Tory Shepherd: Imagine the torture for doctors, banned from easing someone into death with dignity

Hardline anti-euthanasia and anti-abortion share the same cruel blindspots and tricky claims, writes Tory Shepherd.

As euthanasia debates simmer and rage all around the country, you have to wonder if those who are obstinately against them have watched someone they love die.

If they’ve watched a relative, a partner, a friend, be deprived of water and food at the end of their lives. As they die in Dettol-scented facilities, with hardworking and under-resourced strangers looking after their most intimate moments.

Victoria has assisted dying laws in place, and Western Australia’s have just come into force. The Tasmanian and South Australian parliaments passed legislation recently, and in both states it could be accessible by the end of next year. Some are fighting the ban on the Northern Territory’s ability to pass euthanasia laws (which the federal government forced on them after they legalised euthanasia in the ’90s).

Queensland, too, is in the process of debating them.

There have been, and still are, nuanced and complicated issues around euthanasia. Who should be eligible? What safeguards are needed? Where should it be available?

But those who are dead against it (sorry) seem oblivious to the flip side. To the suffering so many go through at the end of their lives. They focus on an imagined world where devilish doctors and inhumane families are just waiting to snatch a life away for nefarious reasons. Instead of the harsh reality for many.

Liz, and Bret Habermann, with a photograph of her son Rhys, who took his own life to due illness at the euthanasia vote vigil on the steps of Parliament House last month. Picture: Kelly Barnes

Imagine the torture for doctors, banned from easing someone into death with dignity. Trying to decide whether incrementally increasing a morphine dose – to the point of possible death – is the moral action, when it’s not the legal one. Families watching someone choosing to refuse food and water, because that’s their fastest way out of here.

A last-ditch argument from the anti-euthanasia lobby is that all Australians should have access to gold-standard palliative care.

Of course they should. Alongside the option to end their agony, not instead. Those pushing for better palliative care for everyone, if their hearts are in the right place, should be working even harder as voluntary-assisted-dying laws become a reality. Their moral obligation should be to keep arguing for those services in the hope it may reduce the numbers of those in too much pain to go on.

There’s a similar reluctance among anti-abortion activists to think about the world they are wishing for. A wilful blindness to the pain they would willingly cause. It’s a fervent and cruel ideology that would see girls giving birth to a rapist’s baby, women forced to carry a doomed foetus to term, entire lives up-ended and psychological scars etched on someone in the fight for a cluster of cells. These are the outcomes the pro-lifers don’t want to talk about.

Senator Amanda Stoker at an anti-abortion rally outside QLD State Parliament, along with George Christensen. Picture: Lyndon Mechielsen

In 2019, former prime minister Tony Abbott declared a NSW decriminalisation bill to be “abortion on demand”, while his deputy Barnaby Joyce said it was “the slavery debate of our time” because it would have rendered his son “subhuman”. These incendiary comments slip out so easily, with zero consideration of what a world looks like where women are always forced to carry babies, which they don’t want, to term.

One of the most dim and grim arguments being put forward at the moment is by Queensland backbencher George Christensen. His Children Born Alive Protection bill is an attempt to force doctors to resuscitate aborted children born with a heartbeat – even if that is a “fruitless exercise”, he said.

Yes, that is a tricky sentence to unpack. Because Mr Christensen is being deliberately tricky. There are some extremely rare, and traumatic, cases where a medical abortion followed by induced labour can mean a baby sometimes has a heartbeat for a short time after delivery. In these cases they have no chance of survival due to severe medical conditions.

Anti-abortion activists in Adelaide earlier this year. Picture: Mike Burton

There are also some circumstances where it helps the mother to hold the baby, a baby sure to die, to say goodbye. What unimaginable heartbreak. And imagine wanting to compound that by forcing doctors to keep, hopelessly, resuscitating. Again, there’s no consideration of what that would look like. Doctors forced to intervene. Imagine what that would be like for everyone in the room.

(It’s consistent with Mr Christensen’s generally inconsistencies that he is so avidly pro-life, yet seemingly flirts with being anti-vax. He says he’s not an anti-vaxxer, he’s just hesitant about Covid-19 vaccines – as he told an anti-vaxxer protest he attended in May.)

I’m sure the hardliners believe they’re doing the right thing – by their conscience, or their gods, or their politics.

But by closing their minds off to the consequences of what they’re pushing for, those who declare themselves pro-life keep showing themselves to be, instead, pro suffering.