New Zealand considers referendum on euthanasia.

Alex Schadenberg
Executive Director, Euthanasia Prevention Coalition

New Zealand Parliament

The New Zealand parliament has been debating a euthanasia bill for many months. Parliament will now be voting on a referendum bill based on the fact that the New Zealand First party decided that they will not support the "End of Life Choice" without a referendum on the issue.

A New Zealand Herald article by Boris Jancic and Chris Knox, argues that the euthanasia bill will have a hard time passing without the support of members of the New Zealand First party. The article states:

A crucial vote on whether to hold a referendum on legalising voluntary euthanasia looks set to go down to the wire, according to a poll of all MPs. 

Act Leader David Seymour's End of Life Choice Bill will return to Parliament on Wednesday and politicians will have to decide whether the final decision should be put to the public if it passes a third reading. 

If the referendum is rejected, the entire bill – which would let terminally-ill adults request assisted dying – will struggle to pass into law at the third vote, with New Zealand First looking like it may pull its support unless there's a referendum.

The article then states that the Herald has polled every MP and found that 56 MP's plan to support the referendum, 46 plan to oppose the referendum and 18 wouldn't say how they planned to vote. 61 votes are needed to pass legislation.

Euthanasia in Belgium. A son's story

Tom Mortier

Godelieva De Troyer had been suffering from chronic depression for twenty years. The family was unaware when she was euthanised by a doctor who co-chairs the federal euthanasia regulator and who co-founded a euthanasia organisation that De Troyer had just given money to.'

Tom Mortier hadn't given much thought to Belgium's euthanasia laws. He didn't think they affected him. Tom is a university professor in Belgium, where he has lectured since 2006. For Tom, it seemed that if a person wanted to die, who are we to stop him? Why can't that person simply make that choice? Besides, it doesn't affect anyone else.

'Tom's perspective changed forever one day when he received a phone call. The caller was from a hospital, letting him know that he needed to take care of his mother's affairs since she had been euthanized.'

To read more about Tom's story, visit ADF International's 'Affirming Dignity' campaign.

More articles about Tom and his mother's death:

• Europe's top human rights court will hear case of depressed Belgian woman who died by euthanasia (Link).
• Depressed mother died by euthanasia, her son challenges the law (Link).
• Belgian euthanasia promoters attack man whose depressed mother died by euthanasia (Link).

UK Doctors challenge Royal College of Physicians’ controversial decision to go neutral on assisted suicide

Link to the press statement.

Press statement issued on behalf Drs Randall, Myers, and Kearney

A group of doctors have today won the legal right to challenge the Royal College of Physicians’ (RCP) controversial decision to go neutral on assisted suicide after overturning a ruling by the Charity Commission.

Donate to the legal challenge by UK doctors (Link).

The doctors launched their legal action against Britain’s oldest medical group after it announced in March that the college was dropping its long-established opposition to assisted suicide, following a poll requiring a 60 per cent supra-majority.

At the time thousands of doctors voiced their concerns at decision to change the College’s position before consulting members, a failure to follow previous procedure and the unprecedented use of a supra-majority invalidated the poll. However, the RCP decided to press on with the change.

Following this decision, three doctors decided to launch legal action to review the decision and processes used by the College. They argued that the RCP had broken charity law. Despite agreement from the Charity Commission that it was a legally sustainable claim, the charities regulator withheld permission to allow the doctors to progress legal action, as they had already raised their concerns with the RCP and warned them not to repeat these mistakes. 

Today, in the High Court, this decision by the Charity Commission has been reversed, giving the doctors a green light to take further action against the RCP.

Dr David Randall, one of the claimants commented:

“Today’s judgement is good news for doctors and for society.

We believe that it is vitally important that doctors’ voices are heard on the issue of assisted dying, which if legalised would represent the single biggest change in the ethics and practice of medicine for a generation. The unsatisfactory way in which the College has approached this matter, ignoring the advice of its own ethics committee, has left it with a position of neutrality on assisted dying that prevents it from engaging in the public debate on this important issue. We expect the College to be active in championing key concerns such as the protection of vulnerable patients, the promotion of palliative care and hospice services, and the defence of conscientious objection for all healthcare practitioners. Doctors are not neutral about assisted dying, and neither should the College be.”

