – which provides information on a variety of ways a person may take their own life – is banned for sale in Australia.

The purchase flagged the possibility that Mr Sanford might be considering self-harm, and so two police officers knocked on his door to conduct a “wellness check.”

Instead of being grateful that the state’s suicide prevention systems seemed to be working, Mr Nitschke complained.

According to the Courier Mail:

Mr Nitschke described the seizure of the book as a “significant new and worrying development”.

“We’ve only seen wellness checks used in the past when people have attempted to purchase euthanasia drugs and had them intercepted,” he said.

“To carry out a wellness check on people simply ordering a book seems to be a total waste of police resources.”

In criticising the intervention from police, Mr Nitschke has once again revealed the real intention of euthanasia advocates: lethal drugs should be available to any adult who wants them; it doesn’t matter if – like Mr Sanford – they are “in pretty good health.”

If Mr Nitschke and his fellow euthanasia supporters label suicide prevention efforts for healthy people “a total waste of police resources,” how do you think they will respond to police resources being used to investigate the suicide deaths of terminally ill Queenslanders under a euthanasia regime?

Pressure to expand euthanasia and assisted suicide laws.

Alex Schadenberg
Executive Director, Euthanasia Prevention Coalition

As I have written before, the euthanasia lobby will promote "safeguards" or limits to assisted dying laws to sell its legalization to the public, but once legalized the death lobby will soon promote the expansion of the law.

For instance, the first legal challenge to Canada's euthanasia law was launched only 10 days after parliament passed Bill C-14. Canada's parliament introduced Bill C-7, to expand Canada's euthanasia law, on February 24, 2020, less than four years after legalizing euthanasia and without carrying out the required review of the euthanasia law. 

YES, Canada expanded its euthanasia law without first completing a review of the law that the legislation required.

Australian states are also being pressured to expand their euthanasia laws, even though they only recently legalized medical killing.

HOPE Australia reported that there is pressure to expand the Western Australian euthanasia law even before it has been implemented and an article published in The Age on May 3 reports that a bill will be debated in Victoria Australia to expand its euthanasia law, a law that has only been in place since 2019.

California is debating Bill SB 380 to expand its assisted suicide law and Washington State debated a bill to expand its assisted suicide law that thankfully failed to pass.

Jurisdictions that are considering the legalization of euthanasia need to be aware that the safeguards (that are usually written with imprecise language) are designed to sell the legalization of medical killing and not designed to protect people in vulnerable situations.

The assisted death lobby views these "safeguards" as creating a pathway to legalization and after legalizing the act they promote these same "safeguards" as barriers to access.

Negotiating the "safeguards" will not lead to a safer law, it only provides the death lobby with an ability to sell the law to the general public. Once legal, the death lobby will propose expansions.

Australian Murder acquittal raises serious questions

This article was published by HOPE Australia on April 29, 2021.

By Branka van der Linden, Director, HOPE

New South Wales woman Barbara Eckersley has been found not guilty of murder, and guilty only of the lesser charge of manslaughter, after putting lethal drugs in the soup given to her mother.

92-year-old Botanist Mary White died in her nursing home in August 2018, after eating the soup into which her daughter, Barbara Eckersley, had laced with drugs that are used to euthanize animals, leftover from Eckersley’s time as a wildlife volunteer.

The drugs – which Eckersley had kept for many years – were slipped into her mother Mary’s food without Mary realizing. She died shortly after the meal.

Testifying in court last week, Eckersley denied intending to kill her mother. According to the ABC report, Eckersley said: "I was intending only to make her comfortable for the time she was in my care."

That Eckersley didn’t intend to kill her mother is obviously an explanation the jury accepted, hence the manslaughter conviction (rather than murder.)

But one is left to ask how they came to that conclusion.

After all, Eckersley had kept the euthanasia drugs for years after she ceased her voluntary position as a wildlife volunteer. She took them to the nursing home where her mother was living. She poured them into her soup and then allowed her mother to eat. She also failed to tell the police that she had done so when they interviewed her about her mother’s death.

How did the jury decide that Eckersley only intended to make her mother comfortable, or did they turn a blind eye because Mary was 92 and had suffered a stroke?

What challenges does Mary’s death and Eckersley’s acquittal of murder charges have to say about the impending euthanasia debate in NSW?

Proposed assisted suicide regimes allow for lethal drugs to be kept in a person’s home, until they are taken at a time of their own choosing. But the Eckersley case has exposed how easy it is for lethal drugs to be slipped into someone’s food without their knowledge or consent.

It also shows how juries are reluctant to convict on murder in these circumstances.

Alarmingly, a video of Mary “agitated and distressed, barely able to move, except to wipe her eyes” was played to the jury as part of Eckersley’s defense; as if somehow, Mary’s frail state was relevant to whether or not her daughter intended to kill her.

The outcome of this case is a foreshadowing of how juries might treat breaches of euthanasia and assisted suicide “safeguards” if these laws are introduced in NSW.

Attention now turns to the sentencing, which will reveal how the NSW judicial system views the involuntary death of the elderly at the hands of another.