A MARCH for Life in Brisbane on August 28 aims to rally public opposition against euthanasia just days before Queensland’s parliament starts debating a Voluntary Assisted Dying Bill.
Cherish Life is organising the event as a final push to persuade Queensland MPs against supporting the Bill.
“This is a dangerous bill. There will be wrongful deaths,” Cherish Life’s Teeshan Johnson told a parliamentary inquiry hearing on voluntary assisted dying in Brisbane last week – one of seven public hearings before the controversial legislation is due to go before Queensland MPs to be debated and voted on in September
Euthanasia “normalised” suicide, she said, pointing to the jump in suicide rates in Victoria, the Netherlands and Oregon in the US after mercy killing was legalised.
The inquiry also heard the case against euthanasia from Dr David van Gend, a Toowoomba GP and for 15 years a senior lecturer in palliative medicine at the University of Queensland.
“… euthanasia will shatter the very cornerstone of law, which is the prohibition against intentional killing,” Dr van Gend said.
“It will corrupt the role of doctors by making us bringers of death.
“It will demoralise palliative care, as we have seen overseas.
Worst of all according to Dr van Gend, VAD will “usher in a new insidious oppression of the most vulnerable. It will see this not as a right to die but more as a duty to die.”
“The UK House of Lords said vulnerable people, the elderly, lonely, sick or distressed would feel pressure, whether real or imagined, to seek early death,” he said.
“Even Paul Keating said that it is fatuous to assert that patients will not feel pressure to nominate themselves for termination. That is the injustice upon which this bill should be rejected.”
Catholic Health Australia also lodged a parliamentary inquiry submission, as the largest grouping of non-government health and aged care services in Australia and provider of more than 15 per cent of all hospital and aged care beds in Queensland.
“In every health, aged care, and community facility, the people we care for and the people who provide care know our services will never take part in VAD,” the CHA submission said.
“Our mission is to always care, never abandon, and never kill.
“Consistent with this ethic of care, the Catholic health and aged sector will not provide, facilitate, or authorise anyone to support a person in our care to undertake VAD.”
CHA’s submission also warned that in countries where euthanasia is legal, eligibility criteria have expanded over time.
For instance in the Netherlands assisted suicide laws have been progressively widened to people with mental ill health, patients with dementia who have previously provided consent, and children over one year of age.
In Victoria, the first Australian jurisdiction to introduce VAD laws, eligibility is limited to people with a terminal illness.
By December last year 224 people had died and 405 people had been issued permits under the scheme and by May this year assisted dying advocates were already campaigning to broaden access.
“The chair of Victoria’s Voluntary Assisted Dying Review Board has also argued that people diagnosed with a terminal illness should be proactively informed that VAD is an option for their treatment,” the CHA submission said.
It urged Queensland MP’s to consider the risk of ‘mission creep’ when introducing the proposed VAD Bill.
“This is a genuine prospect when existing assisted suicide regimes have shifted the goalposts despite initially confining access to the terminally ill,” CHA’s submission said.
