What is Euthenasia?

Euthanasia" comes from two Greek words which together mean "good death."

I will define passive euthanasia as "choosing not to provide or to deliberately withdraw life-sustaining equipment, surgery, or medications from a patient, when such action may result in his death." While active euthanasia is taking a life, passive euthanasia is permitting a death. It does not actually take the life, but allows the person to live or die without extraordinary medical efforts to keep him alive. (By "extraordinary" efforts I refer to medical equipment, surgeries, chemotherapy and other treatments beyond basic food, water, warmth, care and personal attention.

After such equipment and efforts are withdrawn, sometimes people live much longer than anticipated, and in rare cases even fully recover.)

Voluntary Euthenasia

Voluntary euthanasia is when the patient requests or agrees to euthanasia.

Involuntary Euthenasia

Involuntary euthanasia is when he does not, or cannot. With voluntary euthanasia, the request may be made by the patient at the moment, if he is conscious and coherent. Or, it may have been made by him in advance, either verbally or in the form of a Living Will. The latter normally states that if he is suffering and there is no reasonable hope for recovery, he desires that extraordinary medical care be withheld, and he be allowed to die as painlessly as possible.

Hence, euthanasia is not a simple or single issue, but actually involves four distinct situations: 1) voluntary active euthanasia, 2) involuntary active euthanasia, 3) voluntary passive euthanasia, 4) involuntary passive euthanasia. Each of these, in turn, may involve a number of variables from case to case.

Courtesy of Pastor Randy Alcorn

The Media report on increasing support for Euthenasia Law Reform in Tasmania

Survey backs euthanasia

25/05 Tim Martain, The Mercury | Ahead of tabling his Dying With Dignity Bill 2009 in State Parliament tomorrow, Greens leader Nick McKim released the findings of an EMRS poll that he commissioned.

The survey of 1000 Tasmanians was conducted by phone from May 4-7 and revealed more than three-quarters of Tasmanians were in favour of changing the law to allow voluntary euthanasia for the terminally ill.

It found 78 per cent of Tasmanians were "in favour of changing the law to allow doctors to meet the patient's wish to end their life" - up from 75 per cent last year. It found 15 per cent of those polled were against changing the law, 6 per cent were unsure and 1 per cent were unwilling to answer.

Tasmania Considers Voluntary Euthenasia

26/05 The Australian | A BILL allowing voluntary euthanasia in Tasmania has been introduced into the state's Parliament. It's the second attempt since 1998 to decriminalise and regulate voluntary euthanasia for terminally ill people in Tasmania.

Tasmanian Greens introduce euthanasia bill

21/06 Green Left Online | Tasmanian Greens leader Nick McKim introduced a private members bill on May 26. If passed, it will legalise euthanasia in the state. When introducing the “Dying with Dignity Bill” to the state parliament, McKim said: “It’s time for the law to reflect the values of compassion, respect for human dignity and freedom of choice which I believe are held by the overwhelming majority of Tasmanians.”

... Strong opposition to the bill has come from right-wing Christian groups. According a May 27 Mercury report, Right to Life Australia’s national president Marcel White said the law would make Tasmania “the final stop for death tourists looking to end their lives by unnatural means”.

Australian Christian Lobby Tasmanian director Nick Overton also condemned the proposed law.

Saltshakers are calling on all Tasmanians to send a submission / letter to this inquiry

Ask that euthanasia or 'dying with dignity' legislation NOT be passed

Please address the Terms of Reference - and read the Bill - if you can to ensure that the submission addresses the thrust of this Bill.

Click here for Terms of Reference.

Read the proposed Dying with Dignity Bill 2009.

Submissions close on 31 July.

The Committee will report by October 2, 2009. 

Please email your submission to: committees@parliament.tas.gov.au

Contacting MPs

Then please contact your MPs to ask them to vote against this Bill if or when it comes to the parliament for a vote - Tasmanians have 5 MPs in the House of Assembly and 1 in the Legislative Council.

Please also contact the Premier David Bartlett (ALP) and the Opposition Leader Will Hodgman (Lib) to ask them and their parties not to support Mr McKim's Bill.

Tasmanian MP contact details - click here.

Alternatively, phone the AEC on 12 2326 for MP details.

