Aiding and abetting a suicide is anathema
Covid has given the opportunity to browse Letters to the Editor from earlier this year with fresh eyes. Meantime we have sacrificed our economy and personal security to save lives threatened by this pandemic. It is ironic therefore that we still knowingly kill about 30 unborn children every week.
Equally Bob Walker's letter (Give people right to make their own choice, February 15) is fraught with contradiction. He willingly admits that the current version of the End of Life Choice Act is against "what is written in the Bible". However, he mistakenly claims there is no legal choice to die with dignity in New Zealand. In fact, New Zealand has never had laws against death by personal choice; nor is it against the law to refuse further medical treatment, enact "do-not-resuscitate" requests and to turn off life support equipment.
Aiding and abetting suicide is, however, still illegal. What the current Act aims to do is allow state sanctioned killing of another person when that person requests to die and when certain conditions are met. One of those is that medical professionals must assume the responsibility of ending that patient's life. In his columns, Jay Kuten has dismissed this as simply "providing a prescription". He ignores that the Act demands that a medical professional is actively involved when the lethal dose is administered.
In the 1930s the Labour Party opposed state-sanctioned capital punishment for murder. That became law in 1941. In 1989, treason was also dropped as a capital offense. One of the compelling reasons for these changes was that, "if one person died as a result of being falsely convicted, then that was one person too many".