Paul Conrathe, Human rights solicitor from Sinclairslaw commented:

“Today the court expressed its’ concern that the decision of the Royal College of Physicians to change its position to neutrality was unlawful and irrational. It was concerned that the College had adopted as its public position the least favoured option in its recent poll.

The College has suppressed the report of its own ethics committee into the results of the poll and adopted a supra-majority criteria that effectively pre-judged the outcome of that poll. Today the court has paved the way for the College to be brought to account.”

For media inquiries, please contact Alistair Thompson on 07970 162225.

ENDS

The Doctors

• Dr Dermot Kearney MRCP, Consultant Cardiologist, Gateshead 
• Dr Kathy Myers FRCP, Retired Consultant in Palliative Medicine, London 
• Dr David Randall MRCP, Registrar in Renal Medicine, London

Links

• RCP to poll its members: https://www.rcplondon.ac.uk/news/rcp-poll-its-members-assisted-dying 
• Survey closed at 5pm on 1 March: https://www.rcplondon.ac.uk/news/rcp-poll-its-members-assisted-dying  
• Times covered the row that’s erupted thanks to the poll: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/bitter-split-on-assisted-dying-hits-royal-college-of-physicians-vlj38b63w  
• 1,500 doctors back campaign against ‘tacit support’ plan: https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/1085158/assisted-dying-doctors-plea-campaign-health-debate-for-against-uk-dignitas 
• Judicial Review Crowdfunder: https://www.gofundme.com/rcp-poll-challenge

End-of-Life Care Europe November 7 - Euthanasia Symposium

Can we do better?

Kunnen wij het beter aanpakken?

About the Dutch euthanasia policy and those that are concerned about protecting vulnerable lives.

Over het Nederlands euthanasie beleid en degenen die zich inzetten voor het beschermen van kwetsbaar leven.

R.S.V.P: ELCENetherlands@protonmail.com

Location: Burg. Verbrughweg 40, 4024HR, Eck en Wiel

Attendance to the Symposium is free of charge though an R.S.V.P. is required before 5/11/2019. Lunch is included. For more information or questions Tel. +31 (0)639781279

Program:

9:30 Welcome and coffee

9:45 Taking stock of the Dutch euthanasia practice so far. What have we gotten ourselves into and where do we go from here? Henk Reitsema.

10:45 Coffee break

11:00 The Politics of Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide in the Medical Community. Gordon McDonald

12:30 Lunch

13:45 Strategy of the promotors of euthanasia and how to counter it. Henk Jochemsen

15:15 Tea break

15:30 Panel discussion with speakers: Where are the opportunities and which strategies can be most fruitful?

Gordon Macdonald

16:45 Closing

Dr Gordon Macdonald is the CEO of the Care Not Killing Alliance. He has been involved with Care Not Killing for a decade, chairing the Scottish Committee with great effect. 

He was instrumental in the 2010 and 2015 defeats of bids to legalize assisted suicide at the Scottish Parliament, and has proved himself an effective media communicator.

Henk Jochemsen

Prof. dr. Henk Jochemsen studied molecular biology and is Professor for Christian Philosophy at the Wageningen University and was lector in medical ethics at the Free Universit MC in Amsterdam. For many years he was the director of the Lindeboom institute which was focussed on bio ethics. His areas of focus have been: philosophy and ethics of new technologies (bioethics, nanotech, synthetic biology, development aid and sustainable agriculture. Jochmsen was also the director of a collective of NGO’s called Prisma.

Henk Reitsma

Henk Reitsema is a member of the staff at Dutch L’Abri and one of the trustees of the international work of L'Abri. He has been active in the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition International for many years and is now member of the ELCE (End of Life Care Europe). His academic background includes Philosophy, Theology and Ethics. Focal themes for him have been the Philosophy of Technology and bioethics. Mentoring, lecturing and engaging in dialogue about the issues that confront us today form an integral part of his work at L’Abri. He has published a variety of articles both scientific and popular in the disciplines of Apologetics, Philosophy of Technology, Ethics.

