There are many times when it is very good advice not to believe what a politician tells you. And when a politician tries to tell you that he is offering you the ‘safest euthanasia bill in the world,’ then you know they are lying through their teeth. There is no such thing – it is an oxymoron. A bill to legalise the killing of people is never safe – nor can it be.
This is what we find with the new killing bill which has just been introduced in Victoria. The Voluntary Assisted Dying Bill 2017 is the misnamed pro-death bill. This is not about assisted dying – that is what is known as palliative care. This is about deliberately bumping people off.
The 126-page bill and the 41-page Explanatory Memorandum can be viewed here: http://www.legislation.vic.gov.au/domino/Web_Notes/LDMS/PubPDocs.nsf/ee665e366dcb6cb0ca256da400837f6b/d162e1f2fcc3f7c3ca2581a1007a8903!OpenDocument.
Every bill like this is said to be fully safe, but all these bills are like a slice of Swiss cheese: riddled with holes that a truck could drive through. In this case there are supposed to be numerous strict safeguards, but they are not worth the ink they are printed on. Consider just one very small portion of the bill.
Part 2—Criteria for access to voluntary assisted dying
9 Eligibility criteria for access to voluntary assisted dying
(d) the person must be diagnosed with a disease, illness or medical condition that—
(i) is incurable; and
(ii) is advanced, progressive and will cause death; and
(iii) is expected to cause death within weeks or months, not exceeding 12 months; and
(iv) is causing suffering to the person that cannot be relieved in a manner that the person considers tolerable.
-As I document in my 2016 book The Challenge of Euthanasia, cases considered to be incurable quite often are not.
-How exactly are we to understand terms like “advanced”?
-Up to a year to cause death? Wow, big trucks can be driven through that one as well.
-This will have to be an exceedingly subjective understanding of what is “tolerable”.
The whole bill is like this! It is so vague and ill-defined that once again, anything goes. The simple truth is, you cannot build safeguards into a killing bill. Safety is already absent from the very beginning. People will be put at risk, and the thing will just blow out as all the other similar bills have done.
Three past presidents of AMA Victoria — Dr Stephen Parnis, Dr Mark Yates and Dr Mukesh Haikerwal – have recently come out warning us of the dangers here. As Dr Parnis said: “The answer lies in better end-of-life care for the dying, not the provision of a lethal medication which cannot be made safe, despite the so-called safeguards.”
He continued:
Experience tells us, from other parts of the world, that when you are dying, you are frail, you are vulnerable. The proposed legislation is meant to have a number of safeguards to ensure that there is no coercion, that people do this of their own free will and that they get the best possible care. But having studied this carefully, it’s my opinion and that of my colleagues [Dr Haikerwal and Dr Yates] that there are too many places where this can be misused, where people cannot be offered the sort of assessment and care that they fully deserve. When it comes down to it, if you provide the right palliative care urgently, effectively and confidently, you don’t have to have the sorts of deaths that proponents of this legislation are suggesting you can’t avoid.
And a major concern is that the Andrews’ government will try to rush this bill through without proper debate and community consultation, especially while the homosexual marriage debate is now taking everyone’s attention. Sneaking it in under the cover of darkness would be par for the course for the Andrews’ Labor government.
Given that I am now interstate with a heap of speaking engagements, I cannot wade through the 200 pages of this bill to do it proper justice. So stay tuned – I hope to get to that in the near future. Suffice it to say this is a dangerous bill put out by a dangerous politician.
Once again ordinary Victorians are being held to ransom by the most radical secular left jurisdiction in the nation. Andrews and Co seem to never be satisfied with all the radical agendas they promote, be it open slather on abortion, wholesale assaults on our children through the fiendish “safe Schools” programs, or now this killing bill.
It is OK to say no to all these hardcore agendas. We don’t need them and we don’t want them.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-09-19/ama-presidents-pressure-victorian-mps-to-reject-euthanasia/8957800
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