Related Readings

24 October 2008 from The Canberra Times (Canberra, Australia)

http://www.canberratimes.com.au/news/local/news/general/euthanasia-book-could-be-banned-from-sale-in-aust/1342241.aspx

Euthanasia book could be banned from sale in Aust
BY TOM SKOTNICKI
24/10/2008 1:00:00 AM

A book by euthanasia campaigner Philip Nitschke, Killing me softly, could be banned in Australia after a Classification Board hearing expected to take place next week.

Dr Nitschke said Attorney-General Robert McClelland had referred the book to the board. The board's decision to hold a classification hearing is unusual, given Penguin Australia published the book more than three years ago.

It is understood the Attorney-General was reacting to newspaper reports that a Perth mother, Erin Berg, who committed suicide in May after travelling to Mexico, had read the book, which describes euthanasia drugs sold overseas.

Mrs Berg was suffering from serious post-natal depression but was not inflicted with a terminal illness.
The Classification Board has the power to ban the book altogether, restrict its sale and distribution, or make it a crime to sell or display it.

The chairman of the Classification Board, Donald McDonald, contacted Penguin Australia earlier this month and asked the publisher to submit a copy of the book that was written by Dr Nitschke and his partner Fiona Stuart.
Dr Nitschke, who was on his way back to Australia from Britain after establishing an on-line site for his controversial The Peaceful Pill Handbook, said Mr McClelland was reacting to pressure from what he claimed was a campaign being organised by the family of Mrs Berg.

''The book Killing me Softly has about one sentence referring to the fact that people go overseas to obtain euthanasia drugs,'' he said.
Dr Nitschke said the book was largely a discussion of the issue and had been used in school curriculum. Penguin Australia publishing director Robert Sessions said any ban on the book could cause significant disruption.

There were few copies of the book in bookstores and the ban would mostly inconvenience libraries.
''I submitted the book under protest,'' Mr Sessions said. He stressed that the publication was thoroughly examined by lawyers before publication and was a legitimate contribution to an important debate.

The Classification Board refused to confirm the reference had come from the Attorney-General's office, as alleged by Dr Nitschke.
A spokesperson for the Attorney-General refused to comment and said all matters regarding classification were dealt with by the Home Affairs Minister, Bob Debus, whose portfolio is part of the Attorney-General's Department.

________________________________________
 

There's More to Life than My Right Breast Printed 2002: ISBN 1 86436 776 8 (Griffin Press, Adelaide)

Author is Cyndi Kaplan-Frieman ($24.95 at David Jones, Chadstone)

"Yes, I still miss my right breast.  And yes, there are moments when I feel sad about "not being complete" but I cope by doing a reality check.   I'm alive, I'm lucky to have the cancer behind me.  And really, honestly, there is more to life than my right breast"....

This book is not dissimilar to the previous mentioned Songs of Strength, but obviously written in a more youthful style of writing

I loved the optimism shown when talking about finding the right surgeon, looking for the right doctor....not all of us are given that luxury.  I suppose because breast cancer usually announces itself with a demonstrated lump one has a warning that all is not well.  The author was already a motivational speaker prior to her diagnosis so much of her professional training would have helpful to her perhaps.  Not the dreaded "think positive" aspect, but just don't think the worst until its confirmed...stay as calm as possible but alert to the need for immediate action....and not from vegetable water and herbal stuff.   (My very young neighbor of 25 discovered too late,  that alternative medicine has its place and cancer is not the time for experimentation)

I like the "Livesavers" throughout the book, appropriate words of information highlighted in a block for ease of reading.   

Songs of Strength: Printed 1997 ISBN 0 7329 0884 1

The diagnosis of cancer changes everything!

The fear, uncertainty and helplessness that accompany it can be overwhelming.   Songs of Strength is the voices of sixteen women with different types of cancer.   They tell their stories - the shock of diagnosis, the changes in their physical wellbeing; how they dealt with treatments and maintained a sense of themselves within the medical system; how their relationships with family and friends were challenged; how their priorities and perspectives on life changed.

The Cancer Foundation of Western Australia said "This book is a must"......and my own opinion is that it made me extremely grateful for the health care workers that I came under the care of when I too was diagnosed and underwent horrendous treatment in order to become well again.   This book also made me realize how difficult it is for doctors to "get it right" when dealing with the sensitive subject of how to "tell it how it is!"....some felt wronged they were told on the phone, others that waiting for an office appointment took too long for results....I felt some doctors were damned if they did and damned if they didn't ....but I also remembered how terribly fragile the human becomes at such a stressful time...

An old book which I picked in a second hand book shop in the city of Melbourne for $12.....I found it worthy of the effort of carrying the somewhat solid book for a further three hours and recommend its reading, which although medications may have changed, I can't think that the mental stress and strain of going through the pain barriers have really changed all that much!

http://www.dymocks.com.au/ProductDetails/ProductDetail.aspx?R=9780522855036

Good death
SYME Rodney

Forward by Pamela Bone who died April 26, 2008 (last Saturday night) suffering multiple myeloma, a cancer of the bone marrow which is incurable.   She was diagnosed in 2004 and wrote her own book "Bad Hair Day" which I have loaned out.

