Euthanasia -

Calvary: Upholding the Dignity of Life at Every Stage

Published on 4 May 20264 May 2026 by hlps_australiaLeave a comment

The following statement is from Tony Brennan, the Regional Director of Mission at Calvary St John’s Hospital. In it, Mr. Brennan explains the philosophy underpinning Calvary’s decision to not provide assisted-suicide services in its hospitals.

At the heart of Calvary’s mission is a deep and enduring belief in the inherent dignity of every human life. This dignity does not depend on health, independence or productivity. It is present from the beginning of life to its natural end, and it is never lost through illness, disability, ageing or vulnerability.

Calvary exists to heal where possible, to care always, and to never intentionally cause death. Our understanding of care is grounded in the belief that every life is worthy of compassion, respect and protection, especially when people are at their most fragile.

Importantly, Calvary will never block or interfere with a person’s lawful choice to access VAD elsewhere. Nor do we turn away from people who raise questions about it. When someone in our care expresses interest in VAD, we respond with respect, sensitivity and compassion. We listen. We remain present. We continue to care.

In all that we do, we seek to affirm this truth: every life matters, every person matters, and dignity is never lost.

In Tasmania, the End‑of‑life choices (Voluntary Assisted Dying) Act 2021 sets out a legal framework for Voluntary Assisted Dying (VAD). The act came into effect in October 2022 and includes provisions for an independent review which opens in May and June 2026. While this legislation forms part of the broader health system in which we operate, Calvary’s response is shaped first and foremost by our values.

No one is abandoned at Calvary — especially at the end of life. Our staff are there to have the difficult conversations, to accompany people and families through fear and uncertainty, and to ensure that every person feels heard, valued and cared for until the very end.

Some practices, including voluntary assisted dying, are not consistent with Calvary’s ethic of care. For this reason, Calvary does not participate in any step of the VAD process. This includes making formal requests, assessing eligibility, or administering substances intended to directly cause death. This position is not about judgment or exclusion. It flows from our long‑held commitment to protect life and to care without condition.

We take suffering seriously. People approaching the end of life can experience pain and distress that is physical, emotional, psychological, social and spiritual. Calvary is committed to walking with people through this suffering — not by hastening death, but by relieving pain, addressing distress, offering presence, and providing holistic care that honours the whole person. We also respect a person’s right to refuse treatments that are overly burdensome or no longer helpful.

Tony Brennan

Regional Director of Mission

Calvary St John’s Hospital

Image credit: Calvary St. John’s website.

For information about end-of-life care, please go to our Supports page.

Young South Australian to die by assisted suicide

Published on 29 April 202630 April 2026 by hlps_australiaLeave a comment

26-year-old Annaliese Holland will end her life within months through assisted suicide in Adelaide. Her story has been appearing in mainstream media, leading to concerns that her case is glamorising assisted suicide. An excerpt from an ABC news article and a video from news.com are provided below.

Even when a patient like Annaliese has to endure severe suffering, it is never morally justified for them to take their own life. Likewise, doctors who assists in such a case are killing their patients, rather than abiding by their oath to protect life.

It is tragic that instead of peacefully living out her final days with her friends and family, in a spirit of acceptance, Annaliese has been encouraged to take her own life.

From ABC news:

“Annaliese Holland will end her life within months through voluntary assisted dying in Adelaide. The 26-year-old has been living with Autoimmune Autonomic Ganglionopathy since she was 18….

“Deciding to access voluntary assisted dying would have seemed unusual, even for Annie, just a few years ago.

“I used to be one of those people who was actually against voluntary assisted dying,” she tells hack.

“It wasn’t until I got sick that my views on it completely changed.”

Annie says she only realised assisted dying was an option when she met Lily Thai, a 23-year-old also suffering AAG, who ended her life just months after South Australia’s voluntary assisted dying laws came into effect in 2023.”

Read the rest of the article here

Death as a way out: euthanasia precedent in Spain

Published on 30 March 202630 March 2026 by hlps_australiaLeave a comment

The life of Noelia Romos was tragic enough, but it is her death by euthanasia which has brought worldwide attention to her case. The Spanish courts overruled her father’s attempts to stop her death, and her best friend was denied permission to say one last goodbye, and potentially make Noelia reconsider, before she was put to death. Now there are claims Noelia herself requested a 6-month stay due to her deteriorating mental health, which was also denied by medical authorities. The reason: Noelia’s organs were already earmarked for sale, meaning that she was more valuable to the State dead than alive.

This article by by Jeniffer Díaz was written just prior to Noelia’s death and has been updated.

Noelia Castillo Ramos was a 25-year-old woman from Barcelona, Spain, who ended her life through euthanasia on 26 March, after a long legal battle. Her controversial case has attracted widespread media attention in Spain.

