Why This Government Urgently Needs to Pick Up Maryan Street’s Euthanasia Bill.

The answer to my question posed in the title is because self-determination of the manner and means of one's death is an individual’s basic right. But unfortunately politicians follow a dreadful pragmatism, rather than a principled view toward our freedom, so let me provide it.

In my round up of the 2014 election, I wrote:

The most important debate to be had over the next three years in the pursuit of individual liberty was Labour MP Maryan Street’s Dying with Dignity euthanasia bill. I am gutted that Maryan did not get back in last night as that means her bill is dead, with little likelihood the social conservatives in National will look at opening this essential debate. In a time when the Chief Coroner is trying to change the death certification process in order to catch out humane doctors over-prescribing pain medication to bring on early death in judged circumstances, this issue becomes urgent.

In this post and this post to Dr. Mark Peterson, Chair of the New Zealand Medical Association, I explained how the NZMA’s position against euthanasia is based upon a contradiction, or a conceit, rather, and as such, is an irresponsible, dangerous (for doctors and patients), ethical mess. That contradiction is NZMA opposing legal euthanasia, yet with that stance ‘justified’ by dint of the back-street provision they cite of it being ethical for doctors over-prescribing pain killers to keep pain at bay, even if to an extent that might hasten death, despite no threshold or certainty is provided as to what 'over-prescribe' or 'hasten' means. Incredibly on an official level it's the ‘we don’t need euthanasia legalised because it already unofficially occurs’ nonsense. This stance also draws the inference, repugnant to myself, that it's Dr. Peterson and his colleagues who know best and get to decide the circumstances of a death; that the decision over a dignified exit is not up to those dying.

Such a mealy mouthed wording, and professional arrogance, in a matter that concerns all of us at the most poignant part of our lives, dying, is as offensive as it is preposterous. Especially in light of the fact such over-prescription is set to be denied doctors by our Chief Coroner, Judge Neil MacLean, who wants to change the death certification process so that doctors doing precisely this are found out, presumably to face the full force of the law. This carries two cruel consequences: first, those humane mercy releases that do now occur under compassionate doctors in hospices and hospitals will stop; second, pain remediation regimes for the terminally ill will become more conservative, which only means one thing; more pain for the terminally ill.

Forget the ethical and philosophical issues here, this is intolerable and needs fixing by this government as their first item of business; and I repeat by the government, not by private members bill with that insane lottery known as the ballot, but by means of responsible government legislating an essential freedom that should by right be available to all, just as it is in many Western jurisdictions.

Dr Peterson never replied to my second email pointing out the consequences of the Chief Coroner’s current course, and I put it to him, here, that if the haughty NZMA were to poll its members, as their UK equivalent did, I’m sure they would find also their doctors would come to the same majority decision that such a basic freedom is up to we individuals of society, not the medical profession: at the very least, the NZMA should butt out. (And noting that the basic freedom of dying with dignity should never be up to a majority vote:  human rights don’t work like that, for they are inalienable.)

If I can’t convince this National government in this, then if the MPs care to take six lousy minutes of their time, perhaps 29 year old Brittany Maynard can. Brittany has been diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumour, and has moved to one of the five American states that allow assisted suicide so that she can die with dignity, in the arms of her husband and mother, on 1 November coming. There is nothing more important this government can do over the next three years, than pass legislation under which the terminally ill in New Zealand can have the same chance at dignity, and a death without suffering, moreover, death on their own terms; please, show some humanity.

"I can't tell you the amount of relief that it provides me to know that I don't have to die the way that I have been told that my brain tumour will take me on my own," Maynard said in the video.

"I will die upstairs in my bedroom that I share with my husband, with my mother and my husband by my side and pass peacefully with some music that I like in the background," she said.

Update 1:

Brittany Maynard, subject of the above Youtube clip, and who plans to take her life in three days time, has ticked the last item off her bucket list.

Brittany Maynard, the terminally ill woman who plans to take her own life, has checked the last item off her bucket list.

She visited the Grand Canyon last week.

"The Canyon was breathtakingly beautiful," she wrote on her website, "and I was able to enjoy my time with the two things I love most: my family and nature."

Photos showed her and her husband standing on the edge of the canyon, hugging and kissing.

But her cancer reasserted itself.

"Severe headaches and neck pain are never far away, and unfortunately the next morning I had my worst seizure thus far," she wrote on her website. "My speech was paralyzed for quite a while after I regained consciousness, and the feeling of fatigue continued for the rest of the day."

Maynard, 29, had been married a year when she discovered she had an aggressive brain cancer.

Last April, doctors said she had six months to live. She considered dying in a hospice, she wrote in an op-ed piece for CNN.

"I quickly decided that death with dignity was the best option for me and my family," she wrote for CNN. "We had to uproot from California to Oregon, because Oregon is one of only five states where death with dignity is authorized."

We need civilised euthanasia law in New Zealand, and given the reasoning in my post above, such legislation is urgent. I have twice tweeted a link to this post to Justice Minister Amy Adams, with no response. Next week I will be turning this into letter format and emailing the minister: if she plans to do nothing, then she at least owes it to us to explain why.


Final Update.

Brittany took the assisted dying - it's not suicide, outside her illness she wanted to live - option over the weekend. Her obituary reads she had 'died as she intended - peacefully in her bedroom, in the arms of her loved ones.'

Compare that to how Rosemary Mott died in New Zealand. Struggling for breath her head in a plastic bag, alone, her husband having to leave the house so he would not face criminal prosecution.

One death how it should be, peaceful, on respondents own terms, dying with her loved ones. The other barbaric in every respect of that word, given no civilised euthanasia law in New Zealand.

That comparison is the end of the argument. Why can I not get a single National MP to even acknowledge this post on the need for urgency here?