A Good Death, an argument for Voluntary Euthanasia is printed by Melbourne University Press www.mup.com.au in 2008 and will be available from DWDV and good bookshops.  It is an easy book to read physically and mentally, with well spaced paragraphs and soft cover.    Expected to retail at about $45 (but don't quote me on that please)

A Good Death is Rodney Syme's extraordinarily candid and controversial account of the many terminally ill people who he has assisted to end their lives. Over the last 30 years Syme, at first clandestinely and now publicly, has challenged the law on voluntary euthanasia, risking prosecution in doing so. He again risks prosecution for writing this book. A Good Death is a moving journey with those who came to Rodney Syme for help and a meditation on what it means to confront death in our culture. It is also a doctor's personal story about the moral dilemmas and ethical choices he faces working within the grey areas of the law.

In A Good Death Rodney Syme argues for the end of the unofficial 'conspiracy' of silence within the medical profession and the
decriminalisation of voluntary euthanasia in Australia. Through Syme's determination to tell the stories of those who he has assisted to die with dignity, A Good Death also draws wider lessons of value for those who find themselves in a similar situation.
 

http://www.smh.com.au/news/world/scientists-behind-guide-to-quick-and-painless-suicide/2008/03/24/1206207010435.html

Scientists behind guide to quick and painless suicide

Joan Clements in The Hague
March 25, 2008

A SCIENTIFIC guide to do-it-yourself suicide is to go on sale in the Netherlands.

The book, believed to be the first of its kind to be published, is by a group of respected scientists and psychiatrists. It contains detailed information on using drugs as well as committing suicide by starvation, including the quickest and least painful way to do it.
There are also chapters on the ethical and judicial questions for those who aid suicides.

Its authors are planning English, French and German editions.

One of the authors, Boudewijn Chabot, a psychiatrist, said: "Doctors learn little about this subject in training. This book is for people who want to make their own decisions about ending their lives."

Dr Chabot said most suicides were carried out with the help of family and friends, with common methods being the refusal of food and drink or the surreptitious collection of prescribed drugs until a lethal quantity was acquired.

Last week medical and legal experts criticised the Swiss assisted-suicide organisation Dignitas for "inhumane" practices over its new method for helping people to kill themselves using a plastic bag full of helium.

According to Swiss prosecutors, the Zurich-based group has assisted in four cases in the past month in which people have used this suffocation technique.

Ludwig Minelli, the founder of Dignitas, has described it as a "painless and faster" way of suicide. Most importantly, it needs no doctor's prescription.

The chief prosecutor, Andreas Brunner, said he had a video of a gassing in which the dying person's body "shook for well over 10 minutes".

Since it was set up a decade ago, Dignitas is believed to have helped more than 700 people to kill themselves. Last year John Elliott, a Sydney doctor, travelled to Zurich, where he committed suicide in a Dignitas clinic with his wife Angelika by his side.

Assisted suicide has been legal in Switzerland since 1942, under certain, strict conditions.

February 2008

A review copied and pasted from the DWDV Newsletter: (price, comprehensive printing details  and availability not provided)

To Die Well: Your Right to Comfort, Calm and Choice in the Last Days of Life, by Sidney Wanzer and Joseph Glenmullen,

Da Capo Press, 2007.

The authors of this book are very much concerned with making the end of our lives as comfortable, bearable and consistent with our competent wishes as is possible –

but they also look forward to what is desirable in terms of changes to medical practice and law that would assist in achieving this goal. The book has many brief and tragic case studies to exemplify and support the arguments deployed to justify autonomy and choice in end of life matters. Both authors are medical doctors who draw on their long experience to provide a very compassionate and sometimes a controversial case for dying with dignity.

The authors identify two crucial ‘turning points’:

The first medical turning point near the end of a person’s life is the time when the patient turns away from aggressive treatment aimed at restoring health and opts instead for comfort measures to ease the dying process. A second turning point may occur in a very few patients who are suffering intolerably in spite of comfort measures that are properly administered, such that the patient wishes to hasten dying and thereby shorten the period of suffering

What is suffering intolerably? The authors argue that this is a subjective judgment that will differ from patient to patient
and therefore, it is the patient who should decide. In cases where a patient becomes incompetent then the matter rests with what planning the person has done when competent, such as establishing a medical power of attorney with an agent – usually a member of one’s family.

For those who do not have friends or family – and there are such people in our community – the next best thing, the authors suggest is a Living Will (format available from DWDV office). Whatever advance notice is given for what we might desire for our future selves the authors suggest that we discuss the matter fully with those involved, such as our doctor. Do not think, they warn, that because a doctor listens sympathetically that he or she is agreeing with you – make sure that you have an explicit undertaking by the doctor
that he or she will follow your wishes.

In a very useful chapter the authors distinguish between and discuss the difference between sadness at the end of life
and clinical depression. The reason why this is useful is that there are still some people who seem to believe that no one in
their right mind would contemplate ending their life. Hence, anyone who wishes to do so must, so these people believe, be
suffering from some sort of depression or mental illness (and, hence, should not be permitted to end their lives).
There is much good advice given in this book to allow for a merciful death. The book discusses the options available to
hasten one’s death; the part played by pain and its control and has a range of appendices.

It is a very readable book and the case studies in themselves are fascinating and demonstrate that though we are
more rational and merciful than we have been in the past there are still practices that deprive patients of their selfdetermination.

Ralph Blunden, DWDV Committee

November 14, 2007

I have acquired a few new books of interest possibly to people who access this site:  I must stop buying books!

What Dying People Want by David Kuhl, MD is a book promoted as "Practical Wisdom for the End of Life" and from page one I felt this man at at least tried on my shoes, his observations were so accurate of how dying people see themselves.   He may not agree with the concept of voluntary euthanasia but he most certainly understands why others reach that stage in their own lives.

