New Zealand groups opposing euthanasia have come together in a movement to fight legislation in parliament that could soon legalise assisted suicide. #DefendNZ launched on March 10 with a website and video trailer introducing Kiwis who could be eligible for assisted suicide under a bill that could be passed in the current parliamentary session.
#DefendNZhas excellent background resources for the case against all forms of euthanasia.
Not satisfied with our mounting suicide rate – at a 10-year high in the year to June 2018 – the right-to-die lobby want to encourage the terminally ill and seriously disabled to think along those lines. It’s only about “the right to choose,” they say, but that is not how many of those living with disabilities and illness see it.
Over the next few weeks #DefendNZ will feature some of them in five mini-documentaries exploring the impact the End of Life Choice Bill would have on their relationships with their doctors and caregivers, on how society views and values their lives, on the way they feel about themselves, and on their safety. Former MP, Hon. Dame Tariana Turia DNZM will also share her perspectives in these documentaries.
The bill is a project of Act Party MP David Seymour. Mr Seymour, the sole representative of his party in parliament, is a libertarian who has taken up the cause of right-to-die advocates The cause received a major boost from the 2015 case of Lecretia Seales, a lawyer with terminal brain cancer who appealed to the High Court claiming a right to assisted suicide under the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act.
The Court’s finding, that there was no such right in the law, led to a petition to parliament to change the law, and a commission of inquiry attracting over 21,000 submissions – 80 percent of which were opposed to any form of euthanasia.
Another public consultation on Seymour’s bill brought a record 37,000 submissions last year and a large number of people wanting to be heard in person. The Justice Select Committee is due to report back to parliament by the end of this month. A huge majority of submitters – 92 percent — again oppose the bill.
Of particular concern is a clause permitting assisted suicide for a person with “terminal illness or grievous and irremediable condition.” A “grievous and irremediable condition” is defined as “degenerative, unable to be successfully treated, and very severe,” which has raised fears among people with disabilities about how their lives may be viewed in future.
In response, Seymour has proposed eliminating this provision from his bill, to the dismay of the euthanasia lobby. However, it will help keep the Greens, who are concerned about voters suffering disabilty, on board. Other changes include eliminating advance directives.
He has also “made explicit” that mental health conditions and disability alone do not allow a person to have a doctor kill them. To get the support of the New Zealand First MPs he says the issue should be the subject of a binding referendum at the next election.
The country has a proud record of ignoring referenda results, but to keep its coalition partner NZ First happy, Labour might go along with this one. It has already committed itself to a binding referendum on personal cannabis use at the 2020 election.
Seymour also proposes incorporating an Access to Palliative Care Bill sponsored by National MP Maggie Barry, and an amendment to protect the conscience rights of pharmacists, nurses and medical practitioners.
With these changes he hopes to get enough support in parliament – and, with any luck, the voting populace — to get the principle of a right to assisted suicide enshrined in law – after several failed attempts over the last few decades.
Whether that would do anything for the government’s promised wellbeing budget outcomes remains to be seen.
This article by Carolyn Moynihan was originally published on MercatorNet under a Creative Commons licence. The original article can be found here.
The following article by Michael Cook, Editor of BioEdge, appeared in their 12 July 2018 newsletter and is republished here, with his permission.
Every year, about 1.5 million cases of euthanasia take place in the United States. Does this have a negative impact on healthcare workers? Sorry, about 1.5 million cases of cat and dog euthanasia take place. But the question is still relevant. Veterinarians, veterinary assistants and shelter workers experience great stress at having to put animals down.
The emotional connection between the work of human doctors and animal doctors is closer than you might think. Owners often react to a pet’s death with the intensity of grief which appears equivalent to the loss of a beloved relative.
So the moral stress which vets experience is relevant. Suicide amongst vets has been the topic of several studies. “Veterinarians are four times more likely than members of the general population and two times more likely than other health professionals to die by suicide,” according to a 2012 study in the journal of The American Association of Suicidology, Suicide and Life-Threatening Behaviour.
