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Vulnerable sick and elderly at risk if WA euthanasia bill passed


Australian Christian Lobby
Friday, 21 May 2010, 9:50 (EST)
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The Australian Christian Lobby (ACL) today called on West Australian parliamentarians to reject the euthanasia bill being introduced into the Upper House by Greens’ MP Robin Chapple today, saying that, if passed, the legislation would put the lives of vulnerable sick and elderly West Australians at risk.

ACL West Australian Director Michelle Pearse said that if Mr Chapple’s private member’s bill succeeds the ‘right to die’ could quickly become the ‘duty to die’ under the new culture legalised euthanasia inevitably creates.

“Supposed safeguards for euthanasia legislation don’t work,” Mrs Pearse said.
“In Holland where euthanasia has been practiced since the 1990s, 1000 people per year are killed without their consent. The Dutch experience shows that so-called voluntary euthanasia quickly becomes non-voluntary euthanasia.”

Mrs Pearse said that in every Australian state where a parliamentary committee has closely examined euthanasia, the committee has rejected it on account of the way in which the laws to protect life are made inconsistent and dangerously subjective.

“The parliaments of three Australian states have rejected legalised euthanasia in recent times – Victoria in 2008, and Tasmania and South Australia in 2009. Now it is the turn of West Australians to rise up against the devaluing and cheapening of human life that so-called ‘voluntary’ euthanasia brings,” Mrs Pearse said.

“Euthanasia endangers the lives of the most vulnerable, the people we should be striving hardest to protect. As a society, we should be seeking to ease people’s pain through better palliative care, not promoting killing as an alternative to helping them.

“We should also be considering the message euthanasia laws send to the disabled and elderly. No society has the right to create an expectation that you should terminate your life if you would otherwise be an ‘inconvenience’ to society. This would be a dreadful situation.”

Mrs Pearse said that the West Australian Parliament should be affirming the unique and intrinsic worth of all human beings, no matter what their physical, mental or emotional state might be. She called on all parliamentarians to vote against the bill.


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