First published in Australia February 2005 its Bibliography Index is ISBN 0 7333 1520 8,  an ABC Book and the address provided is GPO Box 9994, Sydney, 2001

Funeral Rights by Robert Larkins is a book promoted as "What the Australian "death-care" industry doesn't want you to know.  Robert Larkins has practiced as a barrister for over 20 years.   He has appeared in a number of coronial inquests and is also a founding father of the Victorian Environment Defenders Office.  Funeral Rights is his first book.

The book is very informative and I could say that I don't think those in the funeral industry would be very happy with the wealth of information he provides us with on our rights at a time of great suffering and convenient time for manipulation of the bereaved,  because of that.  Coloured photos are included in the book which I could imagine were not easily procured.

I purchased it on the internet and unfortunately I didn't keep the details of the website but notice that www.penguin.com.au gets a mention underneath all the other formal stuff like the ISBN 978 0 670 07108 1.   First published by the Penguin Group Australia in 2007 the information provided couldn't be more timely.

Cost about $30

When tomorrow Comes by Peter O'Connor a small book promoted as "a journey for today".   A work of fiction about an old man dying of cancer who has one last request of his granddaughter in that he seeks his last journey of discovery to see for himself the total eclipse of the sun.  His three previous quests had been thwarted by clouds etc.   The author makes you believe it is real!  I liked the message that we only have today!   Tomorrow is never assured, and people like the fictional grandfather reliving his war experiences has the capacity to come back and reclaim his remaining life to enjoy the next challenge he provides for himself.

(A bit like the old man of ninety some years ago,  being interviewed by a stupid woman in America, for real,  that couldn't comprehend why an old man continued his gardening so passionately even though he himself may not have lived to see the fruits of his labour.  She asked very bluntly why he bothered and he just looked directly at her fully into her face and asked "why not?")

The blurp on the back of the book reads "This thought provoking and encouraging story offers a definitive and accessible guide to seizing every moment and making it count"....What really encouraged me to buy the book though were the old man's words of "I want to live until I die" which is my own warcry.   "Inspirational fiction" it was selling at Collins Booksellers for $18.95 but may be found at clearance centres now. 

Printed in 2004, the ISBN 1 4050 3579 8, was published by Macmillan, St Martins Tower, 31 Market Street, Sydney.

I particularly liked Peter O'Connor dedication words which read: "For my wife Karen, in whose company everything seems possible".

July 1st, 2007

http://www.truthbeknown.com/whatisgod.html

Reviewed by Acharya S

Over the years, people have asked me what books I recommend for children on the subject of God and religion, even requesting that I myself write children's books. Although I have read several good books on the subject over the years, other than Jonathan Livingston Seagull I have not been able to come up with any at the spur of the moment. That inspiring book, however, is not specifically about God and religion <http://www.truthbeknown.com/whatisgod.html>, and is also geared for an older audience.

For younger children, even as young as those who can understand full sentences, What is God? by Etan Boritzer is without a doubt the best children’s book on the subject of God and religion that I have read to date. As is appropriate for young children, What is God? contains marvelously attractive illustrations by Robbie Marantz that may hold the attention of the wandering mind which is still too young to understand some of the heady but accessible concepts provided by Boritzer’s fabulously inclusive text. The book is simply appealing from cover to cover, and the best surprise is that it is not at all preachy and would be useful for even the most ardent unbeliever to teach his or her children about what other people believe about God.

This book is so great, in fact, that I believe reading it to all the world's children would have an enormous impact on ending religious strife globally. What is God? does not teach children what to believe. It is not threatening to any parents, except for those who think that informing their children about other people's beliefs will somehow "poison" their minds. This book simply and matter-of-factly recites a wide variety of beliefs from around the world, including the simplistic and childish concept that God is an old man with a long white beard who lives in the sky. "Next time you fly in an airplane," says Boritzer, "look out the window at the clouds. But you won’t see that God there, because no one has ever seen that God!"

What is God? continues in this vein, relating that religions are a set of beliefs shared by groups of people, generally revolving around a shared holy book and a teacher believed to be divinely inspired or to understand the question "What is God?" Boritzer explains that there have been many books and teachers, listing the most famous such as Jesus, Moses, Mohammed and Buddha, and the Bible <http://www.truthbeknown.com/whatisgod.html>, Koran, Torah, Vedas and Sutras. He also imparts the knowledge that these beliefs have caused people to fight among themselves over whose concept of God was right and whose was wrong. The author further delves into what is prayer, in a highly satisfying manner.

My favorite part is where God is described as everything:

"Yes! God is everything great and small!
God is everything far away and near!
God is everything bright and dark!
And God is everything in between!...

If everything is God,
Then I am God,
You are God,
All of us are God!"

In a sense, this last part is teaching us and our children what to think about God, but is it in fact harmful? Or, just maybe, do these concepts serve as an inoculation against strident and exclusionary beliefs that our children will surely encounter down the road, which truly are harmful?

The interpretation of these concepts that follows in What is God? is that believing we are all God allows us to connect spiritually with each other and with the universe as a whole. As a longtime observer and critic of religious strife, and someone who has striven to provide solutions to this dilemma, I can state that such a perspective can only be helpful for all to hear and understand.
Boritzer's style is enlightened, kind and gentle, such that no one should feel threatened but all are made to feel welcome. Although it was not within the purview of his work to discuss atheism, Boritzer may have wished to include one or two sentences which related that some people do not believe in a god of any sort and do not pray, but that's okay!