The Australian Christian Lobby are calling on Christians to be informed via the "Care not Killing" campaign on the Make A Stand website

“[T]he legalisation of voluntary euthanasia would pose a serious threat to the more vulnerable members of society and . . . the obligation of the state to protect all its members equally outweighs the individual’s freedom to choose voluntary euthanasia.”

This was the crystal clear finding of the Tasmanian House of Assembly Community Development Committee when it examined voluntary euthanasia back in 1998. The only change in the euthanasia debate since then is that palliative care is even better now.

Euthanasia endangers the lives of the most vulnerable, the people we should be striving hardest to protect. We already know that the “right to die” quickly becomes sociatal pressure on people who are seen as “unproductive burdens” to terminate themselves for the greater good.

So-called legislative safeguards are unable to prevent voluntary euthanasia from becoming involuntary. In the Netherlands, where voluntary euthanasia has been legal for a number of years, medical practitioners kill around 1000 patients per year without their consent.

The euthanasia debate has been run and lost in parliaments the world over including Tasmania. Tasmanian Greens leader Nick McKim, by introducing his private members bill - the Dying with Dignity Bill 2009 - ignores the very strong evidence against voluntary euthanasia.

In almost every country in the world, bringing about the death of another person is illegal, but this Bill permits a doctor to intentionally end the life of a terminally ill patient who requests ‘assistance’ to die. This turns on its head the enduring medical duty of a doctor to always help, and to never kill a patient.

The Bill is now being considered by the Joint Standing Committee on Community Development, which will report its findings to Parliament by 2 October. It is vital that as many people as possible send in a submission to the inquiry before the July 31 deadline.

Please Make a Stand right now and write a submission (no matter how short) urging the Committee to protect human life from becoming a disposable commodity when it is no longer deemed useful. The lives of Tasmania’s most vulnerable citizens – the elderly, the lonely, sick and distressed – are at stake.

Visit the Make A Stand website to follow this issue

Here are some points you might like to include in your submission - please use your own words.

• Safeguards do not stop voluntary euthanasia becoming involuntary. Doctors kill 1000 patients a year in the Netherlands without their consent.
  
  
• In the Northern Territory, when euthanasia was briefly legal in the mid 90s, several people euthanized weren't even suffering from a terminal illness.
  
  
• Society should be affirming the unique and intrinsic worth of all human beings, no matter what their physical, mental or emotional state might be.
  
  
• 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.
  
  
• Professional palliative care can relieve the suffering of the vast majority of patients experiencing a terminal illness.
  
  
• We should reject legislation that would send damaging messages to vulnerable sick, elderly and depressed people that their lives are not worth living.
  
  
• Euthanasia destroys the medical mandate of a doctor to do no harm. Patients can no longer be assured that their medical practitioner is always acting to preserve life.
  
  

10th June 2009 Christian Concern for the Nation - UK | The Coroners and Justice Bill is a complex piece of legislation which, amongst other things, is attempting to tighten up the Suicide Act 1961 to prevent the internet promotion of suicide. The government have been rightly concerned about the increasing level of 'copycat' suicides amongst young people (as illustrated in the recent Bridgend cluster) which are linked to websites glorifying or promoting suicide.

However, the pro-euthanasia lobby, which has repeatedly failed over many decades to change the law to allow assisted suicide or euthanasia in this country, has seen the Coroners and Justice Bill as a vehicle which they can hijack in order to slip in assisted suicide or euthanasia amendments unnoticed through the back door.

 We have recently seen a very high profile campaign built around 'hard cases' usually of people taking relatives to the Dignitas suicide facility in Switzerland in an attempt to try to raise public and parliamentary support for a change in the law.

... This amendment, if passed would remove a powerful deterrent to mercy killing, would encourage people with malicious motives to push the boundaries of law and would make a future Harold Shipman much more difficult to detect and convict. ...

UK: Controversial pro-euthanasia activist holds his first DIY suicide workshop in UK

May 2009 Christian Concern for the Nation CCFON | A controversial pro-euthanasia campaigner from Australia, dubbed Dr Death, brought the first of his suicide workshops to the UK. He is preparing to give talks on suicide methods at venues across the UK after being allowed into the country. He has a seven-day visa and with his partner Fiona Short intends to visit Brighton, Stroud and Glasgow to give his presentations.