The last few years of Noelia’s life were marked by intense pain. She was diagnosed with BPD (Borderline Personality Disorder) at a young age, a serious condition that causes emotional instability, a profound sense of emptiness and fantasies of self-harm.

She was under state guardianship since the age of 13. Due to their limited financial situation, her parents had to rely on public resources for her care.

In 2022, she was raped, the details of which remain largely unknown. This traumatic event was the breaking point in her life. Afterwards, she attempted suicide by jumping from a fifth-floor window. She survived, but was left paraplegic.

After that, she has had use a wheelchair and take different medications to relieve the pain. Although these medications were effective, they caused her severe side effects.

After conducting several mental capacity tests and treatments, the psychiatrists who treated Noelia concluded that, despite her BPD, she was capable of making decisions about her life and death.

However, her story portrays profound pain, traumatic events and a BPD diagnosis, which at least partially clouds the autonomy attributed to her by the doctors, since BPD can severely affect a person’s emotions and undoubtedly impact decision-making.

In 2023, a discharge report concluded that Noelia was medically stable and her physical pain was under control. Nevertheless, despite all her father’s efforts to change her mind, on 10 April 2024 she officially requested euthanasia from the Catalan Commission for the Guarantee and Evaluation of Rights.

Just a couple of months later, on 18 July 2024, the commission accepted the request.

Noelia gave a final television interview before her death, in which she reaffirmed her decision to end her life with the support of her mother, although the latter made it clear that she did not want this ending for her daughter either.

The family was actually divided on the issue. Her father sought help from the Christian lawyers association, arguing that Noelia was not psychologically capable of making that decision. Against his wishes, the process continued.

This case sets a dangerous precedent in Spanish society, suggesting that a life of extreme suffering is no longer “worthy” of being lived.

Ours is a failed state that allows its citizens to resort to death not only for physical pain, but also for mental illness, as in Noelia’s case.

The 2021 Organic Law regulating euthanasia in Spain was originally approved for people suffering from a chronic, incurable illness that causes significant pain. This was based on the new individual right, namely the autonomy to exercise freedom over one’s own life and death.

Between June 2021 and mid 2025, euthanasia has been applied to 1,034 people in Spain.

But, as anticipated, there is currently no clear definition of what constitutes this type of painful illness. This case raises the question: Do depression, various personality disorders and borderline personality disorder fall under this category? The answer seems to be yes.

We look with concern to a future that already seems dystopian, because depression is currently spreading throughout the world like a pandemic, and Spain is one of the countries with the highest suicide rates among young people.

Can the solution to this mental health crisis be entrusted to the state? Does society have the necessary tools to respond to profound suffering? Noelia’s case suggests it does not.

The state is making a serious mistake by believing that the dignity of life can be defined in terms of suffering.

It would be wise to view with suspicion this law based on the right to personal autonomy, which ignores that life is not the absolute private property of the individual, but rather has an origin and purpose that transcend the person.

God breathed the breath of life into Noelia, created her and was pleased to see her born, so that she might know Him and find the meaning of her life in Him.

Noelia’s pain was real and her desire to end her suffering was legitimate and entirely understandable. However, even though she was broken inside and had lost the will to live, Noelia was made in the image of God. Her life has incalculable value.

This is a heartbreaking story that should move us deeply. We live in a time of a total loss of the value of human life, where people have become disposable consumer goods. Society was unable to restore hope to Noelia, and then offered her the quick way out, disguised as ‘dignified’: death.

That is quite the opposite of the message of the Gospel, which delves into the heart of suffering to redeem it — not necessarily to eliminate it. God can redeem a life, even in such extreme circumstances.

Job longed for death; Elijah cried out to God to take his life; but undoubtedly, the most extreme case of physical and emotional pain was suffered by our Lord Jesus Christ.

Jesus is an expert in impossible causes; he is the Lord of those who seek him, of the brokenhearted; he is the comforter and the giver of hope.

The state surrendered too quickly with Noelia; God would never have done so, and neither should we surrender to the suffering of others by offering death as a solution.

by Jeniffer Díaz. This article has been republished from Evangelical Focus under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0 license

Euthanasia in Tasmania

Published on 28 February 202628 February 2026 by hlps_australiaLeave a comment

The Euthanasia legalisation is a form of killing which has traditionally been prohibited by the great world religions. It is now becoming increasingly routine and validated by contemporary cultural doctrine.

by Wayne Williams

From a traditional standpoint, killing oneself is still killing a human being and is forbidden as such. Nor is it only self-killing, for in the legislation, there is the provision for the doctor to kill the patient if the patient cannot do it alone. As for the medical profession itself, euthanasia negates the well-known affirmation of the traditional Hippocratic oath, “First do no harm”.