The suggestion that I write children's books curiously led me to discover this wonderful tome, as I attended a seminar with the author on how to publish children's books. Little did I know what a life-changing event it would be, as I am now able with great clarity to pass along to my own progeny pertinent information concerning what I regard an extremely important subject. I am also able to explain what it is I do! For example, in the part of What is God? that illustrates how people fight over the concept, I was able to share that I like to stand in between the two men in the picture fighting over the word "God" and to tell them to stop!

What is God? should be present in libraries, churches, synagogues, temples and mosques the world over, translated into every major language, and read by every person interested not only in the subjects of God and religion but also in world peace.
 

April 15. 2007

Without religion,  Pro Choice supporters in a genuinely secular Australian Government would not have to fight for rights to our own body's end of life choices.   Most Australians whether holding a religious faith or not, obviously support legislative change for voluntary euthanasia with strict guidelines because if they didn't we would not have an 75% plus Polling outcome. 

I have nothing personally against religion if that your "thing" but it isn't mine,  and yet it encroaches on my Rights to Die.

Against God   (The Sunday Age 15/04/07 News Extra 13)
Thornton McCamish
April 15, 2007


The swelling of atheist literature is a reaction to a worldwide rise in fundamentalist religion.
A new breed of evangelical atheist is preaching a fiery gospel that rejects religion, write Thornton McCamish

I'm utterly fed up with the respect that we are brainwashed into bestowing on religion (Richard Dawkins, author)


ON PALM SUNDAY, Dr John Perkins drove out to the Careforce Church in Mount Evelyn to tell its congregation that everything it believed and held dear about God was, sad to say, mistaken and even dangerous.

It wouldn't be everyone's idea of a fun night out. Finding himself in similar circumstances, Australian arch-atheist Philip Adams once described himself as "a lion thrown into a den of Daniels".

And the scene did appear set for a mauling: the modern community hall-style building can hold 1000 and the debate had sold out within 20 minutes of tickets going on sale.

But there was no blood spilt. The Careforce house band belted out a few numbers, including John Lennon's Imagine ("Imagine there's no heaven, and no religion too …"), and then for nearly 90 minutes a mostly Christian audience listened intently while Christianity and atheism went 10 heartfelt rounds on stage. There was gracious applause at the end.

This slightly odd event is part of much wider phenomenon: the emergence of newly energised atheism centred around Richard Dawkins' book, The God Delusion. An unapologetic and even contemptuous attack on faith, the book has caused a storm in the US where it has been camped on the The New York Times bestseller list for five months.

Dawkins' is just one of at least half a dozen popular books preaching an anti-religious message that have appeared in the past year or so. There are more to come, too. Connoisseurs of the heretical will be salivating at the prospect of Christopher Hitchens' God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, which is due in May.

This swelling of atheist literature is a reaction to a worldwide rise in fundamentalist religion. But in kicking back at extremism, the bestselling atheists don't discriminate between mainstream faith and the loony fringe. It's religion itself they object to.

Dawkins hopes to eradicate faith entirely. This immodest project has put the high-profile English biologist at the vanguard of what's being called — inevitably — "evangelistic atheism".

Dawkins has been on the cover of Time magazine. He even appeared on TV show South Park, where he was, as he himself grumblingly described it, "portrayed as a cartoon character buggering a bald transvestite".

Popular atheism is not new — Bertrand Russell's classic Why I Am An Atheist was written half a century ago — but the emphasis on mass conversion to common sense might be.

The "Beyond Belief" forum, at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in California late last year resembled, The New York Times reported, "the founding convention for a political party built on a single plank: in a world dangerously charged with ideology, science needs to take on an evangelical role, vying with religion as teller of the greatest story ever told."

It's also unrepentantly trenchant, eschewing the delicacy conventionally observed in religious discussion. "I'm utterly fed up with the respect that we — all of us, including the secular among us — are brainwashed into bestowing on religion," Dawkins has said. And so say an increasing number of thinkers for whom the fundamental absurdity of all religious belief has become non-negotiable. In a swingeing philippic against Islamic fundamentalism published in the Observer last year, Martin Amis wrote: "Today, in the West, there are no good excuses for religious belief — unless we think that ignorance, reaction and sentimentality are good excuses."

If this seems unnecessarily trenchant, says English philosopher A. C. Grayling, who has contributed his own irreligious tract, Against All Gods (2007), to the book shops, remember that religion started it. "Politeness and restraint have been banished by the confrontational face that faith now turns to the modern world," Grayling writes. "In the face of the growing volume and assertiveness of different religious bodies asking for preferential treatment, secular opinion has hardened."

There were no traces of this rancorous mood at the debate in Mount Evelyn. Careforce senior pastor Dr Allan Meyer warmly congratulated Dr Perkins on having the courage to bring his bad news to the largest Church of Christ congregation in the country. In turn, Dr Perkins apologised in advance for any offence his views might cause. Proceeds from ticket sales went to the Royal Children's Hospital Good Friday appeal.

The debate was an away fixture for the atheists. But then, it's hard to imagine what an atheist home game would look like, since a gathering of Australian atheists wouldn't fill the MCG's southern stand. In the 2001 census, barely one Australian in 2000 identified as atheist, though nearly 15 per cent claimed to have "no religion".

