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ACT Right to Life AssociationN E W S L E T T E R |
ACT euthanasia bill defeated
Michael Moore MLA's voluntary euthanasia bill, the Medical Treatment (Amendment) Bill, was defeated in a vote in the ACT Legislative Assembly on Wednesday, 22 November 1995 by 10 votes to 7.
The vote was as follows.
Against the euthanasia bill: Kate Carnell, Terry Connolly, Greg Cornwell, Tony De Domenico, Harold Hird, Gary Humphries, Trevor Kaine, Paul Osborne, Bill Stefaniak, Bill Wood.
For the euthanasia bill: Wayne Berry, Rosemary Follett, Lucy Horodny, Roberta McRae, Michael Moore, Kerrie Tucker, Andrew Whitecross.
President of the ACT Right to Life Association, Jeremy Stuparich, described the defeat of the bill as a triumph for patient rights.
"The rejection of this euthanasia bill will help the cause of people with a terminal illness by ensuring that our community does not say that their lives are without worth - that we would take their lives just as soon as treat their symptoms", said Mr Stuparich.
"A number of the members of the ACT Legislative Assembly who opposed this euthanasia bill referred in the debate to the danger that the bill would first allow a choice for euthanasia, then an expectation, and later an obligation for patients to accept euthanasia.
"They referred to the many government reports investigating euthanasia from around the world which concluded that voluntary euthanasia could not, in safety, be offered to the community. Legalised euthanasia would offer too many opportunities for abuse that could not be legislated against.
"Since the Northern Territory's Rights of the Terminally Ill Act was passed on 25 May both South Australia (Voluntary Euthanasia Bill -rejected 27 July) and the ACT have rejected euthanasia bills. Clearly the momentum that was seen to have been behind euthanasia in Australia has been halted", said Mr Stuparich.
The euthanasia bill was dangerously close to being passed. Michael Moore banked on the Labor Party ensuring that its members would support party policy and support the euthanasia bill.
On Tuesday, 17 October, it seemed that Mr Moore might get his wish when the Labor Party caucus voted to say there would be no conscience vote allowed on euthanasia.
However, Labor member Bill Wood said he would defy party policy and vote against the bill, while shadow Attorney General Terry Connolly said he would work further within the party to get a conscience vote.
Informal discussions between the ALP National Executive and the local branch of the Labor Party convinced the ACT branch to allow a "Claytons" conscience vote. It was decided that those members who did not follow party policy would not be disciplined.
Speaking on ABC Radio 2CN on the morning of Tuesday, 21 November, the two Green members of the Assembly, Lucy Horodny and Kerrie Tucker, announced their intention to support the euthanasia bill. The Greens had said, since the election earlier this year, that they had not made up their mind on the issue.
However the Green's decision to support euthanasia was no great surprise since their platform, announced before the election, included support for voluntary euthanasia.
ACTRTLA president Jeremy Stuparich wrote to the ten MLAs who voted against the euthanasia bill to thank them for their courage in opposing the bill.
However, this will not be the last time the ACT will see a euthanasia bill. Michael Moore has promised to reintroduce his bill as many times as he has to until it is passed into law. Given that an MLA cannot re-introduce a private member's bill into the Assembly within 12 months of it being defeated, there will be a short break before the next attempt.
Luke Gormally speaks on euthanasia
Luke Gormally, Director of the Linacre Centre for Health Care Ethics in London, spoke in Canberra at the ACT Legislative Assembly's Reception Room on Wednesday, 8 November 1995. Mr Gormally's trip was hosted by TRUST. Extracts from Mr Gormally's speech appear below.
"All of us will have been more or less close in our lives to the kinds of situation which can make euthanasia seem the only solution available. Situations in which someone close to us is dying; and it does not seem possible to relieve their pain or distress, or to relieve the deep depression which has overtaken them from the knowledge of what has irretrievably gone from their lives, or to relieve the sense of dignity at the complete dependency they now experience."
