Rev Dr Joe Parkinson: SA – a state of illusions

As a euthanasia bill moves stealthily through South Australia’s Parliament, Perth bioethicist and moral theologian Rev Dr Joseph Parkinson assesses whether society really needs such a bill

In Don Dunstan’s time, the State of South Australia prided itself on blazing a trail in social and cultural progress, and nothing seems to change in South Australia.
SA State Premier in the 1970s, Dunstan was famous for reducing South Australia’s crime statistics by the simple expedience of de-criminalising behaviours that proved too difficult to enforce by law.
In one fell swoop he reduced the workload on police and created the illusion of a safer society merely by having Parliament arbitrarily (and somewhat cynically) redefine the boundaries between acceptable and unacceptable behaviour.
While this proves that what the law considers acceptable can be changed by political fiat, it in no way affects whether a behaviour is ethically or morally good or bad.   That depends on the nature of the behaviour in itself.
South Australia’s Criminal Law Consolidation (Medical Defences – End of Life Arrangements) Amendment Bill 2011 is deceptively simple in both title and content.
It proposes to create new legal defences against one person intentionally killing another, a behaviour which up to now has always been considered unacceptable.
The Bill offers no rationale to justify such a radical social change: the people of South Australia are asked simply to accept that what has until now been unreasonable is henceforth to be considered reasonable, and therefore a defence against criminal charges, on the rather flimsy grounds that “Parliament intends that conduct bringing about the end of a person’s life is a reasonable response to such suffering in exceptional circumstances” [S13 (B) 5].
Like most other attempts to legalise euthanasia, this Bill places all of the onus on the medical profession, which until now has claimed for itself the ethical high ground.
Doctors have long prided themselves on the fact that their profession is sworn to heal and to help, and never to end a patient’s life deliberately even if the patient requests it.
But this Bill would allow a doctor to help a patient to end his or her own life by creating a defence against a charge of ‘assisting suicide’, even in the absence of any clear request from the patient: an ‘implied’ request for help is sufficient.
Since they place such trust in the legislative process, one wonders how that State’s politicians can possibly approve so nebulous a defence.  
In all likelihood, it will come down to lawyers and judges to decide what does or does not constitute an ‘implied request’, which rather defeats the Bill’s intention to bring clarity to a very difficult medical and ethical question.
One also wonders why only doctors are afforded this legal protection. Why not parliamentarians? We elect these people to make our laws, why not trust them to apply the law as well? If this is an absurd proposition when referring to parliamentarians, why is it not absurd when referring to doctors?
Perhaps most concerning of all is the condition that both euthanasia and assisted suicide are acceptable if the patient forms the view that his or her life has become ‘intolerable’.
Failure to distinguish between an ‘intolerable pain’ and an ‘intolerable life’ serves only to cloud the real issue.
Life may be difficult because of intolerable pain, and indeed a person might legitimately prefer to die rather than continue living in great pain, but a more reasonable response of a civilised society would be to spend every effort trying to kill the pain, not to kill the patient.
And so the Bill’s focus falls not on what the medical profession can already achieve by excellent palliative care, nor on what medical science might reasonably be expected to achieve if more resources are given to research.
It falls on an activity which, until now, the medical profession has steadfastly refused to accept as legitimate medical practice.
True, the Bill allows that palliative care may not be able to relieve a person’s suffering to a level acceptable to the person, but that only demonstrates its own internal contradiction: the Bill commits an entire State to accept by law an action whose lawfulness depends entirely on the arbitrary decision of a single person.
I can’t think of any other instance where this applies.
Failure to distinguish between ‘pain’ (which can be quantified to some degree) and ‘suffering’ (a much broader concept) only serves to further obfuscate what the Bill sets out to clarify.
This latest attempt at ‘social engineering by law’ entirely fails to recognise that ultimately the ability of our legal system to bind us to avoid certain behaviours rests not on the preferences of this or that individual, even if that individual is an elected member of Parliament, nor even on the cumulative preferences of everyone in that society.
It rests on moral and ethical standards which express the absolute dignity of every individual person in every society, absolute respect for which is an essential requirement for mutual human flourishing.
Christians may be more used to thinking and talking about this dignity in terms of ‘being created in God’s image and likeness’, but in our Catholic tradition we also hold that this truth is evident to any person who tries to think objectively about what it means to live in human society, and who sets about creating the conditions best adapted to enable that to happen.
Whether by legislation or otherwise, we trade off this dignity at our peril.