ATHEISM seems to suffer from an odd Australian ambivalence about religion. In her book God Under Howard: The Rise of the Religious Right in Australian Politics, Marion Maddox argues that in Australia's "exceptionally secular culture" religion is still welcome, "but mainly as something we approve of for others, rather than participate in ourselves".

It may be true that fewer Australians attend church than ever, says Dr Carole Cusack, chairwoman of the department of studies in religion at the University of Sydney, but Australians still view being religious positively. "If somebody says they're religious, it means they have principles and morals."

The reverse seems to apply to atheists. "I think if you just say 'I'm an atheist'," says Dr Cusack, "people assume that you despise religion. People somehow think atheism is linked to being derisory."

Or perhaps to being humourless. Some people with no time for God seem to prefer more mischievous alternatives than plain old atheism can offer. In the last census, the number of professed atheists was dwarfed by the more than 70,000 Australians who described their religion as "Jedi", a la Star Wars. The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, a parody religion created by American Bobby Henderson, has become a huge hit on the web in just a couple of years, and now offers its own gospel, nifty T-shirts and mock-commandments, the eight "I'd Really Rather You Didn'ts".

Nearly 60,000 copies of Dawkins' book have sold in Australia, but it's hard to say whether it's producing a generation of atheist converts. It does seem to have galvanised existing atheists somewhat. Dawkins can take some credit for the Melbourne Atheist Meet-up Group, which was set up in June last year and now has some 60 members. One of its founders, Andrew Rawlings, an atheist activist, says The God Delusion was "very influential" in the formation of the group.

On Australia Day this year, 10 members of the group established an "atheist presence" outside a Catch the Fire Ministries prayer rally at Festival Hall.

There was a small scuffle when one rally participant tried to knock a copy of The God Delusion out of an atheist's hands, but no one was hurt. Probably no one was converted, either. Most of the Christians, says Rawlings, seemed not so much angered by the atheists as concerned for their souls.

Spreading the word against God has never been a priority for Australia's more established atheist groups. The Atheist Foundation of Australia, which provided Dr John Perkins for the Careforce Church debate, has been in existence for 37 years. Its most important functions, says its president, David Nicholls, are to promote secularism, and to argue that the indoctrination of children with irrational religious ideas is dangerous, and that indoctrinating children into a belief in eternal damnation is actually a form of abuse.

Still, Nicholls has high hopes for the new atheism. "Anyone who reads Sam Harris' The End of Faith and doesn't start questioning their faith really has not got a hold on reality," he says.

Melbourne philosopher Tamas Pataki is soon to add another book to the growing pile of popular atheistic literature. His Against Religion is due out next month, but he has no interest, he says, in being part of "some movement to defeat or repel religion". He too sees the boom in atheist thought as a reaction to the rise of fundamentalism. "But I think what intellectuals find more offensive than Islamic fundamentalism is probably what's happening in George Bush's America, and the influence of the Christian right."

The particular stridency of the new atheism in America probably reflects a stronger sense of embattlement among scientists there — Dawkins' book speaks directly to controversies over stem cell research and teaching creationism in schools — and also to the greater role religion plays in public life.

David Nicholls admits that religion doesn't have nearly the cultural power here as it does in the US. "But, having said that, we now have many parliamentarians expressing religious views in an attempt to be either truthful to themselves or to catch the religious vote which they think is out there. I think it's a very dangerous path that we're treading. A democratic society shouldn't take the risk."

IN AUSTRALIA, the differences between the faithful and non-believers has mostly taken the form of this proxy war over secularism — though, of course, it's not only atheists who consider the intrusion of religion into politics a public nuisance. The main reason atheists turned out at Festival Hall on Australia Day was the fact that the Prime Minister had sent a formal message to the prayer rally, something they strongly objected to.

But the new atheism is about more than defending secular political arrangements: it's about sweeping away all religion with the firm broom of reason, and doing it fast. "Global religions are global tribes," argues John Perkins. "People pretend that there's not religious conflict … There's too many people out there who have access to very powerful weapons whose beliefs are inconsistent with the beliefs of other people with equally powerful weapons."

What atheism believes it offers is the only universal alternative to dangerous unreason. "There seems to be a kind of darkening of the world in many ways," Pataki says. "We're becoming more politically conservative and morally regressive, and at periods like that in the history of civilisation, religion and superstition always come to the fore."

Atheists who see scientific standards of evidence as utterly incompatible with religion look with dismay at the rise not just of fundamentalism, but religion generally: to them, it's as if a long-eradicated disease had returned to afflict the human mind anew. When hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans last year, Sam Harris says, a survey found that 80 per cent of survivors said the events had only strengthened their faith in God.

Harris is astonished by this. Yet maybe what this shows is that a hurricane, like everything else in creation, is a religious Rorschach ink blot: whether or not we divine the hand of God in what we see says more about us than what we're looking at.

Atheists can't leave it at that relativist impasse, though. "The question of truth is important here," Pataki argues. "Is religion true? I think it's not. I think religion is in discord with common sense. Not so much with science but with common sense."

But perhaps a confident, evangelising atheism based on reason just doesn't seem reasonable to many people now. "The naive atheist seems to believe that a sophisticated seminar in godlessness is all that is required to eliminate religion, showing a grateful people that they can be liberated from an oppressive and debilitating illusion," writes Alister McGrath in his book, The Twilight of Atheism: The Rise and Fall of Disbelief in the Modern World. "What atheists don't get is that people actually like their faith, and find it helpful in structuring their lives, and actually believe it's true." Western culture, he says, has "long since recognised the limitations of reason".

