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Victoria became the first state in Australia to legalise state-sanctioned suicide – or, to use the preferred bland euphemism, “Voluntary Assisted Dying” – last year. It’s also taking its first steps on the slippery slope that death-fanciers insist doesn’t exist.
More than 300 people have applied to end their lives in Victoria since the state’s voluntary assisted dying laws came into effect in June last year, and at least 124 have done so[…]swamping Premier Daniel Andrews’s June 2019 estimate of “around a dozen” people using the laws to die in their first year of existence.
Permits to obtain lethal medication were issued to 231 people over the same period.
So, either Andrews knowingly misled Victorians about the impact of the laws, or the permits are being handed out at ten times the rate the government argued that they would. Either way, it appears that the supposed “rigorous safeguards” are perhaps not as formidable as claimed.
The numbers have prompted concern from a group of eminent doctors, who say the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted inadequacies in the aged-care system and state Department of Health and Human Services which give little cause for confidence in VAD safeguards administered by DHHS.
Given what a right bollix Victoria’s health bureaucrats have made of everything else they’re responsible for, why on earth would anyone trust them to manage a system of state-approved killing?
The Australian Care Alliance, which opposes VAD, said the report raised “far more questions” than it answered. It said it was unclear how many doctors had participated in the process of sanctioning deaths under the laws, how long deaths took if there were complications in the dying process, how many of those who died were alone, and what proportion of applicants underwent palliative care assessment and treatment prior to opting for VAD.
It was telling, in the debate over the laws, that the medical fraternity – as opposed to the politicians-with-stethoscopes in the public health bureaucracy – were solidly opposed. Seeing the laws in practise doesn’t seem to have mollified them at all.
Emergency physician and former AMA vice-president Stephen Parnis said the pandemic had made clear that regulations governing aged care were “hopelessly inadequate”. “How can we have any confidence that the so-called safeguards for the dying are any better?” Dr Parnis asked.
Geriatrician Mark Yates said professionals charged with the delivery of safe, ethical care for the frail and aged felt “unsupported in the current environment”.
Specialist physician John Daffy said Victorians had been promised dramatic improvement in palliative care services when the VAD laws passed in 2017. “In the three years since that promise, little has changed,’’ Dr Daffy said.
“Access to palliative care has not improved, and VAD should not be the only option.’’
Yet the unseemly haste with which the state rubber-stamps medical suicide suggests that it’s the preferred option for bureaucrats.
Half of all applicants proceeded from their first request to begin being assessed for eligibility to their final request for the medication within 19 days, with most permits then issued within two days.
Of course, the Victorian government and its cheerleaders sugar-coat their suicide laws with heart-tugging stories of “suffering” and “intolerable pain”, but, to be brutally blunt, this is just so much pious blarney. Such blathering is the virtue-signalling motte in the death-fanciers’ gambit. The bailey is death on demand, for any reason, at any age – which remains the stated aim of euthanasia advocates.
Oh, the next step on the slippery slope will sound very reasonable and “compassionate”, too, of course. Next will come “a terminal condition” (imminent no longer necessary), while “suffering” will be almost imperceptibly altered to “mental suffering”. The number and nature of “medical witnesses” will quietly change. As the experience of an unnamed elderly woman in the Netherlands shows, patient consent will become optional.
As the overseas experience shows, we’ll then somehow find ourselves at the true goal: death, on-demand, at any age.
State-sanctioned suicide will be little more trouble than getting a sickie certificate.
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