THE euthanasia Private Members Bill introduced into WA Parliament’s Upper House by Greens MP Robin Chapple on 21 May will put the lives of vulnerable sick and elderly West Australians at risk, the Australian Christian Lobby (ACL) said.
The Bill would allow any terminally ill West Australian over the age of 21 of sound mind and able to communicate his or her intentions to ask a doctor to help them end their life. The request must be witnessed by two independent people and assessed by two doctors.
Mr Chapple told the ABC that a draft version of the legislation has been well received by MPs and he hopes the Government will allow it to be debated soon. WA Premier Colin Barnett has said that he will grant Liberal MPs a conscience vote on the Bill, but does not think it will succeed.
Calling on WA parliamentarians to reject the euthanasia Bill, ACL West Australian director Michelle Pearse said that if Mr Chapple’s private member’s Bill succeeds, the ‘right to die’ could quickly become the ‘duty to die’ under the new culture legalised euthanasia inevitably creates.
“Supposed safeguards for euthanasia legislation don’t work,” Mrs Pearse said.
“In Holland where euthanasia has been practiced since the 1990s, 1000 people a year are killed without their consent. The Dutch experience shows that socalled voluntary euthanasia quickly becomes non-voluntary euthanasia.”
Mrs Pearse said that in every Australian state where a parliamentary committee has closely examined euthanasia, the committee has rejected it on account of the way in which the laws to protect life are made inconsistent and dangerously subjective.
The parliaments of three Australian states have rejected legalised euthanasia in recent times – Victoria in 2008, and Tasmania and South Australia in 2009.
It is now time, she said, for West Australians to “rise up against the devaluing and cheapening of human life that so-called ‘voluntary’ euthanasia brings”.
“Euthanasia endangers the lives of the most vulnerable, the people we should be striving hardest to protect. As a society, we should be seeking to ease people’s pain through better palliative care, not promoting killing as an alternative to helping them,” she said. “We should also be considering the message euthanasia laws send to the disabled and elderly. No society has the right to create an expectation that you should terminate your life if you would otherwise be an ‘inconvenience’ to society. This would be a dreadful situation.”
Mrs Pearse said that the West Australian Parliament should be affirming the unique and intrinsic worth of all human beings, no matter what their physical, mental or emotional state might be. She called on all parliamentarians to vote against the Bill.