The stats suggest he might be on to something. The Australian 2001 census showed that mainstream Christian denominations were shrinking; but so was the "no religion" category. Both sides represented at Careforce, atheists and church-goers, are shrinking categories, both losing support to what scholars of religion see as a shift towards a vague, non-committal openness to spirituality.

In this context, atheism's insistence on judging religion by scientific truth alone can seem like an arbitrary definition of terms. From there it's only a short step to indicting atheism for intolerance. Dawkins' "scientistic materialism", concluded this newspaper's review of The God Delusion, is just a "dogmatic form of fundamentalist faith".

It's an old charge, and one that atheists refute outright. But even some secularists wonder what's wrong with the old live and let live idea: lock up the dangerous loony fringe and let everyone else just rub along together.

In The God Delusion, Dawkins argues that heinous acts of religious terrorism should be blamed on "religion itself, not religious extremism — as though that were some kind of terrible perversion of real, decent religion".

Dawkins "can scarcely bring himself to concede that a single human benefit has flowed from religious faith," wrote Marxist critic Terry Eagleton in The London Review of Books. "The countless millions who have devoted their lives selflessly to the service of others in the name of Christ or Buddha or Allah are wiped from human history — and this by a self-appointed crusader against bigotry."

For Sam Harris, the challenge to religion depends on what he calls intellectual honesty. "Either the Bible is just an ordinary book, written by mortals, or it isn't," Harris writes in A Letter to a Christian Nation. "Either Christ was divine, or he was not … If the basic tenets of Christianity are true, then there are some very grim surprises in store for non-believers like myself."

Grim indeed. The Pope recently reminded Catholics that unrepentant sinners can still expect eternal damnation. Hell "really exists and is eternal", he told parishioners in Rome, "even if nobody much talks about it any more".

Many of the people who contact the Atheist Foundation are struggling with the psychological residue of religious upbringings, Nicholls says. Especially in the winter months, "we get many people who can't get over the fear of hell, can't escape it. Even though they're atheists."

And that's the main problem for atheist evangelisers: just because something isn't true doesn't mean it's not real.

 

April 3, 2007:

Illegal book heads through internet gateway  (The Sunday Age Pg10 News April 1, 2007)

("The download version will be illegal but people will take that risk" ..says Philip Nitschke)
John Elder

THE outlawed euthanasia manual The Peaceful Pill Handbook will soon be available as a downloadable document from the internet via Google Books. The deal with Google Books was made in the US last week by the book's author and euthanasia campaigner Dr Philip Nitschke, who said the download version, illegal under Australian law, would cost about US$30 ($A37).

Speaking to The Sunday Age on Friday, Dr Nitschke said The Peaceful Pill Handbook had been a steady seller on Amazon.com, often ranking in the top 1000 books out of a pool of 2 million — but Australian customers ran the risk of losing the book to interception by customs officers, and the downloadable version would be a more secure option.

"The download version will be illegal but people will take that risk because they feel they won't be tracked down," said Dr Nitschke. "We've heard there has been some trouble with buying it on Amazon … from people not receiving books."

Sample material from the book is already available at Google Books. "You can read the foreword, the index and the first three pages of each chapter," said Dr Nitschke.

The book became a banned publication in February when it was denied classification by the Commonwealth Office of Film and Literature Classification — in part because it contains instructions on how to travel to Mexico to obtain the veterinary tranquilliser Nembutal and smuggle it back into Australia.

Nembutal was once a legal barbiturate, popular with Hollywood stars such as Marilyn Monroe. It's still used by veterinarians and is available over the counter in Mexico, or by prescription for human consumption in Switzerland.

A 100-millilitre bottle of the veterinary version of the drug will kill a person in about 30 minutes, said Dr Nitschke. Nembutal was the drug used in the high-profile suicides of Nancy Crick and John Elliott, the mercy killing of dementia patient Graeme Wylie (resulting in murder charges against two women), and by the four people who legally ended their lives under the Northern Territory's voluntary euthanasia laws.

Those laws were overturned by the Federal Government 10 years ago this week — an anniversary marked by the protest burning of 150 copies of The Peaceful Pill in Canberra by Dr Nitschke and his supporters.

Dr Nitschke said about 100 Australians made the Nembutal trek to Mexico last year and another 20 have done so this year. He said most of those people were in their 70s and 80s, not suffering from a terminal or disabling disease but simply preparing for the future. Said Dr Nitschke: "In our workshops, we encourage people to make the trip while they're still healthy … otherwise, if they get sick and rely on their families to smuggle in the drug, they're putting their wives or children at risk of being charged with assisted suicide."

A spokeswoman at the Office of Film and Literature Classification said the office couldn't comment on the downloadable version of The Peaceful Pill Handbook but said: "Once something's been refused classification, it cannot be legally sold. This is now an enforcement matter which is governed by the states and territories."

Calls to Police Minister Bob Cameron's office yesterday were not returned.

____

March 29, 2007:

The Peaceful Pill Handbook as reviewed below some time ago has since been banned on Appeal by the Attorney General Philip Ruddock who moved to reverse the decision of the Office of Film and Literature Classification, for a "Restrictive Category".   Unfortunately as a result of the Appeal being upheld all copies of the unsold books were removed from shelves throughout Australia.   Members of Exit were subjected to the distressing image of 150 copies of the book being burned symbolically in front of the Australian Parliament House in Canberra.