"Why do some of us who have had such experiences nonetheless reject the proposal that doctors should be allowed to kill patients to relieve them of such miseries ... [?]"
"... since it is a doctor who is being asked to do the killing, and since, therefore, it is the doctor who has to answer for what he has done, he is bound to wish not to act on a mistaken judgement of the patient. Any effort to avoid doing so involves the doctor in looking for what he will count as evidence that the patient no longer has a worthwhile life. But even if the doctor does not take care to do that, the fact that he concurs in the patient's view of the worth-whileness of his own life means that he has made the basis for his own decision to kill the patient a judgement on the worthwhileness of the patient's life.
"We should be clear that the decision to kill has to be the doctor's; doctors are not automata mindlessly implementing the wishes of patients. And because they are not automata they have to have what are truly their reasons for acting - even if they base those reasons to a large extent on the words of the patient.
"So we should be clear that the serious work of justifying the carrying out of euthanasia at the request of the patient is not the request as such but the judgement that the patient has not got a worthwhile life. Because this is the fundamental consideration which purports to justify euthanasiaist killing, we can now see why a clear-headed advocate of voluntary euthanasia cannot consistently oppose non-voluntary euthanasia, that is the killing, supposedly in their own interests, of patients who cannot ask to be killed.
"Among such patients one would include handicapped newborn babies, the mentally retarded, those suffering from severe senile dementia, and the irreversibly comatose. If euthanasia can be a benefit - or at least do no harm - to those who ask for it, on what grounds could one deny it to those incapable of asking for it? There will not appear to be grounds for denying it if the basic reason for agreeing to kill those who ask for it is the judgement that they no longer have worthwhile lives. That same judgement will be much more readily arrived at in many cases of incompetent patients."
"If a legal system accepts euthanasiaist killing it has in effect accepted that certain lives may be intentionally ended on the grounds that no continuing value attaches to those lives. To do so is to kick out the cornerstone of justice in that system. It is idle to pretend that all one had in mind was legalising voluntary euthanasia, since no gulf separates the justification of voluntary and non-voluntary euthanasia.
"If one accommodates the principle that one may kill people because they are judged to lack worthwhile lives, it would be folly to think one could contain what Judge Cardozo once described as 'the tendency of a principle to expand itself to the limit of its logic'. In accepting voluntary euthanasia you would find that you had willy-nilly bought into the entire Singer-Kuhse package-deal: first, that some human lives may be judged to lack inherent worth, and, secondly, that they may be intentionally terminated for that reason. The legalisation of voluntary euthanasia is indeed a decisive step in the subversion of human dignity."
"Autonomy is the capacity for giving direction to our lives through the choices we make ... Both the fact that the commitment is chosen and what we commit ourselves to choosing matter. It is plain to common sense that many human choices are self- destructive. The evidence is right under our noses in the phenomena of drug addiction, child abuse ... A choice which has no other justification than it is my choice - its what I want to do - has as such no claim on our respect.
"At the very least, the basis on which I ask you to respect my 'right of autonomy' must be one which enables us to see why we should respect the varied human rights of every other human being."
"Euthanasia is not a solution to this situation, because it has two necessary consequences:
o it deepens the sense that people have that when they are at their most vulnerable they will be disposed of rather than supported;
o it introduces into the doctor-patient relationship, on the side of the doctor, a fundamental undermining of dispositions vital to that relationship.
The latter point is not well-understood by many in our society and certainly not by utilitarian propagandists for euthanasia."
"... a doctor needs to be disposed to recognise the ineliminable dignity of every patient who comes his way. How otherwise can we be assured that he will not be inclined to abuse patients, and that he will be concerned to treat them fairly? Secondly, a doctor needs to be disposed to find solutions to his patients' problems which express a commitment to the care of those patients. The marvellous developments which have occurred in recent decades in symptom control in the field of palliative care medicine would never have occurred if we had legalised euthanasia some time ago."
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