Why? Performing euthanasia day in, day out, also appears to make some vets less able to resist the temptation to commit suicide. The authors of the 2012 study found that “… all else being equal, veterinarians may be more likely than members of other professions to enact a lethal attempt when they desire suicide because their exposure to euthanasia has rendered them less fearful of death.”
Aren’t there lessons in these finding which are relevant to doctors who euthanize their patients? Sometimes doctors in Belgium or the Netherlands are quoted as saying that the death they helped was beautiful or peaceful. Could that be bravado masking their own nonchalance about human death?
How many times have we all heard the argument, “You wouldn’t let a dog suffer like this…” Its logic is that if the suffering of animals and humans is essentially the same, they both should be released from suffering in the same way. But if the animal-human parallel works for the patient, why not for the doctor? If we allow euthanasia, surely we can expect the same burn-out rates and the same suicide rates as veterinarians … at least the same. That should scare us all – especially the doctors who will be responsible.
NZ Christian Network is advising everyone who is concerned about euthanasia being legalised in New Zealand to make sure that they send a submission to the Justice Select Committee. This matter is now very time-sensitive: Submissions to the Select Committee have been extended and close at midnight Tuesday 6 March 2018.
This article comes from The Conversation, an independent source of news and views, sourced from the academic and research community and delivered directly to the public.
This UK ‘experiment’ is a wonderful example of bringing our communities together for the benefit of all. A timely lesson for western cultures.
What happened when we introduced four-year-olds to an old people’s home
It does wonders for the health and mood of the elderly.
Lying on the floor pretending to roar like a lion can do wonders for an elderly man’s well-being. That’s not a scientific fact, but it was one of the surprising and memorable moments we observed while making a television program which introduced a group of very young people with residents of a retirement village.
The two episodes of Old People’s Home for 4 Year Olds set out to explore the increasing isolation of older people within our communities.
The impact of young children and older people sharing daytime care facilities has already been shown to be generally positive. But this was the first time an experiment was undertaken within the UK to measure the impact of inter-generational interaction on the health and happiness of the older group.
Ten four-year-old children and 11 people in their late 80s were brought together for six weeks in a new nursery set within a retirement community in the city of Bristol. Before we started, the elderly participants were measured on their cognition, mood and depression, as well as physical abilities including balance and the ability to get up and walk (“Timed Up and Go”). These measurements were taken again at three weeks and once more at the end of the six-week programme.
The programme consisted of a timetable of activities in which the two generations were given time and space to engage physically and socially. It included games, occasionally requiring individuals to get down on and off the floor, walking outdoors, picnicking and participating in indoor activities using a variety of craft and art work. The final week also included an inter-generational sports day and a short theatrical production.
After three weeks, the halfway point, there were noticeable improvements in the residents’ measurement scores. Final measurements revealed significant improvements in the majority of metrics, with 80% percent of residents showed improvement in the “Timed Up and Go”. Grip strengths were up generally and activity tracker scores showed that the residents had become increasingly active over a 24-hour period. On sports day, one woman who could not recall the last time she ran, was seen sprinting off with her companion four-year-old in order to beat the competition.
At the start of the experiment, nearly all of the residents were identified as depressed, two of them severely. After six weeks, none of them was registered as depressed. They had completely changed their outlook on life and in their hope for the future. Even the most sceptical person within the group, who had been heard to say “I can’t really see it making any great difference to us”, admitted that the children had brought “great joy”.
Lifting spirits
This was not a scientific trial or a traditional academic research project. It was a social experiment involving a very small group of people. But the results showed marked changes in the residents’ physical ability and mood.
When you get very old you become less mobile, friends die, and you can’t get out to meet people. If you live in a care home, the only younger people you see every day are staff. That’s why depression is the epidemic of old age – and it’s important for us to present opportunities for them to meet young people.
Children are open minded. They love attention and take an interest in adults. At the same time, children learn quite mature skills from adults, so this inter-generational engagement is reciprocal.
