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Dying Down Under: From Law Reform to the Peaceful Pill
- Rutgers University Press
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268 VVVVVVVVVVV Dying Down Under From Law Reform to the Peaceful Pill PHILIP NITSCHKE AND FIONA STEWART “My quality of life is still good but it would give me great peace of mind to know that I could end it should the situation change and with something that would be peaceful (e.g., Peaceful Pill) and less traumatic for my family and friends than the means now available (plastic bag). I also consider that it is my right to do so without interference from church or state. Realising this will take time, money and a lot of work. One day we may live in more enlightened times and reason will prevail.” —Betty, seventy-two years old, retired business owner, Western Australia In Australia, voluntary euthanasia (VE) has attracted a consistent 70 percent support among the Australian community for the past forty years. Yet where public policy is concerned, governments of all political convictions have done little to address this growing social need. As one who has been working in the field of end-of-life choices in Australia for over a decade, I [Nitschke] have been privileged to witness the benefits an end-of-life law can bring to the terminally ill, while feeling helpless and frustrated at the plight of those left behind.1 Unlike the terminally ill, who have the benefit of significant advances in palliative care to reassure them that their passing will not be traumatic, the well elderly have very little at all. And the more frail a person is, the less able she or he will be to organize the end for themselves. In most jurisdictions in the post-industrial West, suicide remains legal, while assisted suicide can attract the most savage of penalties. In some states of Australia, assisting a suicide can attract life imprisonment, the harshest penalty the state can exact. The point of this paradox is awful in its stark reality. In this essay I provide a personal, historical account of my involvement in the right-to-die movement over the past decade. From the heady days of the world’s first voluntary euthanasia law to the innovative work of my nonpro fit organization, Exit International, ten years later in developing a homemade Peaceful Pill, I document my travels from law reform advocate to Do-It-Yourself (DIY) activist, noting along the way that there is no more important human right for the coming decades than deciding when and how we will die. Falling Feet First into Voluntary Euthanasia In mid-1995, when the chief minister of the Northern Territory (NT) first proposed his voluntary euthanasia law, I was working as a physician operating an after-hours home medical service. Like most people in the Northern Territory at that time (and Australia today), I thought that was a brave idea. I was surprised that such an innovative and ground-breaking piece of public policy was being proposed in Darwin, since the Northern Territory is hardly a place known for its forward thinking, let alone social liberalism. In too many ways, attitudes in the Northern Territory are reminiscent of hard-line attitudes of the southern United States in regard to both crime and race. Our Australian version of being tough on law and order means we have mandatory life sentences for murder and regressive and discriminatory race policies , which do little for the indigenous (majority) population of the north. With the vision of Chief Minister Marshall Perron, the Northern Territory had an opportunity to lead the world on end-of-life choices. Yet within days of the announcement, the medical profession declared its opposition to the bill with a statement by the head of the NT branch of the Australian Medical Association (AMA), a right-to-life advocate, Dr. Chris Wake. Wake said that “killing patients is not a proportional or proper response to terminally ill situations.”2 He went on to add that “AMA members will have nothing to do with the drug protocols and the like necessary to enact the legislation.”3 The message from the medical profession was that they would wreak havoc on the legislation, no matter what the people or the politicians wanted. DYING DOWN UNDER 269 [18.208.172.3] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 15:04 GMT) Why the vitriol? I wondered. What was it that the AMA was so afraid of? And what about the patients? What do seriously ill and dying patients want? Did the AMA ever ask them? My imagination...