The main issue about Euthanasia that its cheerleaders point blank refuse to engage in

By
Martyn Bradbury
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26
55

While it’s great to see so many Baby Boomer MPs calling for the right to kill their parents, the reality is that the ‘suffering from a grievous and irremediable medical condition’ part of the Euthanasia Bill creates a loophole you could drive a stretch limo hearse through.

Euthanasia cheerleaders keep painting this picture of ending the suffering of the terminally ill writhing in agony needlessly for 6 months.

That narrative is terribly misleading.

The law will allow assisted suicide for those who have been diagnosed with a terminal illness and have only 6 months to live AND those suffering from a ‘grievous and irremediable medical condition’ – THAT clause is not about the terminally ill being put out of their torturous misery – that clause allows for huge swathes of vulnerable to be pressured into suicide.

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We just watched representatives of the State lie, manipulate, threaten and use falsehoods to steal baby infants from Māori mothers. I have zero doubts that if passed, this legislation will be picked up by some cost cutting Wellington bureaucrat to suggest information campaigns for those NZers who have ‘grievous and irremediable medical conditions’, you know, the expensive ones.

IF this Bill was simply aimed at the terminally ill with 6 months to live, I could accept it because no one wants to see another human being suffer in pain when the inevitable is on the horizon, but that’s not what this bill is and anyone pretending it is, is a liar.

 

26 COMMENTS

  1. You do know that clause is very unlikely to make it to the final bill. The Greens want it tightened up, for one. In fact this is one of the few times I’ve heard really constructive debate, in Parliament.

  2. “That narrative is terribly misleading.”

    Martyn, I’m a big fan of yours but what I find misleading is your use of the word “killing”

    Both you and I know if someone is killed it is a criminal offence. This bill is never about killing but the right to choice. Almost like Israel’s right to choose what he says and Maria’s choice to support him. I choose to disagree with their message but my choice to a death without pain should be mine.

    The interesting message from the debate in parliament came from Chris Bishop, euthanasia is happening already, yet it’s a criminal offence as with the abortion law.

  3. For David Seymour, the ACT party, Treasury and those who administer the state, cost-cutting is one of the main drivers behind the euthanasia bill.
    For the rest of New Zealand there are other more problematic, but not unrelated issues.
    In days past, courage and compassion were our ways of dealing with pain, loss and disability and the value of human life was measured in a plane completely removed from that in which we measure the value of commodities based on their utility and capacity for sensual gratification.
    Neo-liberalism is inherently secular and concerned with the individual pursuit of happiness in the world. That leaves no place for courage or compassion, a lack which becomes most strikingly obvious in the conduct of modern war, modern policing and modern government generally.
    Yet regardless of what laws the New Zealand parliament may enact our doctors will not collaborate in euthanasia, and our people when in full possession of their faculties will not choose suicide.
    The bright red line that divides our people from the Realm of New Zealand will become ever brighter as the regime leads its own into a moral wilderness.

  4. What I suggest is that if someone wishes an assisted death then their estate becomes forfeit to Government. I have seen many people contemplate their death so as “not to be a bother” and family better off without them. I have also seen families hovering waiting for death to access estate while playing the “we don’t let our dogs suffer” line. If a person is suffering we are under an obligation as a society to ensure they are aided not removed. If opiates don’t alleviate suffering find a drug that does!

    • “If opiates don’t alleviate suffering find a drug that does!”

      Cue: big pharma. I’m sure they’ll have a drug for you lucy

      Question though: whats the point of existance while being so drugged to the eyeballs your not even aware if its day or night

      Thats not living

      Thats keeping someone alive just to prolong the inevitabl3

      Is that what you want? Ok, thats your right to choose that

      But please keep your damn drugs away from me

    • Lucy, my children know that I support assisted death/voluntary euthanasia; it has been a family conversation off and on for years.

      You are now saying, that if the time arrives when I tell them the time has come for me to sign off, that if they give me the support they have agreed to, then the govt should be the sole recipient of my estate ?

      Why ? This is nuts.

  5. Lucy – Some people enjoy being a bother – talk to a Southlander – or a Greek -or an Indian – about the great matriarchs of their families.

    Tyranny is a survival technique for some older women- American academics have written papers – and I daresay books – about it -inbetween scraping for research grants to write other tantalising frith-froth to enlighten us.

    Suggesting that assisted death estates be forfeited to the government is absurd, and illogical.

    What you don’t seem to realise, is that VE supporters, often have to work get their offspring onside. With me, it has been an ongoing relaxed conversation over several years, and you are wrong to assume that ve supporters are greedy ghouls waiting for death like the one’s who hover around you seem to be.

    That is not the way it works, Lucy.

    Rarely is any major life event as simple, or as soiled, as you are assuming, or implying or believe. In between your observing of odious behaviour extremes, perhaps you could try not to be so judgmental about people in whose shoes you are not walking.

    In the meantime, maybe tell the medicos to, “find a drug” that works. I wonder why they haven’t done that yet ?

    • Snow White: “Suggesting that assisted death estates be forfeited to the government is absurd, and illogical.”

