David Penberthy: Long-suffering deserve a death with dignity
WE can’t dismiss euthanasia — and those enduring a life of pain and suffering.
ANDREW Denton describes it as one of the most depressing books ever published. It is. It is depressing not so much because it documents unimaginable pain and suffering.
It is especially depressing because the worst of that pain and suffering is avoidable, and could be eliminated overnight if our legislators reflected what is clearly the majority will of the people.
Good books are described as unputdownable. TheDamage Done borders on being unpickupable. I would challenge anyone to get through a dozen pages without choking up, and putting the damned thing down to regain their composure.
It is an enormously powerful book in that it gives voice to people who are voiceless; compiling the harrowing final testimony of those who are now gone, killed by incurable diseases and plagued by unmanageable pain.
People such as Elisabeth Inglis, one of the almost 800 Aussies who die each year from motor neurone disease, a hideous, incurable condition which sufferer and AFL great Neale Daniher has labelled “The Beast”. MND methodically strips its victims of all their faculties. The ultimate cause of death is asphyxiation.
Elisabeth, who had lost the capacity for speech, scribbled a note from her hospital bed, a photo of which appears in the book. It reads: “It’s so much worse than I had imagined.”
Three things strike me about stories such as hers. They smash the idea of a peaceful exit, all that cliched bullshit about going quietly into the night.
The first is that people such as Elisabeth are wholly in possession of their mental faculties as their bodies turn on them.
The second is that they are denied the chance of a dignified final moment with their partner, their kids, and their loved ones, as their disease turns their final weeks and days into an unbearable horror show.
The third is that as their conditions worsen, they are all forced to lie there in hospital knowing the worst terror lies on the horizon, like some uniquely cruel pending execution.
I am writing about all this because of the renewed push to make voluntary euthanasia legal in this country, led by the group Go Gentle Australia, headed by Andrew Denton. The campaign is already advanced in two states, Victoria and SA, where draft laws are before the Parliament and a conscience vote will soon be held.
It seems the chances of success are now higher than they have ever been for a few reasons. To borrow a phrase from the republican movement, this latest euthanasia push is framed around what you could describe as a minimalist model.
Unlike some past euthanasia attempts — principally those associated with activist Dr Philip Nitschke — the safeguards included in this new approach are more stringent than anything which has gone before. To quote from the Go Gentle website: “To qualify, a person has to have to have an extreme medical condition which, in the assessment of two doctors, independent of each other, is clearly leading to their death and which can no longer be treated in a way that will meaningfully ease their suffering. Further, the request for voluntary euthanasia cannot be made by anyone but the patient, who must be deemed to be mentally competent.”
These are important safeguards. In the past, critics of euthanasia have argued it could be used by exhausted families to end the life of children or parents who have become an unmanageable burden, even though the person in question either does not wish to die or has no way of expressing a view either way.
Another feature of this campaign is that it is very sensibly avoiding the rattiness of past efforts to make euthanasia law, chiefly by avoiding any involvement with the aforementioned Dr Nitschke. My own hostility to euthanasia has been driven to a large degree by genuine alarm at the manner in which it was championed by the likes of Nitschke, who famously set fire to the federal legislation overturning the Northern Territory euthanasia laws during John Howard’s first term as PM.
It always struck me as odd that a movement which promised “dignity in death” could amass an arsenal of strategies — ranging from plastic “exit bags” or LPG gas canisters — as the only way to enter the hereafter.
Not only did the dignity seem thin on the ground, there was also a real looseness as to whether people who were suffering from manageable mental conditions should be eligible. It raised the prospect these deaths would effectively be state-sanctioned suicides for people who were enduring a harrowing but, hopefully, temporary mental illness.
Opponents would argue that whatever you call it, euthanasia is still a form of state-sanctioned suicide. They’re right, I suppose. It is. But having read The Damage Done, I now find myself wondering why these people stick so doggedly to the miserable alternative.
Even Palliative Care Australia concedes that there is a small percentage of chronic patients for whom palliative care simply does not work.
My views on this are swinging around now. It is a cautious model advocated by credible people. And if you don’t support it, logic would suggest you are effectively telling everyone whose last days are documented in this miserable bloody book that they had no choice but to die like that, and no right to choose another way.