There's no need to go down this dangerous road

By LYNDA SCOTT*

Euthanasia is described in the dictionary as "the act or practice of killing someone who has an incurable disease or injury, or assisting that person to die".

This is a line we should not cross. My concern is that if we legalise one human taking another's life, where will it stop?

Before entering Parliament I was a nurse, then a doctor. As a geriatrician who worked with the terminally ill and disabled, I thought a great deal about the issue of euthanasia, especially when faced with pain and suffering. My work with these people brought me to several realisations.

Patients often choose the timing of their death. They will hold on until a special person arrives, or until an issue is resolved. It is only when the will to live goes that a person with a terminal illness finally dies.

Every doctor has patients whom they may have felt would have been better to have died one or two weeks earlier. There are other patients who pull through against incredible odds. A doctor's professional ethics state they should save life, not take life.

Terminally ill patients often have the means of taking their own lives because they have access to large doses of morphine, but they rarely do so. This is because every last minute is precious to some people, no matter how much they are suffering. No one but the individual can judge the quality of his or her own life.

You might believe when you are young, healthy and fit that you would not want to live if certain things happen to you. Yet when those things do happen people often cope far better than they believed possible. You cannot really know how you would respond to an accident or illness until it happens. This makes living wills dangerous unless they are regularly updated.

Passive euthanasia is available: people can state that they do not wish to be resuscitated, and those wishes are respected.

I always tried to ask all patients admitted under my care about this issue. It often surprised me that it was the most seriously unwell patients who wanted full resuscitation. Also, some patients whom everyone expected to die occasionally recover and live many more years.

It is hard on relatives to watch someone they love die a long, lingering death from a terminal illness but those carers do not have the right to decide when another should die just because of their own distress.

To ask someone to take your life puts a huge burden on that person - a burden they may not bear well if they act upon it.

Good palliative care is essential for the patient and to help families to cope with a terminally ill or dying member. The patient must also have good symptom control and pain management.

In effect, only two countries in the world have legalised euthanasia - Belgium and the Netherlands. In both countries the rules are complicated.

In Australia's Northern Territory, the 1995 Rights of the Terminally Ill Act was soon made ineffective by an amendment from the Commonwealth Government.

When euthanasia is legalised, it is difficult to control the potential for abuse. What happens to a society when we say it is okay to take the life of someone whom we believe can no longer make a contribution - for example, because he or she has Alzheimer's disease, or who is suffering but whose suffering we cannot quantify?

When human life is not held sacrosanct, we cross a line that could lead to some of the worst excesses we have seen in other parts of the world.

It is easy to find reasons to justify taking someone's life. But there are many ethical and moral reasons not to go down this dangerous road. Human life is precious and should remain so.

* Dr Lynda Scott is National MP for Kaikoura.