      Indeed; bizarre. A suggestion based, it seems to me, on a misunderstanding of what Seymour’s Bill will actually allow.

      Assisted death must be freely chosen by the individual concerned: the choice requires informed consent. One’s family cannot do away with one; as the Bill is worded, that cannot happen.

      The debate over Seymour’s Bill reminds me very much of the disingenuousness and viciousness which characterised the debate over the Homosexual Law Reform Bill. Back then, opponents were convinced that the sky would fall. It didn’t, of course. Nor will it when Seymour’s Bill is passed into law.

  6. 5 days before my father in law died of metastized lung cancer he was relatively pain free then he went through the last 5 days in terrible pain that wouldn’t be relieved with morphine.
    The doctor in charge of his palliative care being a very strong Roman Catholic told us he wouldn’t increase pain relief to the stage that it would repress his breathing so he suffered badly. A pill (or needle) 5 days before would have meant he died in dignity and pain free.
    Legalise it.

    And get off the antibaby boomer BS. It’s baby boomers that are in the firing line for cancers more than any other generation at the moment due to age and longer exposure to chemicals and pollutants. It’s not our parents (most who have already gone) it ourselves that we want to be legally done away with when MR Cancer comes knocking with it’s friends Screaming Pain and Agony.

    My daughter and I have lived on the firing line all our lives having inherited an orphan genetic mutation that disables the genes that prevent tumour growth.
    Every year and often more frequently we are scanned, tested and sometimes put under the knife by a health system that has never failed us and that has worked tirelessly at some expense to prevent our early deaths.
    But when death comes knocking I want an option. And it’s not going to be like my Father in Law who had none.

  7. “If opiates don’t alleviate suffering find a drug that does!”

    Cue: Big Pharma. I’m sure they’ll have a drug they can peddle you

    Question: what would be the point?? What would be the point of keeping someone alive barely conscious, or unconconscious, doped to the gills with so many drugs they dont know if they’re Arthur or Martha??

    Thats not living. Thats a miserable half-alive existance which might satisfy some perverse sense of “morality”, but I dont understand how that benefits a person close to death

    Please enlighten us

    In the meantime Lucy, you go ahead and choose that option for yourself. Thats your right. Hope it works for you

    But keep those damned drugs away from me. I will go when a I choose, not when it suits the neo-moralists who suddenly want to have power over when & how I exit this life

  8. was chemically poisoned on my job while working in Canada and was treated for several years to be able to return to my home in NZ and 20yrs later at 75 yrs old as a baby boomer I face uncertainty as NZ does not treat anyone with the latent effects of chemical poisoning, so now technically i could be ruled as “uncurable in NZ’s inadequate medical system so I may fall through the cracks if this bill is passed to receive “assisted death as technically I cannot be treated to live any more.

    The people who dreamed up this “assisted dying bill” are not thinking it through as I have had to do, because they have merely said the bill is suited for all but I would not be considered uncurable if I returned to Canada because they have clinics to treat patients that have been chemically poisoned and NZ does not.

    So the ‘assisted death bill’ will give doctors the licence to kill because they have not been given neither the skills and regimen to save those of us that have been chemically poisoned.

    Sad people that vote for this bill.

  10. I have a very simple question.

    Who has the authority to say I that I cannot decide to say when I die?

    Death is inevitable. When and how it happens should be my choice.

    It is personal.

    Governments should butt out.

  11. As someone who saw an expensive private ‘nursing facility’ put his old man down like the dog he so often was by using the horrific “nil by mouth” solution, I have no doubt that any euthanasia bill will be abused by assorted human beings for a plethora of reasons.

    I’m sure that all the highly publicised cases of ‘right to die’ are not exclusively peopled by the self obsessed but it often seems that way.

    There are so many ways for a human to end her/his life without attracting attention. I simply cannot understand why this nonsense idea of state sanctioned killing has made it so far. (btw someone upthread attempts to contend that killing implies illegality when it does nothing of the sort. I suspect murder and/or manslaughter are the terms this person is trying to remember).

    There have been instances of quadriplegics creating the means and opportunity to off themselves although admittedly any assistant could have been found to be in breach of the law.

    A better fix for this issue would be making assisting a suicide legal. That would fix the problem without requiring the sort of state intervention which causes grave doubts among those of us familiar with the amoral corruption of some bureaucrats.

    I have witnessed friends and family burdened with painful and lingering deaths go thru the full gamut of mood swings where they want to end it at one time then later tell us they are determined to wring every last minute out of their lives. Going backwards and forwards – which statement is the correct one? Obviously both are right and both are wrong – as is the case so often when fools try to create order in the chaos that is human existence subjective reality cannot be honestly objectified because the cat can be in the box and not in the box simultaneously.

    Insisting that it is the human themself who must initiate their end to life right before the moment of death has to be the only even vaguely just way of a human legally ending his/her life and even then one would be concerned about gen X and Y offspring bullying an ill or non compos mentis boomer patient into ending it all.

    Note to Martyn – there just aren’t that many pre-boomer folks around anymore. The earliest boomers who cropped up are now 74, making them beginning to be the most targeted by this legislation. So sad when a popular meme goes redundant.

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