Western Australian doctor recommends 'kill clinics.'

This article was published by Hope Australia on October 16, 2019.

While the suggestion that specialized “kill clinics” should be established to implement the government’s proposed euthanasia regime might sound shocking, their creation would be entirely consistent with the Bill currently before the WA Legislative Council, as well as the experience in overseas jurisdictions where euthanasia and assisted suicide have been legalised.

Dr Mal Hodsdon, a long-serving GP based in Kalgoorlie expressed his concerns that euthanasia and assisted suicide “goes against the grain” of the Hippocratic Oath taken by doctors and called putting the onus on a GP to become complicit in killing someone “a step too far.”

His radical solution is to establish a clear distinction between doctors who heal and those who kill by establishing specific death centres within the state. “I wouldn’t be prescribing the medication they need but I would be more than happy to refer them to a kill clinic at the Kalgoorlie Hospital,” he said.

While this solution might sound shocking, the legislative regime that passed through the WA Legislative Assembly and is now before the Legislative Council will pave the way for dedicated kill clinics to pop up around the state.

The doctors within these clinics would not have to have specialist qualifications in any of the terminal illnesses with which their patients may be suffering, because the proposed euthanasia laws do not require a doctor signing off on the eligibility of a patient for euthanasia have any specialised training in the illness of their patient.

A patient could also come to a ‘kill clinic’ as a one-stop shop, because the draft legislation does not require the two physicians required to sign off on a euthanasia request to be independent of each other.

Given that Dr Hodsdon also told media that he had not spoken to a GP who was in favour of euthanasia and assisted suicide, dedicated ‘kill clinics’ could even be quite profitable, given the lack of competition from doctors unwilling to contaminate their practice of healing with the prescription and administration of lethal drugs.

The notion of specialist ‘kill clinics’ or at the very least, specialist death doctors, can be inferred from the statistics in Oregon, which has had an assisted suicide regime in place for two decades.

The latest statistics from Oregon reveal that the median time of the patient-physician relationship in an assisted suicide is 10 weeks, indicating that, for the most part, the doctors who are signing off on assisted suicide are not those who have an existing relationship with the patient, but those who are specially sought out to authorize a patient’s death and prescribe them with lethal drugs. In some cases, the patient-physician relationship lasted only one week and one physician alone wrote 35 prescriptions for death-inducing drugs in a single year!

This is consistent with the most recent report from Washington State, which revealed that in 50 per cent of deaths, the doctor who prescribed the lethal drugs had known the patient for less than six months and that in some cases (the number of which was not reported), the length of the doctor-patient relationship was less than one week.

Kill clinics staffed by specialist death doctors are par for the course in states that legalize euthanasia and assisted suicide. And it will become par for the course in WA if the Legislative Council doesn’t reject this Bill.

Swiss doctor found guilty in the assisted suicide death of a woman who was not sick.

Alex Schadenberg
Executive Director - Euthanasia Prevention Coalition

Finally a little sanity within the insanity.

Pierre Beck

A Swiss doctor was found guilty in the assisted suicide death of a woman who was not sick. 

According to Swissinfo news:

A court in Geneva has given a suspended sentence to the regional vice-president of EXIT, Pierre Beck, for helping an 86-year-old woman to die when she was not sick.

He was found guilty of breaking federal law on therapeutic substances and given a suspended 120-day jail sentence. The court thus confirmed a criminal order issued by the Office of the Attorney General of Switzerland.

Beck, a medical doctor who is vice-president of Exit in francophone Switzerland, provided a lethal dose of pentobarbital in April 2017 for the elderly woman. She wanted to die with her husband, who was very ill.

According to Swissinfo, Beck admitted to acting beyond the criteria, but he said that he didn't regret his action and faced with a similar situation he would likely do it again, but after seeking advice.

The good news is the judge decided that Swiss law does not permit assisted suicide for existential reasons.

The court dealt with Beck leniently when giving him a suspended sentence. The lenient sentence may be interpreted as a green light to kill because the court did not provide a deterrent.