I believe the book need not have been banned at all and should at least have been allowed distribution points at the organizational level of both Exit and the Voluntary Euthanasia Societies,  whose staff know their members' histories.   Who knows, with a change in Federal Government later in 2007, someone may be able to reverse the ban.   I do hope so!.....Stalin and Hitler revisited Australia this year.

____

Book Review by the Vice President of the Dying with Dignity Victoria Organisation:

of the : The Peaceful Pill Handbook
Written 2006
By Dr Phillip Nitschke and Dr Fiona Stewart.

The Peaceful Pill Handbook is an interesting summary of many suicide methods and their history. It also includes many insights into palliative care and various legal issues.

However, The Peaceful Pill Handbook may be a title that would mislead some readers. A handbook usually means a practical, “how to do it yourself” manual; which this book largely is not.

While it does discuss a variety of suicide methods, it does so in rather technical detail. I, a biochemist for ten years, would myself have a great deal of trouble successfully implementing many of them.

The authors aim to help the comparison of methods by creating a Reliability and Peacefulness (RP) Score, which is an amalgam of many qualitative factors for a method, each factor given an estimated value. The resulting value may not be so helpful as two methods could achieve the same score for very different reasons. For example, one method could be strong on reliability but weak on peacefulness, and another method vice versa.

The chapter on cyanide seems to advocate this suicide method, missing important medical opinion that it is likely to be neither quick nor painless.

The book also lacks warnings like simple self-assessment checklists for the vulnerable such as those who are “only” depressed, who should seek professional counsel.

Despite these concerns, and overall, I congratulate the authors and commend this book as a useful addition to stimulate the VE debate.

Neil Francis

Saturday, January 13, 2007. 7:42am (AEDT) (ABC News) (The Peaceful Pill Handbook)

Ruddock attempts to ban euthanasia book

Euthanasia advocate Phillip Nitschke is furious that federal Attorney-General Philip Ruddock is attempting
to stop his book from being published in Australia.

Mr Ruddock is appealing a decision by the Office of Film and Literature Classification (OFLC) to approve
the sale of the self-help euthanasia book under strict conditions.

The book offers advice and tips to those considering euthanasia and is being sold in the United States and
Canada.

Dr Nitschke denies his book would lead to an increase in Australia's suicide rate.

"Desperate people are the ones who do desperate things," he said.

"What we find is that when people are in possession of the best information, feel like they have choices and
control, is that they actually live longer.

"So I simply don't agree with that idea that putting this information out is going to lead to a spate of
suicides.

"Rather it will help or improve the overall general health of a lot of anxious and elderly folk at present."

Dr Nitschke says the Government's action is a violation of Australia's democratic rights.

"Over months [the OFLC] considered this book and they finally made the decision that yes, under strict
restrictions, it should be distributed to Australians," he said.

"Then to have the Minister come along and say, 'no, I don't like this decision,' I mean if this is the case
why doesn't every book that comes into Australia go straight to Philip Ruddock's desk.

"He's the deciding agent it would seem in Australia, not the body which is supposedly independent."
Support for publication

Prominent Northern Territory anti-euthanasia campaigner Tom Kylie says he also believes the book should be
published.

Mr Kylie says that while he opposes what the book advocates, he believes it is important that an open and
educated discussion is held.

"I think the issue needs to be debated seriously," he said.

"I disagree with [Dr Nitschke's] ideas and he's for euthanasia and I'm against it, but I think it's an
issue which needs to be discussed so we know where each other stands really."

Mr Kylie says if the book is published it will lead to a healthy community debate.

"I think it should be allowed to be published, I'm not for this idea of book burning and all the rest," he said.

"The arguments for euthanasia and against euthanasia  aren't solely religious or Christian."


http://www.theage.com.au/news/national/ruddock-appeals-suicide-book-release/2007/01/12/1168105181696.html

Ruddock appeals suicide book release

Annabel Stafford, Canberra
January 13, 2007

A how-to BOOK on suicide may be banned in Australia after Canberra appealed a decision allowing its publication.

The Peaceful Pill Handbook, by euthanasia advocate Philip Nitschke, gives advice about suicide options including information on carbon monoxide and cyanide and the use of plastic bags with helium.

It also provides information about countries such as Switzerland where people can go to end their life legally. The Age understands Dr Nitschke will accompany an Australian to Switzerland in the next few days.

Last month, the Classification Review Board approved the book for restricted release.

Attorney-General Philip Ruddock has asked the board to review that decision.

This latest intervention came after he asked the board last year to review eight "hate books", resulting in bans on two.

He has also pushed the states and territories to introduce tougher censorship laws to prevent books that promote terrorism being published in Australia.

A spokesman for Mr Ruddock said Canberra was appealing the decision to allow the book's publication because it was at odds with laws that banned importation of materials that "promoted, counselled or instructed in how to commit suicide".

In September 45 copies that had been printed in the United States were confiscated at Brisbane airport.

The spokesman said "the Government seeks to protect vulnerable individuals in the community" and in 2005 had changed the law to make it an offence to use "a carriage service to access, transmit or publish materials that promote, counsel or incite suicide".

Dr Nitschke said the first Australian print run of 2000 books had begun and he had received inquiries from several stores.

Paul Elliott, who owns PolyEster Books in Fitzroy, said he had already "ordered a few copies". He said Mr Ruddock's intervention was ludicrous.

