Darwin's Law Must Go
by Paul Gray, Herald Sun, January 8, 1997
Two dead - how many to go? That is the next big question to be asked in Australia’s "right to die" debate, after the nation’s second legal euthanasia death in the Northern Territory last week.
As we move into 1997, euthanasia supporters are fearful this may prove to be the year when hopes are dashed for cancer sufferers wanting to use the territory’s radical mercy killing law to end their lives, if the Senate votes to kill the NT law.
This political context lends extra sadness to the death of Janet Mills.
As her final letter urging MPs not to support Mr Andrews’ Bill makes clear, Mrs Mills passionately believed in the rightness of the euthanasia cause.
Nevertheless, MPs are unlikely to be swayed by Mrs Mills’ letter, in the light of other complex issues that have emerged in the course of the past few months’ debate. At the core of these issues lies the "slippery slope" argument. Euthanasia opponents have persistently claimed it is impossible in practice to make mercy killing legislation that will adequately protect vulnerable sick people from being killed.
Euthanasia supporters have countered that argument by claiming that the Northern Territory’s legislation does contain adequate - indeed, more than adequate - safeguards.
However, what no one can convincingly argue is that doctors and legislators will never in future decide to go beyond the Northern Territory legislation, and extend the principle of legal euthanasia to include non-voluntary cases.
The danger of that happening is a danger that must be faced now.
The link between voluntary euthanasia and non-voluntary euthanasia lies at the heart of concerns over legalized mercy killing. Historically, the link is well-established.
In ancient Greece, it was a common practice among the Spartans to leave sickly babies out on hilltops to die. Other ancient cultures also approved widespread euthanasia of the elderly.
In more modern times, the link has also been seen in Nazi Germany. There, "euthanasia committees" were notorious for their work in seeking out groups of defective, sick and "racially impure" people for extermination.
Even in the more compassionate contemporary Netherlands - before Darwin, the most liberal pro-euthanasia society in the world - the link between voluntary and involuntary euthanasia is increasingly of concern.
It has already been widely noted that the 1991 Remmelink Report found 1000 cases of involuntary euthanasia in a single year, after the widespread adoption of practices designed to facilitate voluntary euthanasia.
What has not been so widely noted is the revelation last October by Netherlands Ministry of Health official Johanna Kits Nieuwenkamp that perhaps 100 cases of these 1000 in fact breached the Netherlands’ own euthanasia guidelines.
'The link with involuntary euthanasia is increasingly of concern'
What is at stake here is not whether Australian doctors are already effectively practising euthanasia on a widespread basis, as euthanasia supporters claim.
The real issue is, where will "progressive" medical opinion progress to, once the principle of medically assisted suicide is allowed to stand in Australian law? We have already had bioethicist and euthanasia supporter Professor Peter Singer arguing for the morality of killing severely defective newborns. When he put this forward in 1995, some people dismissed it as the bizarre ranting of a single academic.
Rhonda Galbally, chief executive officer of the Victorian Health Promotion Foundation, and a woman who was disabled by childhood polio, was not so sure. As she commented at the time in the Herald Sun: "My concern with Peter Singer’s logic comes from not being entirely sure where he is planning to stop."
In the light of history - and now the legal mercy killings of Janet Mills and Bob Dent in Darwin - perhaps Prof. Singer’s alternative morality is not so remote from us after all.
Sadly, as time goes on the euthanasia debate is proving it is simply not possible to isolate the issue of a suffering patient’s rights from broader debates about social engineering and the killing off of "defective" humans.
This may be a bitter pill for genuine euthanasia seekers to swallow. But the truth is, reality may prove even harder on future generations of the weak and vulnerable.
That’s if MPs today choose to approve killing as a legitimate answer to medical problems - which they will, if they don’t overturn Darwin’s law.