Recently a physically healthy depressed man died by euthanasia in BC. Alan Nichols (61) died by euthanasia, even though he did not qualify for euthanasia since he was not sick. His family urged the doctor to stop the injection, but to no avail.

Hopefully the Nichols case can prevent other similar cases from occurring in Canada.

Ontario: Euthanasia deaths are rising quickly.

Alex Schadenberg
Executive Director, Euthanasia Prevention Coalition

The Ontario Office of the Chief Coroner released the updated data for MAiD (euthanasia and assisted suicide) deaths in Ontario indicating that since legalization (June 17, 2016) there have been (3822) reported assisted deaths up to September 30, 2019.

The number euthanasia deaths is increasing fast. The number of reported assisted deaths were 519 from July 1 - Sept 30, 406 from April 1 and June 30 and 368 in the first three months of 2019.  

Ontario is now on the pace of killing more than 2000 people per year by euthanasia and since the federal government has not appealled the decision by a Québec court that struck down the terminal illness restriction, the numbers of euthanasia deaths will likely increase faster.

Alan Nichols

In August, we learned that Sean Taggert died by euthanasia in British Columbia because the government refused to provide him the necessary home care for him to live with ALS.

In September we reported on the euthanasia death of a man in British Columbia who was not physically ill but living with chronic depression. Alan Nichols death uncovers that the data does not accurately state why people die by euthanasia and whether or not alternatives were tried.

Do you have a personal story concerning euthanasia. Sharing your story may help us prevent euthanasia deaths. Contact us at: 1-877-439-3348 or info@epcc.ca.

According to the Ontario data, there were 1293 reported assisted deaths in the first nine months of 2019, 1499 reported assisted deaths in 2018, 841 reported assisted deaths in 2017 and 189 reported assisted deaths in 2016.

In March I published an article explaining that the number of assisted deaths, in Canada, increased by more than 50% in 2018 from 2704 in 2017 to 4235 in 2018. 

 

If you have questions or concerns related to assisted death or ending of life medical decisions, we urge you to contact Compassionate Community Care for advice, help and support.

• 774 euthanasia deaths in the first 6 months of 2019 in Ontario (Link).
• Ontario: 368 people died by euthanasia in the first three months of 2019 (Link).
• Canadian healthcare system found it more convenient to kill a patient than provide the necessary home care (Link).
• Physically healthy depressed man died by euthanasia in BC (Link).
• Québec court expands euthanasia by striking down the terminal illness requirement (Link).

Abandonment – That’s what euthanasia is all about

This article was published by OneNewsNow on October 17, 2019.

Alex Schadenberg

The International chair of a coalition that believes euthanasia and assisted suicide should continue to be treated as murder/homicide says even many mental health professionals are against the practice.

Physically healthy 23-year-old Belgian woman is being considered for euthanasia.  

Please sign the Letter of Hope to Kelly  (Link). Share the letter of Hope with your friends.

Alex Schadenberg of the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition tells OneNewsNow a young woman only identified as Kelly of Leuven, Belgium has applied to be euthanized. Kelly reportedly had social anxiety as a youth, experienced self-harm, attempted suicide, and had an eating disorder.

"She's not the only one in Belgium or Canada or the United States that goes through significant psychological pain and issues," Schadenberg recognizes. "But now that euthanasia is being applied to these cases in Belgium, they're now seeking death by lethal injection rather than hope for the future, and this is the great tragedy for such a young person who's physically healthy in every way."

Before her request is granted, Kelly, who is only 23 years old, must gain permission from two psychiatrists – professionals who Schadenberg stresses are supposed to be in the business of preventing suicide, not causing it.

"We can't allow society to abandon these people," he contends. "This is what euthanasia is about. It's about an abandonment. We're abandoning them to their pain rather than helping them find hope in living."

Many psychiatrists and most citizens of Belgium are against assisting suicide for mental health patients. Within the profession, psychiatrists stress younger patients can usually improve with time, therapy, and medication, if appropriate.

