Barbara Sumner Burstyn: Morality can't change to suit the individual

Wanganui woman Lesley Martin killed her terminally ill mother. Convinced of her right to overdose and suffocate her parent she has written a book, To Die Like a Dog.

And now, because of her published confession, the police have said they will reopen their investigation into Joy Martin's death. Undeterred, Ms Martin is determined to face any legal action on behalf of every New Zealander who has ever made a promise to someone they love that they would help, every doctor who has ever helped and kept a secret, and every person who has watched a difficult death and wished it could be different.

But while Ms Martin's belief in her right to choose the time and means of her mother's death might be a popular one, she does not speak for every New Zealander. I have faced circumstances that closely resemble those described by Ms Martin and she certainly does not speak for me. I am just not convinced we have the right to end another person's life, however difficult we judge that person's dying experience to be.

But others are. Dubbed the "deathing counterculture" at Boston's World Conference on Assisted Dying last year, euthanasia has become the new crusade with its own high-security film festival, publications and associated media endorsements. It's not even called euthanasia any more but "assisted dying" or the "right to die" movement.

The theories are so far advanced that an organisation in Switzerland openly assists people to kill themselves. The group targets the mentally and terminally ill, declaring that it is the right of each person to decide if his or her life is unbearable.

But even in the most liberal societies controversy still surrounds euthanasia. In the Netherlands mercy killing was legalised in April but has become a divisive subject, in part because of manipulation by euthanasia supporters such as Australian death doctor Philip Nitschke. Using a Dutch-registered ship he intends to anchor offshore and to carry out mercy killings on board.

Meanwhile, Belgium, which enacted mercy killing laws in September, is struggling with the immediate flouting of its regulations by MS suffer Mario Verstraete. Verstraete was by no means in the last stages of the disease - a central requirement under the new law - when he arranged for his doctor to kill him.

Other MS sufferers in Belgium are reported as fearing the new law - and Verstraete's immediate contravention of it - will lower the bar to public acceptance of their illness and continued right to live.

This threat to the public's perception of the viability and liveability of life for people with illness, advanced age or disability is at the core of many arguments against euthanasia. And they are right.

With an ageing population, the transience of relationships and families and the increasing lack of accessible medical and support services, it would seem that legalising the removal of the infirm would solve a lot of problems.

Because - as Ms Martin and the rest of us who have cared for a dying relative have discovered - dying can be a slow, gruelling process. It doesn't happen during an episode of ER. It's not easy for a body to give up and, despite the ravages of age or disease, something mysterious fights on, shocking you with its resilience.

Dying, you discover, is neither efficient nor in many cases painless. But the dying person enters another place, an arena where the functions of normal life cease to matter.

As Ms Martin will know, the primary caregiver's own life is reduced to a tiny circle of people and place, to the extreme intimacy of a body condensed to its most basic functions, to sleep deprivation and the suspension of recognisable routine.

But our world does not function well when people remove themselves from the race of it. We're not set up for caring, especially of the dying, and who knows if Ms Martin's haste was more to do with her own exhaustion or even a simple lack of appropriate support than any real understanding of euthanasia.

So I'm sorry for Lesley Martin's loss. And for the trauma of her experience. But the very act of deciding who should live and who should die is not a prerogative. To claim it as such reveals Ms Martin's personal loss of meaning, her emptiness and a desperate need to impose order over the chaos of the arduous final days in which she participated.

Accompanying someone all the way requires enormous patience and a trust in the medical profession that pain can be eased with drugs. Above all, it requires an understanding that we are a higher form of being; that to die at your allotted hour is not, as Ms Martin suggests, to die like a dog. It is to die like a human being.

A dog is put down because it is a dog, because its journey is not a fully conscious one and because there would appear to be no value in the suffering of a dog.

But what if Joy Martin's difficult dying had other values to her? What if it was an intimate part of her personal mystery, her journey and resolution, something primal and outside of her reasoning? And what if her killing removed from her the fullness of that journey?

In the absence of any of us truly knowing, should we allow Ms Martin's determinist philosophy to infiltrate our world? Is shortening the dying process, and imposing the standards of the healthy, the answer? Or is it our beliefs around human function and meaning that must change?

As unfashionable as it may seem, we rely on a sense of morality that cannot be reduced or changed to suit individual circumstances. When Lesley Martin murdered her mother she stole her humanity and condemned her to, indeed, die like a dog.

Let's hope we follow Britain's lead, where the act of euthanasia carries a mandatory life sentence.

* Barbara Sumner Burstyn is an Auckland writer.