You can’t cure arthritis completely, but you can increase confidence and, with the help and encouragement of the children, we saw our older folks doing things they never imagined they’d do again – jumping, dancing and rolling around on the floor.
As a consequence of our television experiment, significant developments are underway within the trust which took part in the program. Contact with the children and their families has been encouraged and continued. They are investigating additional ways to increase socialisation of the residents with surrounding communities. And plans are even in place to build a permanent nursery in one of the trust’s homes.
Many older adults live depressed lives in isolation with sadness, hopelessness, and negative feelings toward the self. This experiment has shown that, within a short timeframe – and where people share a similar vision of intergenerational mixing – it is possible to bring about significant enhancement in the well-being of older people.
To help New Zealanders understand what David Seymour’s ‘End of Life Choices Bill’ entails, and what it would mean in Practice, MAXIMINSTITUTE hosted two visiting UK experts at their recent MIC event.
Baroness Ilora Finlay is Professor of Palliative Medicine at Cardiff University. She has been President of the Medical Women’s Federation, President of the British Medical Association, President of the Royal Society of Medicine and is President of the Chartered Society for Physiotherapy. She also chaired the Association for Palliative Medicine of Great Britain and Ireland, and since 2014 has chaired the National Council for Palliative Care.
Robert Preston worked in Whitehall as a civil servant for 30 years. In that role he examined Lord Joffe’s Private Member’s Bill, “Assisted Dying for the Terminally Ill” and he is now Director of the think-tank, Living and Dying Well, which works to examine the objective evidence surrounding the controversial end-of-life debate and publishes research to help inform Parliament and the public.
Both came to be involved in the issue of assisted suicide and euthanasia through their involvement in the 2005 British Select Committee that conducted a comprehensive investigation of the practices of assisted dying around the world. Following the conclusion of that inquiry, both have continued as advocates of improved elder and palliative care, as well as working to oppose legalised assisted suicide and euthanasia.
Both presentations were highly informative, however, the Q&A segment was extremely illuminating. Below is the list of questions asked from the floor with the timestamp on the video.
1:25 Q: Who are you to tell someone who is in pain that they can’t do what they want? If it’s their life, shouldn’t they have the right to do what they want?
4:20 Q: Can palliative care really relieve all suffering? Aren’t there going to be people who still suffer even with the best care we can offer?
5:20 Q: How do the safeguards in David Seymour’s End of Life Choices Bill compare to the safeguards required by similar laws in The Netherlands, Oregon, Belgium etc.?
8:25 Q: Do you think there’s any chance your views on assisted suicide would shift if one of your own family members was ill, in agony, and wanted help to end their pain?
13:30 Q: Purely this is too important a question to trust to just 121 MPs in Parliament. Shouldn’t we settle the issue of euthanasia with a binding referendum so the people can decide?
16:00 Q: Isn’t opposition to euthanasia just driven by religious views? How do you think religion interacts or should interact with this subject?
16:50 Q: You talk about the Hippocratic Oath – “first do no harm.” Proponents of euthanasia have made legal arguments that suggest denying people access to legal assisted suicide means that we’re essentially forcing them to continue suffering, and in essence, doing harm to them. Also, they say that people who want to die on their own terms may choose to commit suicide before they lose capacity, effectively shortening the life they could have had if they were certain someone else could end their life for them later on. How do you respond to these arguments?
20:55 Q: You talk negatively about the rising numbers of people using euthanasia and assisted suicide in the Netherlands and Oregon respectively. Isn’t this just showing that legalising it is giving people options that they want? Is it necessarily a bad thing to see rising levels of euthanasia?
23:45 Q: It seems that a lot of this debate isn’t just about levels of pain, but it’s the idea that any level of suffering or loss of autonomy is something we should have the right to avoid. How do you address those sorts of concerns?
26:20 Q: In your experience in public debate around assisted suicide in the UK, what’s one argument that you have found really resonates with people?
30:35 Q: What about situations where someone is in agony because of their condition, but simply ceasing medical treatment won’t allow them to die? Isn’t there a case for assisted suicide then?
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