Canadian Alzheimer’s Society Endorses Euthanasia by Advance Directive

This article was published by the National Review online on October 17, 2019

Wesley Smith

By Wesley J. Smith

Canada is debating whether to permit euthanasia by advance directive, meaning, allowing people to sign instructions requiring they be killed by their doctor once they reach a determined level of incompetence. In other words, a former self will be given the power to order their current self dispatched — even, presumably, if the current self is not suffering and may not want to die.

Dementia Advocacy Canada is promoting euthanasia.

We can tell which way that debate is going with the Alzheimer’s Society Canada endorsing such a legal change. From the Society’s press release:

People living with dementia are individuals — first and foremost. They have the same rights as everyone else, including the right to participate in decisions about their life and care. We respect the right of all persons with dementia to advocate for their individual best interests, including advocating for MAID [medical assistance in dying, e.g., lethal injection] through advance requests.

So, in Canada, helpless people with dementia are about to become a killable caste with the cooperation of an organization that supposedly advocates for their welfare.

And if incompetent patients, then why not also allow the killing of sick children? Oh yeah, that’s coming too — perhaps without requiring parental consent.

Targeting people with mental illness and dementia for euthanasia.

This article was published by The American Spectator on October 17, 2019

Several countries may be ahead of us in this area, but the U.S. is fast catching up.

Wesley Smith

By Wesley J Smith

A few years ago, a Dutch doctor attended her elderly Alzheimer’s disease patient at a nursing home. The doctor’s purpose wasn’t to examine the patient or prescribe new medicines. Rather, she was there to kill.

While competent, the patient asked to be euthanized when incapacitated, but she also instructed that she be allowed to say when. But before she did that, the doctor and her family decided that her time had come. The doctor drugged the woman’s coffee and, once she was asleep, began the lethal injection procedure. But the patient awakened unexpectedly and fought against being killed. Rather than stopping, the doctor instructed the family to hold the struggling woman down while she completed the homicide.

This would seem to be a clear-cut case of murder. But a judge recently exonerated and praised the doctor for acting in the “best interests” of the patient by merely executing the woman’s previously stated wishes. In other words, the judge essentially ruled that the struggling patient was no longer competent to want to stay alive.

The only unusual aspect of the “Case of the Struggling Alzheimer’s Patient” was the struggle. Even when incompetent and unable to make their own decisions, the law of Netherlands and Belgium allows dementia patients to be killed by doctors if they so order in written advance directives.

Both countries also allow mentally ill patients who ask to die to be euthanized. Such procedures are not rare. According to government statistics, in 2017, Dutch psychiatrists and doctors euthanized 83 mentally ill patients. Sometimes these legal homicides are accompanied by consensual organ harvesting after death. One case — reported in an international transplant medical journal — involved a self-harmer (or “auto-mutilator”) for whom doctors applied the ultimate harm as a “treatment.” Without criticism — or even a moment’s reflection about the moral questions raised by such an act — the medical journal reported approvingly that the lungs of the deceased psychiatric patient were well accepted by their recipients.

The Supreme Court of Switzerland, a country that permits assisted suicide clinics — ruled several years ago that the mentally ill have a constitutional right to access death. Accordingly, there are many verified cases of the non-physically ill being assisted to kill themselves — including an elderly woman who wanted to die because she had lost her looks.

Canada, which recently legalized lethal injection euthanasia for those whose deaths are “reasonably foreseeable,” now is debating expanding the right to be killed to those whose lives are not in danger. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is on record as favoring liberalization and has stated his government will not appeal a recent court ruling declaring the foreseeable death limitation to be unconstitutionally restrictive and discriminatory.

How far is the expansion likely to go? Many Canadian euthanasia advocates are pushing for revisions that would allow people with mental illnesses and dementia to be killed by doctors in the same manner as now allowed in the Netherlands and Belgium. And here’s some breaking news: the Alzheimer Society of Canada — which is supposed to advocate for the welfare of such patients — has officially endorsed allowing euthanasia by advance directive. This means that even if the incompetent patient is not suffering — perhaps even if he or she expresses no desire to die — their former self’s decision trumps the current self’s needs and desires.

Alan Nichols with his brother.

