By Paul Russell: On the 9th of June, the Parliamentary Inquiry into 'end-of-life choices' tabled its report. The report included 49 recommendations. The final recommendation was for a euthanasia and assisted suicide law for people 'suffering serious and incurable conditions'.Yesterday (14th September) the Victorian Health Minister, Jill Hennessy, announced that the government would proceed with a bill to create the possibility of legally binding advance care directives in respect to end-of-life care. The Minister was clear that Victorians, under this scheme, will not be allowed to request euthanasia or assisted suicide. Continue reading

by Paul Russell: I have written a number of times now about the situations where doctors 'go public' claiming to have flaunted the law by killing a person in an act of euthanasia and almost (and sometimes, actually) daring the Police to act against them.Such doctors seem always to be 'going public' in an effort to create or support momentum towards changing the law on euthanasia and assisted suicide. The stories usually include some rhetoric that would have us believe that theirs is a brave act, bordering on heroic; a sacrifice for the sake of others. Continue reading

Robyn Hunt from Not Dead Yet NZ responds to MP, David Seymour by explaining why people with disabilities strongly oppose euthanasia and assisted suicide, in her article published on August 24 in The Spinoff. Hunt writes: I assure David Seymour that assisted suicide is a really big and complicated deal. It is no coincidence that disabled people all over the world oppose it. Our opposition arises from a (largely invisible) dark and troubled history, negative attitudes and behaviours towards disabled people and current human rights abuses. Disabled people see assisted suicide as dangerous because of their already marginalised status. Some disabled people are particularly vulnerable.Disabled and other people who oppose assisted suicide are not religious fanatics. Not Dead Yet Aotearoa was founded on disability rights not religious convictions. Assisted suicide supporters attempting to diminish the opposition by ignoring some and making sweeping statements about others is not helpful.Part of our unease relates to evidence that lives of disabled people are valued less than those of others. There is a history of euthanasia and eugenics, which have gone hand in hand for disabled people. The most notable, yet largely unknown T4 programme initiated by the Nazi Third Reich was the forerunner to the better known holocaust of Jews, gays, gypsies and others who did not meet the Aryan ideal. Around half a million people with of all kinds of impairments were killed. Some were tortured with "experimentation" before death. The first child to be euthanised was killed at the request of his parents. They were labelled "useless eaters". Many disabled people today still feel the residual power of that label as they struggle with cuts to services, parsimonious supports and subtle pressures to find work. Continue reading

by Paul Russell: Western Australia is a long ways away from the rest of the nation. I'm told that West Australians like it that way. Perhaps that might explain why they seem to do their 'politics' a little differently:A West Australian doctor, Alida Lancee, recently admitted to providing a 'lethal injection' to a woman in her 80s who had 'severe emphysema'. Some of the details of this story were recently released in a book that amounts to a collection of stories about difficult deaths. Continue reading

by Paul Russell: "In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible... Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness." George Orwell, Essay: Politics and the English Language (1946) Continue reading

Victorian Upper House MP, Rachel Carling-Jenkins (DLP - Western Metropolitan) made a statement in Parliament last week expressing her outrage at the murders of 19 people living with disability in Japan. ATTACK IN JAPAN: A HATE CRIME AGAINST PEOPLE WITH DISABILITIES Dr CARLING-JENKINS (Western Metropolitan) 19th August 2016 - I rise today to express my shock and sadness at the killing of 19 people with disabilities at a Japanese residential care home on Tuesday, 26 July, over our winter break. This tragedy can only be described as a hate crime deliberately targeting people with disabilities. The man arrested for the stabbings, who killed 19 people and injured 26 others, had written a letter to the Japanese government. Part of that letter said, and I quote: Continue reading

This article was published by William Peace on his Bad Cripple blog on Wednesday August 10. William Peace is a Syracuse University Professor and disability activist JAMA Internal Medicine has been in the news and references to a recent article abound on various social media platforms. Here I refer to "States Worse than Death Among Hospitalized Patients with Serious Illnesses" by Emily Rubin and other researchers at the University of Pennsylvania. Over eight months a team of researchers surveyed 180 patients who had been admitted to a hospital in Philadelphia with serious illnesses that included heart and lung disease. All the patients interviewed were 60 years and older. The study was conducted between July 1, 2015 and March 7, 2016. None of the patients had limitations on any life sustaining treatment in their electronic medical records. Researchers asked these patients to hypothesize whether they would prefer to die than be in a progressively worse state of being. In typically terse language Rubin wrote: Continue reading

By Paul Russell: Next month will mark the twentieth anniversary of the introduction into the Australian Federal Parliament of the Euthanasia Laws Bill 1996. Introduced on the 9th of September 1996 by the Member for Menzies, Kevin Andrews MP, the bill was designed to remove from the Australian Self-Governing Territories the ability to pass legislation relating to euthanasia and assisted suicide:"...the power of the Legislative Assembly conferred by section 6 in relation to the making of laws does not extend to the making of laws which permit or have the effect of permitting (whether subject to conditions or not) the form of intentional killing of another called euthanasia (which includes mercy killing) or the assisting of a person to terminate his or her life." Continue reading

This last week I changed my profile picture on my social media accounts for the first time. A seemingly common reaction to world events these days, I have never before been motivated to do so. Not that I have not grieved over horrible events such as the Charlie Hebdo massacre, the terrorist attacks in Paris or Nice or any of the other atrocities that seem sadly to be all too common these days. I have. But on July 26, 19 intellectually disabled men and women were executed as they slept in a pre-dawn attack upon a care facility in Sagamirihara, Japan. Aged from 19 to 70 years, there were also 26 others who were injured in the attack.The media characterised the attacks as 'senseless' and 'incomprehensible'. At one level, this attack on innocent defenceless people by a lone madman is, indeed, 'incomprehensible'. But for my many friends in the disability community it is, perhaps, an extreme and example of the kind of prejudice that they experience all too often; a chilling and visceral reminder of the subtle and not so subtle discrimination that is never far from them and that echoes through history. Continue reading

Alex SchadenbergAlex Schadenberg Executive Director - Euthanasia Prevention Coalition. The BC Civil Liberties Association has wasted no time in launching the first legal challenge to Canada's recently passed euthanasia and assisted suicide law.Globe and Mail reporter Laura Stone informs us that the BC Civil Liberties Association is launching a court case to "strike down" as unconstitutional the provision in the euthanasia law that states a person's "natural death must be reasonably foreseeable" to qualify for death by lethal injection. Continue reading