A COVID paradox: No right to live with your own risks but free to choose death – Sydney Morning Herald

That is not my experience. In the last weeks of my fathers life, the aggressive cancer spread to his brain, rendering him unable to read. At that point, with the cancer eating away at his mind, life was no longer bearable for him. He would have liked to have ended it, as he had long contemplated and researched. The pain of not being able to give him quietus on his own terms has never left me. Others have had worse and more traumatic experiences, watching their loved ones choke on their own faeces. For those who value dignity and autonomy, the progress of many diseases is especially cruel.

People are cruel too, though, and often venal. Another senior medico friend, who slyly calls himself a fundamentalist Asclepiad tells me of an experience he had as a medical student, when a woman asked him to put her mother down. Philosophically minded, as his suggested pseudonym suggests, he reflects on how this insight into human callousness shaped him: I am conscious that although we have more shiny things and vaccines, we still have the same brains our ancestors had 100,000 years ago, which motivate our desires and preferences. I would bear that in mind when considering why the Ancient Greek Asclepiads expressly forbade euthanasia, knowing about mission creep.

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That is also the concern that former prime minister Paul Keating has expressed. If there are doctors prepared to bend the rules now, there will be doctors prepared to bend the rules under the new system. Beyond that, once termination of life is authorised the threshold is crossed. From that point it is much easier to liberalise the conditions governing the law. And liberalised they will be.

It is hard to escape that concern in reading Greenwichs revised 2021 bill. As much as I want to honour the memory of my father by supporting the right to die with dignity, it is easy to see how the conservative processes outlined could become desensitised routines. Much as the routines of lockdown have desensitised us to the shattering lives of individuals.

Australia needs to talk about death and the impulse to prolong life at all costs. We need to talk about the right to live and die with dignity. It is not an easy discussion. COVID makes it a bad time, but maybe the very best to have this conversation.

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A COVID paradox: No right to live with your own risks but free to choose death - Sydney Morning Herald