Meanwhile, there has already been at least one depressed Canadian apparently euthanized at his request even though his death was not foreseeable. The man’s family even begged doctors not to kill him, but to no avail.

What about the U.S.? Would we ever follow such a course? As of now, the nine states and the District of Columbia that have legalized assisted suicide limit access to patients who are terminally ill. But that’s more a political expediency than a principled limitation. Indeed, restricting assisted suicide to the dying is philosophically unsustainable.

Think about it. If the point of allowing suicide by doctor is to eliminate suffering — and if eliminating suffering can include eliminating the sufferer — how can facilitated death be forbidden to patients, such as those with dementia and mental illness, who may suffer far more extremely and for a much longer time than the already dying? It makes no sense.

Despite continuing disapproval of euthanasia for mental illness by the American Psychiatric Association, that point is increasingly being made in the media and professional journals. For example, an article just published in the American Journal of Bioethics argues that since “the suffering associated with mental illness can be as severe, intractable, and prolonged as the suffering due to physical illness,” as a matter of “parity,” in “severe” cases, “PAD” (physician-assisted death) should be made available to mentally ill patients with “decisional capacity” — even when they have “a relatively long expected natural lifespan.” The authors, University of Utah psychiatry professor Brent M. Kious and noted assisted suicide advocate and bioethicist Margaret (Peggy) Battin, go so far as to suggest that “psychiatrists and other mental health professionals” could one day become “gatekeepers for PAD” once “a metric for suffering in both mental and physical illness” is established.

Ponder this for a moment. Instead of being duty-bound to save the lives of all their suicidal patients, mental health professionals would become approvers for and facilitators of self-destruction. That should be unthinkable.

Alas, the first small legal steps toward permitting the demented and mentally ill to access suicide by doctor have already been taken. After California legalized assisted suicide for the terminally ill, the Department of State Hospitals promulgated a regulation requiring that patients who have been involuntarily committed — and who have become terminally ill — be provided access to assisted suicide despite their mental illness. By definition such people are not legally competent, or else why would they be involuntary hospitalized?

Meanwhile, Nevada just enacted a law that allows dementia patients to instruct caregivers to withhold “food and water” once they reach incapacity toward the end that they starve to death. Please note that this first-of-a-kind law isn’t about refusing a feeding tube or preventing force-feeding. Rather, the law (SB 121) permits patients to order their future selves to be refused “food and water” — even if they willingly eat, perhaps even if they ask caregivers for sustenance. That’s homicide by neglect.

Don’t take my word for it. The influential bioethicist Thaddeus Mason Pope wrote about the law:

Even after we stop offering food and fluids, other problems may arise. Most problematically, the patient may make gestures or utterances that seem to contradict her prior instructions [to be starved]. Does such communication revoke the advance directive? A recent court case from the Netherlands suggests the answer is “no.” Once the patient reaches late-stage dementia, she is unable to knowingly and voluntarily revoke decisions she made with capacity. But the answer remains uncertain in the United States.

In other words, Pope believes that a court could one day rule that an advanced dementia patient isn’t “competent” to want to eat.

Of course, the point of such advocacy isn’t really starvation but convincing people to allow intentional overdosing of these vulnerable patients by doctors. After all, if we are going to end their lives, the reasoning goes, we should at least do it humanely. If we accept the propriety of intentionally ending dementia patients’ lives based on their prior instructions, that argument certainly has emotional appeal.

Accelerating advocacy for legalizing euthanasia is pushing us toward making a stark choice. We can decide that assisted suicide is an acceptable response to human suffering, allowing people to die — but also unleashing gravitational forces of logic that will lead inexorably (over time) to a broader killing license, including of the killing of dementia and mentally ill patients as advocated by Kious and Battin. Or, we can focus instead on suicide prevention in all cases. Such caring takes more time, commitment, and resources, but better exemplifies true “compassion,” the root meaning of which, after all, is to “suffer with.”

Kious and Battin are on the mirror opposite side from me in the euthanasia debate, but we agree that there is no such thing as a “little” euthanasia: In for a penny is in for a dollar. Those with eyes to see, let them see.

