Lecretia Searles Takes Her Fight to Die With Dignity to High Court | MIA: Our MPs.

I’ve written on lawyer Lecretia Searles before: she is dying from brain tumours, and though saying she would not necessarily avail herself of euthanasia, she does, however, sanely want that choice, and so in a legal first for New Zealand is taking her case before a judge at the High Court. Unfortunately her case will be particular to her circumstances and not precedent setting, but it may add more impetus for the growing demand to have legislated this basic individual right/choice for all of us. Best of luck Lecretia, let’s hope you get the humane hearing in court that doesn’t seem possible from our law-makers.

On being headed for the courts, the fight for euthanasia will generate plentiful publicity for – hint – a classical liberal party to wear for itself if it weren’t so gutless, Mr Seymour, and it means euthanasia truly becomes the terminally ill elephant in every ante-chamber of the Fortress of Legislation, sitting with a  gun or some such wretched, violent device, knowing it faces no choice other than to blow its brains against a cold concrete wall, or perform the lonely struggle for oxygen with its head in a plastic bag, because our political masters haughtily won't deign to leave aside the mundane everyday matters of their tax-paid careers, currently being entertained on something as irrelevant and unimportant as the Northland by-election and let us not forget, of course, flags – FFS – and grant us the rightful ownership of our lives and deaths.

Everything I said in my previous post stands, there’s little need for me to repeat myself, other than to note the RNZ audio interview with Lecretia on that link is worth a listen, and this one thing more, which is to say it’s a shame, no, disgusting, Lecretia has to spend the last of the time she has fighting for this right in the court system, when she has better things to do: this is a matter that wouldn’t need be in the courts if we had a representative legislature which philosophically understood the nature of rights in a free society, per my earlier post:

…the fickle path of a private members bill [or a court action] is not good enough for a matter so intrinsic to our lives as this is. Assisted dying legislation needs to come from responsible government: John Key has promised this, and his failure to keep to his word damns him. As with his intention to water down Maryan Street’s very good bill.

Although as bad as our MPs are, the Christian monsters of Family First, within an hour of Lecretia’s piece, Saturday, insensitively nailed to the cross of their sadistic brand of inhumanity, a press release commanding we must suffer for their fairy tale god of war and pestilence, and arrogantly – that word so often synonym for ignorantly - proceeded to tell the legal and policy advisor to the Law Commission, 41 year old  Lecretia Searles, she should not be allowed self-management of her own health issues:

Family First NZ says that the heartbreaking situation that Lecretia Seales faces should not be solved in the courtroom or by a change in law, but through the guarantee of the best palliative care that the country can offer her and others in a similar situation.

In this damnable press release, and I'm talking direct to you Bob McCoskrie, is yet another Arrogance of contemptible, arrogant, meddling fools. How dare you use a word like heartbreaking when you have no hearts at all. Just bugger off with your Stone Age faith teaching suffering for no purpose at all, and thinking it’s your right to have your nose in my face and my life, and in Lecretia’s affairs.

Palliative care simply does not work for all, not by any stroke and for some is unacceptable according to their rational value system – even if drug cocktails of palliative care were to mask pain in some type of vegetative or, for them, undignified state. But more importantly, no one has the right to judge another’s unhappiness as these Christian brutes would do here. Those who don’t agree with voluntary euthanasia are not being forced into anything against their volition, so have no right to be heard, and my life must not be handed by Parliament to the cruel cold hands of a dead God: Family First’s press release is the voice of the school yard bully, pulling the wings off Lecretia’s volition over how she wants to live, and how she wants to die, which is no business of theirs.

Footpiece:

[Note about my father, currently in palliative care, redacted, as last thing I would want to do is offend any of my (Christian) family.