DYING WITH DIGNITY?

I want to talk again about the issue of voluntary euthanasia. I have mentioned the issue many times. Earlier this year I was a guest speaker in Sydney at a voluntary exit conference featuring three people who had assisted loved ones to die. Two husbands and one daughter.

It was also in the news recently because in October last year Margaret Maxwell told her husband of twenty years she had had enough. She wanted to die.

Alexander Maxwell had made a pact with her to help her die if she gave up the idea of starving herself to death.

My opinions on voluntary euthanasia have been pretty public for many years. . I am a fervent believer in voluntary euthanasia. If I get terminally ill that’s the way I’ll go.

I believe the Andrews bill in Canberra that over-rode and overturned the Northern Territory Government’s trail-blazing law permitting voluntary euthanasia was a travesty. And that bill had John Howard’s fingerprints all over it.

believe a person has the right to die. I believe a person has the right to commit suicide… although I think that is often a coward’s way out that pains and scars bewildered and guilt-ridden loved ones left behind.

But when a person is terminally ill. Their emaciated bodies shrunken beyond recognition and wracked with pain. They are entitled to say “whose life is it anyway?” and make a calculated decision to end it.

I held these views for years before I had a personal experience of it. My mother had cancer and was dead within eight weeks. By the end she existed in a twilight world. She didn’t die of cancer. She starved to death. And by the time she died – battered by chemo and with a throat so raw from thrush she could not swallow --she looked like a starving Biafran and weighed about twenty-five kilos.

She wasn’t living. She was existing. As I sat by her deathbed in the middle of the night - and saw her pain - I seriously considered putting a pillow over her face to end it. And I thought if she had been a dog and the RSPCA had walked in I would have been charged with animal cruelty.

Last Sunday I spent some hours with an old journo mate on his birthday a suburban nursing home. He has a debilitating disease that has relentlessly cut him down. Affected his mobility. Affected his eyesight. Affected his ability to even feed himself or control his drool. And with a mind still sharp he cannot even speak.

And I left there and thought: if that were me I would find as way to kill myself. Even if I had to steer a wheelchair into peak-hour traffic.

But, having said all that I cannot go along with a stunt out of Florida where a rock band says it will go ahead with a suicide on stage at a concert this weekend.

The group, appropriately, is called Hell on Earth. They have found a terminally ill volunteer.

The City of St. Petersburg has passed emergency legislation to stop it. And rightly so. I have said many times suicide is your ultimate civil right.

But surely this is a sick stunt. It hardly fits into the category of “dying with dignity”.

Tuesday, September 30, 2003

©Copyright Derryn Hinch 2002