Award-winning author Wesley J. Smith is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute’s Center on Human Exceptionalism and a consultant to the Patients Rights Council.

Being with others cures the epidemic of loneliness.

This article was published by OneNewsNow on Oct 15, 2019.

Studies now provide a reason for siblings to stay in touch with one another and their parents as they grow older.

Loneliness is an epidemic that is detrimental to your health.

Alex Schadenberg

Alex Schadenberg of the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition cites a recent study from London to say research on loneliness shows it leads to potentially serious problems.

"22 percent of people in the U.K., in England, Scotland, and Wales, who are over the age of 65 do not speak to more than three people in a week,” he relays. "And many of those people never speak to anybody in a week, so you have this situation of an epidemic of loneliness."

The data also shows the link between health problems and loneliness and isolation. In fact, it is even worse than obesity as it affects health.

Further, a meta-analysis of 148 studies released in the past 

"concluded that a person who is experiencing social isolation, that their risk of death, an early death, is 60 percent higher,"

Schadenberg explains. 

"As for euthanasia and assisted suicide, we know by the data that quite a few people ask for euthanasia and assisted suicide because they're lonely and they feel they have no purpose for living."

With today's mobility, children as grown-ups often move elsewhere for the sake of jobs, which unfortunately makes it easier for them to become detached from family members. So Schadenberg says it is incumbent on society and on people who care about others to recognize the importance of being with others because it encourages the opposite of loneliness.

Nick Goiran Makes The Case: No Safe Euthanasia Law

This article was published by the Care Alliance on October 16, 2019.

Hon Nick Goiran

In the lead speech opposing the Voluntary Assisted Dying Bill 2019 which would legalise euthanasia and assisted suicide in Western Australia, the Hon Nick Goiran powerfully enunciated the case that it was impossible to create a scheme which could guarantee that there would be no wrongful deaths due to medical errors, elder abuse and patient steering and a lack of equitable access to palliative care.

In his conclusion summing up the argument he made five statements:

• Firstly, the desire of a significant proportion of confident people for ready access to lethal injections ought never to override the rights of the quiet vulnerable to safety and protection.
• Secondly, if we are intellectually honest and reason through the theory of a euthanasia regime, we should conclude that it is inherently unsafe. The insufficiency of the criminal justice safeguards informs us of this. The prevalence of medical negligence informs us of this. The ease of doctor shopping informs us of this. The existence of elder abuse informs us of this, and the reality of doctor bias informs us of this.
• Thirdly, when we engage with the lived experience of the few jurisdictions that have legalised euthanasia or assisted suicide, we know that the theory of an inherently unsafe regime has resulted in casualties of wrongful deaths. In other words, the theory has translated into practice and wrongful deaths have ensued, and there have been casualties.
• Fourthly, there is another way; there is a better way. There is a safe approach to end-of-life choices; however, it will require all of us to persistently insist that quality palliative care is made available to every Western Australian and until we, the 36 of us, have exhausted ourselves in fulfilling this duty, we should not contemplate a euthanasia regime, let alone this bill, which is more dangerous than the Victorian legislation and more dangerous than the now inoperative Northern Territory legislation.
• Finally, I oppose this bill because the risks in legalised assisted suicide are simply too great, not the least of which is because the consequences are final.

Read the whole of the Hon Nick Goiran's speech here

Debate on the Bill continues with further second reading speeches.

EPC - USA is co-sponsoring a conference on November 2 in Bristol CT.

Euthanasia Prevention Coalition - USA is co-sponsoring a conference to be held on Saturday, November 2, 2019 in Bristol, CT. 

Nancy Elliott

Among other topics, this conference will include a keynote speech by Nancy Elliott, President of the EPC-USA and other national and local speakers on assisted suicide and euthanasia. 

There will also be workshops on how to contact your local legislators, how to write a letter-to-the-editor, a showing of Fatal Flaws film and more. If you want to learn more about the importance of fighting assisted suicide on the local level, this conference will provide an excellent foundation. 

Tickets for this day-long conference are only $15 and include lunch. More details and registration is available at: (Registration link).