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Television newsreader Tracey Spicer's confession of a failed attempt to smother her dying mother has added new fuel to renewed efforts to allow mercy killing in Australia.
"I sat next to mum's bed and ... glancing at my sister peacefully asleep on the couch (near their mother's hospital
bed), I knew the time had come," Spicer wrote.
"There was dark silence in the corridor. I picked up a pillow from the floor and walked over to the bed.
"Even at death's door, Mum looked a picture of health, her calm visage disguising the decay within.
"I knew it was the right thing to do."
Spicer's admission in yesterday's Daily Telegraph, backed by a stream of support from readers on the news.com.au site, followed controversy over the manslaughter convictions returned last week for the killing of a 71-year-old man by two women.
It also comes as Greens Leader Bob Brown prepares to introduce a bill to overturn legislation preventing the Northern Territory and the Australian Capital Territory from passing laws to allow euthanasia.
The federal legislation used constitutional powers to block mercy killing in the territories after the NT enacted its rights of the 1995 terminally ill act.
But with five Greens and two other Senators holding the balance of power in the Upper House Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, who is personally opposed to euthanasia, will be under strong pressure to allow a conscience debate on Brown's proposed bill.
Spicer, nationally known as a former Network Ten anchor and her present job with Sky News, wrote a moving account of her own experience as an example of what she described as the dilemma faced every day by thousands of Australians caring for a terminally ill family member or friend.
Spicer described the dismay of the diagnosis of pancreatic cancer and the prognosis that gave her mother Marcia seven months to live, and her mother's stoic acceptance of immense pain and suffering.
Marcia Spicer endured chemotherapy and the twice-daily injections of the blood-thinning drug Heparin that turned her stomach to a mosaic of purple-black bruises.
Her family hugged her through nights of delusion, confusion and nightmares brought on by morphine.
Spicer wrote that her mother and father, Paul, had always been strong supporters of the right to die with dignity and had pleaded with other family members to ensure they were not forced to continue living if they lost control of their faculties.
After failing to convince Marcia's oncologist to end her life by increasing doses of morphine, Tracey Spicer read To Die Like a Dog written by New Zealand nurse Lesley Martin after her conviction for the attempted murder of her dying mother.
But when the final moment came, pillow in hand, Spicer could not kill her mother. "As I looked down at the woman who gave me life, I knew I could not take hers," she wrote.
Her mother died the same night.
