A109 Light Utility Helicopter flight with mayor Gisborne City from the air in November 2023.
A109 Light Utility Helicopter flight with mayor Gisborne City from the air in November 2023.
Opinion
Re: Plenty of doctors willing to assist, January 4 letter.
In her attempt to justify the role of doctors as agents of euthanasia, Alida van der Velde has to stoop to making several illogical comparisons. She tries to equate medical procedures like IVF with assisted dying, conveniently ignoring the factthat the first is to support life while the second is to destroy life.
There is no way that the killing of a doctor’s patients will ever become “acceptable practice and part of modern medicine” as she claims. The fact a very small percentage of doctors overseas do take part in a practice which is the complete opposite of everything they have been trained to do, proves nothing.
The Nazi euthanasia programme would not have taken place without complicit doctors and scientists. That did not make it right.
David Seymour and his supporters have tried to build a case for assisted dying in this country based squarely on scaremongering around the dying process. The palliative care specialists on both sides of the Seales case agreed that all but a tiny fraction of people can have their pain controlled with the medication currently available. For these patients, fully reversible palliative sedation is available. With the rapid progress in developing further palliative care treatments, it is likely that soon even this tiny percentage will have all of their pain successfully controlled at the end without needing even the temporary use of palliative sedation.
