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Why making voluntary assisted dying legal best respects both sides of this debate : Comments
By Andrew McGee, published 25/5/2020After almost three decades of refusing to agree to it, Australian parliaments are slowly beginning to warm to the idea of voluntary assisted dying (VAD).
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Just because a person may be considered to be dying, should they employ VAD, they are nevertheless deliberately killing themselves – they are committing suicide, even if it is just a day or eleven months before they would have otherwise died. The reluctance of supporters of VAD to use the appropriate English is, to my mind, telling.
The choice to use the euphemism, voluntary assisted dying, rather than the honest terminology of, voluntary assisted killing, indicates that there is a reluctance to face the hard truth of what is actually being done. If you as a supporter of VAD think it is a legitimate thing for people to be doing, then you should have the courage of your convictions and call a spade a spade – you support killing people, albeit at their own request and under particular circumstances.
Of course, those being killed in these situations, and their loved ones, probably prefer the softer sounding “assisted dying”, but again, as a matter of integrity, we should speak the truth. If people can’t handle the thought that they are committing suicide then they are not ready to be doing the act.
You make the point that some “experts” (what qualifies someone to be identified as an expert on this?) think we should have a ‘death is reasonably foreseeable’ clause, or that a person’s condition should be incurable, advanced, progressive and be one that will cause death, instead of the need for someone to be terminally ill.
This just goes to show how rather vague, subjective, and ultimately unenforceable any boundaries around assisted killing will prove to be. Once people get used to some killing and cases arise where people are just outside the boundary, they will see that the boundaries are not based upon any inviolable moral principles and so there will be continuous pressure to expand the boundaries. You would be well aware of this taking place in the Netherlands, Belgium and Canada.