IT’S MY LIFE

If ever you had lingering doubts about voluntary euthanasia – and in these supposedly enlightened times I can’t see how anybody would – you should read the story at the weekend about Dr. John Elliott who went all the way from Australia to Switzerland so he could die in peace and with dignity last week.

He had to go to Zurich to put an end to his pain in a cancer-racked body to find a procedure that is illegal in this so-called compassionate and enlightened democracy that we live in here in Australia.

His wife of 34 years, Angelica, is there holding his hand as he calmly sips a cognac, as he reassures a nurse that he wants to go through with it even as he is told ‘ you can opt out at any time’. He then takes the barbiturate mixture of sodium pentobarbital and water. And waits to die. His head nods forward like any sleeping person and within 15 minutes Dr. John Elliott is dead. Granted his dying wish. And answering the question ‘whose life is it anyway?’

And yet what he has done is wrong according to the Federal Health Minister Tony Abbott. A man who forgets he is the Health Minister for all Australians and not just his fellow Catholics is vehemently opposed to voluntary euthanasia.

At the weekend he even resorted to scare tactics. Claiming that legalised euthanasia would put elderly people at risk of being ‘bumped off’. And this Government is so determined to tell you what you can and cannot do with your own life that they overturned the Northern Territory legislation – which was good legislation with several protection devises to stop people being ‘bumped off’ as Abbott put it.

And the Attorney General , Philip Ruddock, has even been trying to ban a book on euthanasia called The Peaceful Pill Handbook.

You know where I have stood on this issue for years having seen my mother starve to death on her bed. Literally a skeleton, rasping for breath, with no dignity or toilet privacy. She looked like a starving Biafran. And, as I have said, if she had been a dog and an RSPCA inspector had knocked at our door I would have been charged with cruelty to animals.

To Abbott and Ruddock and Howard and Andrews I say again: Get out of my life.

And I promise you… if my wife were ever in so much pain that only death would relieve it then I would help her go and face any legal action they could throw at me. Personally, I want to make sure I am of sound enough body and mind to kill myself before I am trapped by some politicians’ warped moral and religious prison.

Monday, January 29, 2007

©Copyright Derryn Hinch 2007