 Dr Philip Nitschke, 61, from Darwin, is the founder of 'right-to-die' organisation Exit International. He was questioned at Heathrow Airport earlier but was allowed to enter the country. His long standing campaign for euthanasia to be legalised has already helped four patients to kill themselves when the practice was legal in the North Territory in 1996, before the law was overturned nine months later in March 1997 by the Federal Government

UK: New GMC guidelines threaten to dismiss doctors who ignore patients' wishes to die

March 2009 Christian Concern for the Nation | GPs have been warned they will be judged to be causing harm and struck off the medical register if they ignore the wishes of dying or comatose patients who have made ‘living wills’ which say that their treatment should be withdrawn and their lives ended.

The draft of the new guidelines is to be circulated by the General Medical Council (GMC) advising doctors how to handle decisions about end-of-life care, including resuscitation and how they should deal with requests and refusals for life-prolonging treatment. The guidelines for all 150,000 practising doctors in Britain cover all life-threatening conditions or permanent disabilities, including heart failure, brain damage and cancer. If approved, they will come into force this year.

The new guidelines underline a shift in the debate on how critically ill patients are treated. Current legal precedents suggest that doctors, not patients, have the final say over whether to provide life-extending treatment or nutrition. At present they can refuse to do so if they judge it to be futile or not in the ‘best interests’ of the patient, because of possible pain or suffering.

WHAT DOES THE BIBLE SAY?

Scriptural indications relevant to ethical issues typically fall into three categories—direct commands, examples and principles:

Direct Commands.

At first glance there seem to be direct commands against active euthanasia, including "Thou shalt not kill" (Ex. 20:13). However, it is unjustified killing (murder) which is always condemned, not killing per se. Indeed, killing is in some cases permitted, and in other cases directly commanded by God (Gen. 9:5,6; Deut. 16:18-21; 19:15-21).

People are killed in war, self-defense and capital punishment. All murder is wrong, but not all killing is murder. Hence, euthanasia is not wrong simply because it is killing. The whole issue is whether or not it is justified killing. The burden of proof is on those who would say "this particular killing of a human being is justified." If deliberate killing takes place outside the context of self-defense, the protection of others, a justifiable war or capital punishment of a convicted criminal, convincing biblical evidence must be ushered to prove such a killing is nonetheless right. Otherwise it must be viewed as murder, which is always morally wrong.

Examples.

The case of Abimelech, in Judges 9:50-57, might be viewed as a request for euthanasia. Yet Abimelech's motive for requesting death was not unbearable pain, but his oversized ego in wanting to be sure that his imminent death was not at the hands of a woman. Whether or not it qualifies as a request for a "mercy killing," the context does not tell us how God viewed it.

1 Samuel 31 gives us a clearer case—a request for euthanasia that is denied, then ends in suicide. A seriously wounded Saul asked his armor bearer to end his life primarily because he didn't want his enemies to have the satisfaction of torturing and killing him. This was a request for voluntary active euthanasia. Out of a respect for human life in general, or the king's life in particular, the armor bearer refused to kill Saul. Both committed suicide, a self-inflicted act of voluntary active euthanasia. (The armor bearer thus showed that he viewed taking the life of another as a greater sin than taking one's own life.)

We are not directly told how God viewed Saul's request to be killed. However, we are told that an Amalekite claimed to have killed Saul, to relieve him of his great agony (2 Sam. 1:9). Though his claim was false, this was unknown to those who heard him. He was professing to have committed an act of euthanasia. David's response was to exercise capital punishment on the Amalekite because (if he really did what he claimed) he was guilty of murder. This was despite the fact that his own heathen ethical system led the Amalekite to believe he should be commended rather than condemned. He expected to be rewarded for "mercifully" fulfilling (so he claimed) someone's request for assisted suicide or voluntary euthanasia.

Though we are not directly told God's view of the whole issue, it is obvious that active euthanasia was condemned by the Hebrew people. It could be argued that this case is unique because it involved an anointed king, whose life was perhaps put on a different par than that of an average person. Though it does not prove it, this incident does suggest a biblical position against active euthanasia.

Principles.

Ultimately, the issue of euthanasia must be decided biblically not examples nor even on direct commands alone, but on principles. Applying these principles can lead us to conclude whether an act of active or passive euthanasia fails to qualify as biblically justifiable, therefore falling into the class of murder which is categorically forbidden by God's law. The following principles are those which I believe are most relevant to the question of euthanasia. Each must be carefully weighed and satisfied in balance with the others.

Follow this link to READ THE REST OF THIS ARTICLE - including more on what the Bible says about Life