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Dear JP,

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The question of life and death is a serious matter, not to be taken lightly. Hopefully, I will not be obliged to make a snap decision one day on whether to leap out the window of some multi-storied building on fire, like the Twin Towers in New York or stay in that building and burn to death.

Having had the time to think about it, I have decided that I would prefer to leap out the window as so many poor victims did, dropping all the way to the ground to my death. Why ?

Because I imagine that smashing to the ground from a great height must be faster and less painful than burning to death – the least horrifying of two atrocious options and the only option I would have the power to choose or reject of my own free will.

Those are the essential features of euthanasia. A “good death” is the conclusion of a deliberate, carefully reasoned decision by the person concerned, implemented with a maximum of humanity and as little pain, stress and suffering as modern science can allow, preferably in a warm, cosy environment, in the company of one’s loved ones if so desired.

That is what I should have liked for my granddaughter if, when all was said and done, she had calmly decided that she still wanted to end her life.

As I explained earlier, that was not the case. She finally managed to achieve what she wanted and what she wanted not only proved to be perfectly safe but brought her much peace and happiness.

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Banjo

I have to say that I find your latest reply very disturbing.

If, the day after your thirteen-year-old granddaughter was taken to hospital, she had again said she wanted to die but this time she asked for formal assistance to do so, would you have simply accepted her decision?
You have previously written that there should be no outside influence on the person’s decision so presumably you would want yourself, and everyone else, to remain silent while she made up her mind.

Then (assuming the law allowed it), if she chose to go ahead with killing herself, so long as she took the government-provided poison in a warm cosy environment, with loved ones such as yourself watching on, you would just stand there and watch her end her life – at 13 years old!

I find it almost impossible to believe that you would actually do so. Grandfathers have a responsibility to protect their grandchildren from harm, not to aid and abet their suicide.

And now even with the benefit of hindsight, with your granddaughter an adult in a happy relationship, you are saying it would have been okay with you if she had killed herself, under the above-stated conditions, all those years ago.

That is disturbing.

JP

Thanks for your response. You have not made an argument on any position, rather you have thrown in strawman/strawperson arguments.

I did not write, as you would like me to have written, that 'anyone, whether they are suffering in any respect or not, should be assisted to be killed upon their request’.
I did not write that because that is not what I am claiming. Strawman argument 1.

You wrote that 'You are saying that society has not only to accept suicide but that we must assist it to happen'. I am not. Strawman argument 2.

Please read the comprehensive Exit ACT submission to the ACT Select Committee on VAD (see link in my previous post), which I suggest you and everybody read, which makes the case for good VAD legislation that respects individual autonomy. There is at least one specific scenario that society might not need to be involved in.

Could you please not misrepresent my arguments.

My On Line opinion article focused on the ACT’s VAD Act. I argued that it is a better Act than that in the states but is ethically deficient as it does not respect individual autonomy.
I made the claim that ‘all people should be able to determine what is right for their own bodies’, with the important caveat that persons should have appropriate decision-making capacity.

In the Exit ACT submission, I discuss the criteria for decision making capacity as discussed in two journals. ‘Troubled teens' would not meet the criteria for VAD decision-making capacity; the criteria are designed to exclude such people.
I am not a psychiatrist, so cannot professionally assess anybody on their VAD decision making capacity.

I will leave you and potential future respondents with a question, related to VAD eligibility and individual autonomy.

Do you accept the claim that 'all people (with VAD decision making capacity) have the right to access VAD so that their quality of life is not reduced below what they consider to be an acceptable threshold’?

It is a yes or no answer.
If no, please make an argument in support of your position.

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Dear JP,

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You wrote :

1. « If, the day after your thirteen-year-old granddaughter was taken to hospital, she had again said she wanted to die but this time she asked for formal assistance to do so, would you have simply accepted her decision? »

No, she was in a terrible state of despair very shaken-up and incapable of rational thought. She needed time to rest and recover before making decisions on anything.

If you read my previous post carefully, JP, you will see that what I wrote was :

“That is what I should have liked for my granddaughter if, when all was said and done, she had calmly decided that she still wanted to end her life.”

By “when all was said and done”, I don’t mean, as you suggest, “the day after [she] was taken to hospital”. I mean long after she left the hospital and returned home from the psychiatric clinic where she remained under close surveillance for several weeks.
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2. « Grandfathers have a responsibility to protect their grandchildren from harm, not to aid and abet their suicide. »

That’s correct, JP. As soon as I discovered she had attempted to commit suicide, I called the ambulance and the fire brigade and they rushed her off to hospital.

I can’t imagine myself ever wanting to “aid and abet” anyone to commit suicide. Please be assured that I have the utmost respect for every human being’s right to both life and death. – neither more nor less.

As you are possibly aware, committing suicide, or attempting to do so, is no longer an offence anywhere in Australia. However, there are offences relating to assisting or counselling someone else to commit suicide in every state and territory.

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(Continued ...)

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(Continued ...)

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The point I was making was that, as I indicated in my post on page 2 of this thread, people wanting to commit suicide today “are left with no other choice but to have recourse, alone with their solitude and in a terrible state of despair, to the most barbaric, inhuman and expeditious methods in order to carry out their macabre enterprise”.

That is not what I should have liked for my granddaughter. If, when all was said and done, she calmly decided she still wanted to end her life, I should prefer it be a “good death”, i.e., by euthanasia as described in my previous post – not some cruel, painful, inhuman, degrading and terribly sad form of death.

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David

Could you explain to me what the essential difference is between, “No suffering person should be excluded from VAD. . . all people should be able to determine what is right for their own bodies” (your words) and “anyone, whether they are suffering in any respect or not, should be assisted to be killed upon their request” (my paraphrase of your words).

I cannot see any meaningful difference, so no, I do not accept your claim that I have misrepresented you.

I have read the Executive Summary of your Submission and that only confirms that I have not misrepresented you, “4. . . . all people have the right to access VAD” and “12. . . . (VAD) should not be denied to anyone”. Point 12 makes it very clear that includes children and as no age limitation is indicated it must be presumed it is intended to apply to children of any age.

You say that my writing, “You are saying that society has not only to accept suicide but that we must assist it to happen” also misrepresents you. Once VAD is legalised, yes, all of society is required to accept people killing themselves and yes taxpayer funding is used to pay for the poison and its provision, so we are all being made to assist with the suicides. Again, you have not been misrepresented.

You say, “that persons should have appropriate decision-making capacity” is an important caveat yet I do not recall you mentioning that in your OLO article or seeing it in the Executive Summary. So how important is it? (Please correct me if I missed seeing it in either place.) The only mention of it that I remember is in your comments to me.

Where in the body of your submission do you mention it and the criteria surrounding it? (No, I can’t read all 117 pages.) I’ll be interested to see why “troubled teens” do not qualify – how discriminatory can you get!

Regarding your last question, my answer is, no. Murder, including self-murder/suicide is simply wrong.