Victorians - Get the Facts! No case for legalising assisted suicide can be made on the basis that this is the only possible response to Australians facing unrelievable pain. Rather Australians need universal access to gold standard palliative care which can alleviate pain, including using palliative sedation as a last resort. Continue reading

New South Wales: get the facts! No case for legalising assisted suicide can be made on the basis that this is the only possible response to Australians facing unrelievable pain. Rather Australians need universal access to gold standard palliative care which can alleviate pain, including using palliative sedation as a last resort. The actual proposal for legalising assisted suicide would cover subjective, existential suffering, including fear of being a burden on others.  Continue reading

People with disabilities and their families need to take action on a new front. It’s probably quite difficult to understand the viewpoint of a person living with a disability.  I once thought it almost impossible.  But that all changed when I met my wife-to-be.  Anne’s older brother lived all his life with a significant intellectual disability. My introduction to my future brother-in-law was handled extremely gently.  I guess having grown up with Mark, Anne understood that people were often visibly uncomfortable in his presence and expected me to be no different.  She was right. Continue reading

Euthanasia advocates market their cause well.  Amongst a long and growing list of euphemisms, catch phrases and slogans, the ‘choice’ mantra rates extremely high. “It’s my life, it’s my body.  I should have the right to choose how and when I die.”  Even in our modern world, there are still many, many areas of our existence where we rightly and for good reason, do not have a right to choose. Even if we were to concede that a person had the right to choose euthanasia (and the pages of this website make it abundantly clear that we don’t), legislation to enable acts of euthanasia to have the protection of the law don’t give ‘choice’ to patients at all — it’s an illusion: it sells a non-reality. Continue reading

Those pushing for a legislative outcome on euthanasia and assisted suicide will always include ‘safeguards’ (or guidelines) as part of any bill tabled. These ‘safeguards’, we are lead to believe, are there to restrict the application of the legislation to ‘only a few’ persons and only in specified circumstances. But the evidence from places where euthanasia and/or assisted suicide is practiced with some level of legal protection/sanction tells us a different story.  Little wonder that opponents of the practice and law have surmised that such ‘safeguards’ are really ‘false assurance’, that they’re simply there to make MPs (and all of us) feel a little better about institutionalized killing of the aged, the infirm and the disabled. Continue reading

Let’s bell the cat right from the start: Australia, like much of the western world, has an aging population.  In South Australia, for example, those over the age of retirement are set to double over the next 50 years.  Projections in other states are not quite as dramatic but, regardless, the general aging of our population poses significant structural and economic difficulties that must be faced. Continue reading

Get the facts! No case for legalising assisted suicide can be made on the basis that this is the only possible response to Australians facing unrelievable pain. Rather Australians need universal access to gold standard palliative care which can alleviate pain, including using palliative sedation as a last resort. The actual proposal for legalising assisted suicide would cover subjective, existential suffering, including fear of being a burden on others.  Continue reading