GIVING the likes of Philip Nitschke licence to kill could create all sorts of horror for the lonely, scared, helpless and impressionable.
When my mother was just days from dying of cancer, I finally agreed to ask a doctor for help so she could kill herself.
Few people could have been more in favour of euthanasia than was I.
My only regret back then was that mum's brave attempt failed, and she took more than another week to die
Decades later, I've changed my mind completely. Legalised euthanasia now horrifies me, and not just because I learned much in mum's last days.
In fact, what most influenced me far more has been -- ironically -- Philip Nitschke, founder of Exit International.
It's Australia's most famous lobbyist for euthanasia who has best shown me how dangerous it can be and what evil might be unleashed in legalising it.
I saw how he started by helping people to die who were not in pain or dying. I saw him move on to helping people to die who were not even sick.
And on Monday I saw him boast on the ABC's Australian Story how he'd now helped two women to kill a man so raddled with Alzheimer's that he literally did not know what day it was.
Here we see the slippery slide that is inevitable when you remove the taboo against murder and suicide. What then stops anyone from killing themselves? Or, soon, from killing others?
Let me trace, body by body, Nitschke's own slide, from the people he helped to die in 1996, when the Northern Territory briefly had laws permitting euthanasia.
Nitschke was the doctor of seven people at that time who formally applied for permission to kill themselves.
From the publicity then, you'd have thought they were in agony or just weeks from death. But when many months later I read Nitschke's account of these seven cases, in an article he co-wrote for The Lancet medical journal, the truth turned out to be very different.
Just two of Nitschke's dead patients had been married, and the loneliness of most of the rest was tragically obvious. Did these people need poison, or love?
Take Nitschke's first patient, Martha Alfonso-Bowes, who committed suicide in 1995, before the NT Act became law.
She'd joined Nitschke's campaign for the NT laws, announcing she had bowel cancer and "there is no hope for me now". In her suicide note, she repeated: "I have decided to end my life because I am terminally ill from cancer. I have maybe a few months to live".
Not once did Nitschke, who appeared with her on 60 Minutes and elsewhere, publicly correct her and reveal she was not terminally ill, nor even in pain.
Yet after her death, and in The Lancet, Nitschke conceded Alfonso-Bowes knew surgery could actually cure her, and her "prognosis was good".
So what might really have made her despair of life? It turned out Alfonso-Bowes was 68 and divorced, and her daughter had died quite young. Nitschke said he'd only once seen her upset, when she talked about her estrangement from her loved son.
In fact, none of Nitschke's seven "patients" had severe pain, and a co-author of his Lancet piece, palliative care expert Professor David Kissane, concluded some just needed better medical and psychiatric care.
Warned Kissane: "It is evident that the regulations did not serve as an effective safeguard to protect the vulnerable." The lonely and scared were most likely to kill themselves. Or to feel obliged to.
I should add that Nitschke denies having given Alfonso-Bowes the tablets she swallowed to kill herself, and claims he tried to talk her out of suicide.
Even so, I thought his career was finished. How could this country think the lonely deserved death rather than care? How could it tolerate a doctor who seemed unsure of the difference?
But Nitschke thrived. And his cases became even more alarming. In 1997, he was filmed by 60 Minutes telling patient Peter Wiese he was terminally ill and "there is nothing that can be done", before saying a plastic bag over his head could kill him. Other doctors told 60 Minutes Wiese was not dying.
In 2002, Nancy Crick killed herself with a dose of the Nembutal that Nitschke says he "promotes". Nitschke had been her doctor, publicised her case, told her how to kill herself and helped arrange for her to die, surrounded by 21 euthanasia activists -- which may well have made her feel obliged to kill herself.
Only after an autopsy did Crick's son discover his mother had no trace left of cancer -- a fact of which he said his mother "was not aware".
Nitschke was unrepentant: "It is irrelevant because she either had bowel cancer or the consequences of bowel cancer, and the quality of her life was such that she thought death was preferable." But did she kill herself in the false belief she was dying? And was Nitschke too quick to facilitate a kill, rather than a cure?
But by now Nitschke was on such a slide, he didn't register he'd crossed another line by helping Lisette Nigot to kill herself, too.
Nigot -- yet another single woman, like most euthanasia victims -- appeared with Nitschke in Mademoiselle and the Doctor, a documentary about her decision to kill herself. This time no one even pretended Nitschke's "patient" was dying or in physical pain.
Although 79, this retired French-born professor was in good health, and said she simply saw no reason to continue living. And so she took poison in her Perth flat, leaving a suicide note hailing Nitschke as her inspiration.
Euthanasia was now being applied not to the dying, or even sick, but to the healthy. And soon yet another line was crossed, and Nitschke supporters faced their first charge of murder.
Mademoiselle and the Doctor also featured a cameo appearance of Caren Jenning, a former schoolteacher who said she was in remission from cancer but was prepared to kill herself "when the time comes there's no one here to look after me".
She was a Nitschke devotee, and one of his organisers. She was also, as she admitted, a "compulsive caregiver with a tendency to interfere", and what she interfered in was the life of a friend, Graeme Wylie, a former Qantas pilot.
Wylie had such severe Alzheimer's that by January 2005 a specialist found he couldn't tell the date, day, month or season, or even whether he was on the ground floor of the building, even though he could see out of the window.
Jenning and Wylie's partner, "bush regenerator" Shirley Justins, eventually decided that what Wylie really wanted was to kill himself -- a wish that neither of his daughters say they heard him express. And a year after doctors concluded Wylie was already too confused to know his mind, Jenning and Justins asked Nitschke for help.
S AID Justins to Australian Story: "Dr Nitschke said the 'Mexican Option' would be the best."
Nitschke said he'd meant that Wylie, whom he'd examined, should go to Mexico for Nembutal, even though Justins admitted "it wasn't possible for (Wylie) to have a conversation" by then or "understand what you were talking about".
Jenning decided she'd go instead for the poison, which was fed to Wylie in March 2006, a week after his will was altered to benefit Justins, who was in frequent contact with a German lover.
Justins was charged with murder, but a jury found her guilty only of manslaughter. Jenning was convicted of being an accessory, but the judge said she was far more criminally liable, being a "manipulative and thoroughly dishonest woman", whose motivation in fetching the Nebutal was not entirely altruistic.
But by then, Jenning had killed herself, too. Her cancer had returned, but in the statement she had Nitschke read out after her death, she said she'd had "no trust in the outcome of this matter and have decided to impose upon myself a penalty of death".
By now Nitschke seemed to lead almost a cult, with supporters now killing themselves for the cause. Yet far from flinching, he damned the verdict against Jenning and Justins as "disgusting", and his backers raised $100,000 for the defence. They saw what was done and were glad.
Note that these deaths since 1996 have occurred when we still have laws against euthanasia. Now imagine what we would let loose with not just one Nitschke, but hundreds, under laws freeing them to help kill the lonely, scared, helpless and impressionable.
If Nitschke is us when at our best, be terrified of the worst |
