Death & Dignity
Professor Julian Savulescu sits in front of the Legal and Social Issues Committee. He’s testifying as to the vagueness and redundancy of current medical law in the face of ones right to choose when and how they die.
With a doctorate in bioethics and decades of experience in palliative care, Professor Savulescu is certainly qualified, his arguments numerous and convincing. He tells stories of a woman who, after consultation with her husband, refused food, fluids, and further medical care as part of her decision to die on her own terms, noting also the disturbingly high suicide rate of elderly people faced with aged care and the like. “There is a basic liberty right that if one individual wishes to end their life and another individual wishes to help them, the state has no role in interfering in that exchange.”
It’s a divisive topic, playing out globally. Professor Savulescu outlines the Netherlands as a region in which the euthanasia of terminally ill children and the mentally unwell have been implemented, with Savulescu claiming “In each of these jurisdictions these are very carefully thought-through extensions and, in my view, entirely appropriate.”
Bernadette Cheesman is at the inquiry too, sitting a row away from me, listening to Savulescu intently.
She’s one of 700 people who have submitted thoughts, warnings, and recounts of personal trials to the inquiry. Speaking with me after the hearing, Miss Cheesman tells of her eldest uncle who suffered from a rare autoimmune disease, rendering him completely immobile and sense deprived; “the mind is still completely there but he was difficult to communicate with, and the doctor took my father aside and asked him, “when he next goes into heart failure what should be done? Should we just let him go? We don’t want to be a burden on the community do we?”
Miss Cheesman’s father did not give permission for his brother to be let go. Not like that, he wouldn’t have wanted it.
Miss Cheesman’s uncle passed three years later, but she continues to wonder, did he truly pass naturally, or was he let go against his will? “These doctors play god and they’re not. They’re human, they make mistakes…there is no way they should be making life and death decisions like these”, she says.
In her submission to the inquiry, Bernadette includes an open letter to her uncle, “the diabetes locked you into blindness and deafness, while the friedreich ataxia locked you further into your body” she wrote. Another family member had also been diagnosed with the same disease, he only lived to the age of 16, however doctors gave Bernadette’s uncle a life expectancy of 60 to 65 years.
“You were determined to prove the doctors right. You made it to 54. Did you decide to go early, or was the decision made for you?” she wrote.
Another speaker at the inquiry, Dr Ranjana Srivastava, reinforced Miss Cheesman’s sentiment. Doctors are often underprepared for the letting go of a life, with their communication skills in times of death being severely underdeveloped. Reading from her semi-autobiographical book ‘Dying for a Chat’, Dr Srivastava recounts a time when the continued decline of one of her patients highlighted how important ‘that conversation’ is when a patient just won’t get better.
“We are often blamed for not communicating with our patients, not explaining to people exactly what they are undergoing and what is happening. On the other hand, it is clearly evident that we have a culture that is death denying; that does not wish to necessarily engage with bad news, that does not want to hear it.”
