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24th April 2008
Opponents of Physician Assisted Dying (PAD) claim that it promotes a culture of death. It is a false claim, and here’s why.
- According to ABS data1, four Australians aged 70 and over kill themselves each week. Many authorities on suicide believe that the official statistics significantly understate the real rate. Professor Diego Do Leo, Director at the Australian Institute for Suicide Research at Griffith University, says that many cases are still under investigation by Coroners, many get an “open” verdict, some are misclassified as “road accidents”, and social stigma encourages suicides to be reported as death by another cause.
- The most common forms of suicide are violent and undignified, clear evidence of the suffering.
- While not all of these suicides will be due to a terminal illness (but conversely not all terminal suiciders are over 70) the figures show that intolerable suffering with no lawful, peaceful escape where even the best palliative care cannot help, creates a culture of suffering. This leads to precipitous action while the sufferer still has their ability to act.
- In the State of Oregon (USA) where PAD has been legal for ten years, ongoing statistics prove no “avalanche” of deaths. After ten years, around eighty Oregonians (population 3.5 million) seek and obtain life-ending medication under their Act each year. And one third of them never take the medication.
- This unambiguously demonstrates a clear need for PAD, yet restraint of those who receive assistance. In fact, simply having the medication available is itself good palliative care: it relieves the sense of hopelessness and inevitability of further intolerable suffering. It means that the sufferer need not act precipitously while they still can. It therefore avoids a culture of death by violent and lonely suicide.
Victorian, Steve Guest, who suffered intolerably from cancer of the oesophagus, said that having a lethal dose of barbiturate made available to him provided a sense of relief and calm that lifted a huge burden from his shoulders, helping his last weeks of life tremendously. His family firmly agrees.
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1 ABS catalogue number 3309.0.55.001 Suicide - Recent Trends 93 to 03.
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