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ACT Right to Life AssociationMEDIA RELEASE |
Moore euthanasia bill dangerous
President of the ACT Right to Life Association, Nicola Pantos, today criticised Independent MLA Michael Moore for, once again, introducing a euthanasia bill - the Medical Treatment (Amendment) Bill 1997 - into the ACT Legislative Assembly.
"Yet again Michael Moore has introduced a euthanasia bill into the Assembly, despite the Assembly’s Select Committee on Euthanasia having rejected euthanasia in 1994, despite the Legislative Assembly having rejected Mr Moore’s euthanasia bill in 1995 and despite his failure to find support for his 1996 bill which would have allowed euthanasia by an overdose of pain relief drugs.
"Given that the Australian Senate may soon vote to prevent euthanasia being legalised in the territories, Mr Moore is just grandstanding to make a political point at the expense of the time and patience of the ACT community.
"Mr Moore’s past attempts have failed for very good reasons. Allowing someone to be legally killed is a very dangerous threshold to cross. Once it is accepted that giving someone a lethal injection is the best that we can do for a patient - that a person’s life is no longer valuable - the difficult hurdle has been cleared and it is very easy to expand the euthanasia provisions from there", said Mrs Pantos.
"Indeed groups supporting euthanasia such as the Voluntary Euthanasia Society already argue that some people who are not terminally ill should be given access to euthanasia. The NSW Coalition of Organisations for Voluntary Euthanasia argues that euthanasia should be allowed for people who have a disability, even if they’re not terminally ill. Another supporter of euthanasia, the then Governor General, Bill Hayden, when speaking about people in nursing homes argued that ‘... succeeding generations deserve to be disencumbered - to coin a clumsy word - of some unproductive burdens.’"
Issued: 19 February 1997
Contact: Nicola Pantos, president of the ACT Right to Life Association.
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