The doctor cannot annihilate if he is truly to heal.

Euthanasia, moreover, damages the doctor-patient relationship. Once the doctor is “licensed to kill”, the patients’ trust in the authenticity of a doctor’s professional commitment to their well-being will almost certainly be undermined.

The contagion of euthanasia is a slippery slope. Once legalised for the terminally ill at the end of life, its practice grows not only quantitatively but spreads qualitatively to new categories: children, the mentally infirm and afflicted and to those who are not even ill but old and tired of life.

The Tasmanian legislation poorly protects the vulnerable. There should be an independent review mechanism that increases the prospects of an unwilling participant being identified and protected before it is too late.

What should be recognised is the important relationship between the patient and their GP. Any preliminary discussion on the topic of assisted suicide must be created and included in the medical records of the person’s GP practice.

Where a coordinating doctor carries out the first assessment of the patient’s eligibility for physician-assisted suicide, part of which the doctor is satisfied that the patient has made their decision voluntarily and had not been coerced or pressured into making it, the coordinating doctor must then provide a copy of the assessment to the patient’s GP. In addition, a subsequent assessment should be made by an independent doctor (independent of the coordinating doctor) and provided to the patient’s own GP. Each assessing doctor would be required to make enquires of professionals who have recently provided health or social care to the patient and such other enquires as the assessing doctor considers appropriate.

The last provision to be included will almost certainly require that the two doctors consult the patient’s own GP to intervene in circumstances which may appear questionable to the patient’s own GP. In Tasmania, there is no requirement that the person’s own GP participate in the eligibility process.

In Tasmania, members of the patient’s family may invite a practitioner who may never have set eyes on the patient before to become the coordinating doctor and who will be responsible for deciding whether the patient has been subjected to any form of coercion or undue influence by his or her family. Unlike the patient’s own GP, the introduced coordinating doctor will have no previous opportunity to know the illnesses, personality, hopes, expectations and fears of the patient; nor will that doctor have any knowledge or insight of the family dynamics at play.

Under Tasmanian Voluntary Assisted Dying (VAD) laws, once two doctors have carried out a positive assessment, all that is required to be done in general terms is for the relevant forms to be filled in and submitted. There is no other legal obstacle to the consumption of life-ending drugs.

A further consideration would be the appointment of a special Commissioner, a judge who has the power to appoint persons to be members of a Review Panel. The Commissioner, having received the patient’s declaration and the two doctors’ assessment, would refer the patient’s case to the Panel for determination of the patient’s eligibility to process to the final stage: the ingestion of life ending drugs.

The Panel’s function should include satisfying itself that the patient has made his or her request voluntarily and not under pressure or coercion. The Panel must have the power to make enquiries of any person whom it believes has relevant knowledge or experience about the circumstances of the patient. The Panel would be statutorily obliged to hear from and may question both the coordinating doctor and the independent doctor.

Tasmanian legislation requires more rigorous standards and must adopt a more cautious and prudent approach to ensure that a person who wishes to pursue physician-assisted suicide is doing so in a truly voluntary way.

The Tasmanian safeguards are more cosmetic than real; there is no effective oversight of the conduct of family members and complicit medical practitioners because Australian practice is private and self- regulating and assumes that all VAD Practitioners are beyond reproach. It is necessary to have checks and balances in the Tasmanian legislation so often the trend is in the other direction, to relax the safeguards even further.

What should be strongly resisted is pressure from pro-VAD proponent lobby groups to remove the ability of Catholic, other Christian and Jewish entities to refuse to countenance VAD in their hospitals and aged care facilities. VAD proponents want the federal law changed so that an eligibility assessment can be conducted by telephone or Zoom. Hopefully, the Tasmanian legislation will not go down that path.

How a medical practitioner could safely conclude by a telephone call or a Zoom meeting that there is no evidence or suspicion of pressure from family members upon that patient is a dangerous form of lunacy, particularly where the patient’s own GP need not be involved.

Notre Dame bioethicist Margaret Somerville stated that “democracies do not necessarily produce ethical laws”.

Democratic Sweden overturned the social censure of incest when, in the 1960s, it legalised marriage between siblings from one parent.

The Human Life Protection Society is strongly opposed to euthanasia on traditional religious grounds that a human being is not the author of life nor its absolute owner and that it is a gift entrusted by the Creator so that it may find its fulfilled purpose in the service of the Creator and other human beings.

Suicide violates the inherent value of life and the fabric of civil society. Will the inherent value of life and our obligations to others persuade when the current secular culture does not accept or feel that these trump euthanasia’s offer of an exit from pain and its teaching of the primacy of one’s own wellbeing?

Written by: Wayne Williams