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?
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.
Written by: Wayne Williams