"I can understand - I don't agree with it - but I can understand if a book was inciting people to hurt somebody else, but to ban (something) that just gives you the facts about committing suicide ... I think it actually shows the arrogance of people (who want to ban it) ... they think that people don't have the
intelligence to make up their own minds."

Dr Nitschke said his book was already available overseas.

                                            _____

 

Pamela Bone:  An article written for The Australian Newspaper January 9, 2007

Let's have faith in society and keep God out of it

* Far from a minority group, the non-believers of this world are fed up with the assumption that moral virtue is reliant on the constant influence of religion in contemporary culture
* January 09, 2007

I WAS annoyed to find that all the copies of Sam Harris's Letter to a Christian Nation were sold out (the bookshops have ordered more). According to its publicity machine, the book is a "bold challenge" to the influence religion has on public life in the US.
Notwithstanding that 44 per cent of Americans allegedly believe the second coming of Christ will occur within the next 50 years, it has been on the New York Times bestseller list for weeks.

Another surprise bestseller over the Christmas period was Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion. A range of anti-religion books are soon to be published: Atheist Manifesto by French philosopher Michel Onfray; Against Religion by Melbourne philosopher Tamas Pataki; Have a Nice Doomsday by American writer Nick Guyatt. The one I am most looking forward to is Christopher Hitchens's God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.

It may be that the Australians who've bought up all the copies of Harris's book merely want to reinforce their opinions of how stupid Americans are. Then again, it may be that in Australia, as well as in the US, people are looking at the nightly mayhem on the television news, making connections, and wondering how religion can still command the respect it does.

These books are giving courage to the rather large minority of people - even in the US, 12 per cent of the population doesn't believe in God - who have no religion and who have been bluffed and intimidated for too long by the convention that religious beliefs, however harmful or absurd, should not be criticised.

Despite the wishful thinking of commentators such as The Australian's Paul Kelly, religious belief is not growing stronger in Western countries. Yes, worldwide, religion is growing because religious people tend to have many children: children who are then indoctrinated with the beliefs of their parents (some call this child abuse). But in countries where people are encouraged to question faith, the intensity of religious belief has been waning for years. People might express an association with a particular religion, but it doesn't affect the way they live their lives.

That is why in Australia only 40 per cent of couples getting married choose a religious ceremony (of brides born in Britain, only 25 per cent wanted a religious ceremony last year, while of brides born in Lebanon, 82per cent did, according to Australian Bureau of Statistics figures). Even more telling is that while Christianity regards suicide as a grave sin, opinion polls show that more than 70 per cent of Australians want legislation to allow voluntary euthanasia.

This does not stop religious folk rising in indignation against the "atheist evangelists", as they describe writers such as Dawkins and Harris. Dawkins is as much a fundamentalist as the Islamic extremists, they claim. He is the man who "hates God". This is nonsense, of course. Dawkins is far too sane to hate an imaginary figure (unlike the writer Kingsley Amis, who when asked if he was an atheist is reported to have replied, "Well, yes, but it's more that I hate him"). And none of the above writers has called for believers to be killed. It is also rather unfair, given that Christian evangelism has had such a long and unimpeded run.

I don't claim to speak on behalf of all non-religious people, but I think I can safely say that a lot of us - the one-quarter to one-third of Australians who either believe God does not exist or admit they don't know - are fed up with the assumption that in order to have a good society you have to have religion.

Non-religious people are fed up with all the talk about the emptiness, the barrenness and lack of meaning in "secular society". It may surprise religious people to learn that our lives are not empty. Some people might need to believe in an afterlife in order to find meaning in this one; others don't. Some might need to believe in a creator in order to be awed by the majesty of nature; others don't. Some might believe in something higher than themselves and call it God; others believe in something higher than themselves and call it humanity or nature. It makes no difference to how morally they behave. Everything good in religion can be had without religion.

I don't need to talk about the harm religion does: read the books. But the fact is that the most peaceful, prosperous and healthy countries in the world, as judged by the UN's annual Human Development Reports, are the least religious. These are countries - Australia is one of them - in which religion is not banned or suppressed, but it is also not promoted by the state.

That is why Labor leader Kevin Rudd's comments about the need for religious thinking to be brought into political decision-making should be viewed with dismay. Rudd is, of course, entitled to his beliefs, but it would have been more responsible, when asked about his religion, to insist that it is a private matter. Even John Howard does not wear his religion on his sleeve the way Rudd does. Howard is religious only in the way most conservatives are religious.

Rudd is popular now - a pretty, clever drover's dog would be popular right now - but in the longer term he is at risk of alienating progressives. He has already given us a hint of the direction of his beliefs in his opposition to therapeutic cloning for stem cell research, apparently counting the rights of three-day-old human embryos more important than the rights of children with cancer. The majority of Australians support therapeutic cloning.

Religion is not a reliable guide to morals. It would be better, as the former bishop of Edinburgh, Richard Holloway, argues in Godless Morality (which may be the best book on the subject), to leave God out of it and find good, human reasons for the decisions we make.

Pamela Bone is a Melbourne writer. Her book about cancer and war, Bad Hair Days, will be published this year by Melbourne University Press.

New life for book of death ( source: The Australian Newspaper)

* Simon Kearney and John Stapleton
* December 22, 2006

A BOOK that gives detailed advice on suicide, including a recipe for cyanide and tips for getting away with euthanasia, has been cleared for publication in Australia.

The first run of the book by euthanasia advocate Philip Nitschke was confiscated by Customs as a prohibited import.

But Dr Nitschke has now ordered a print run in Australia after the Office of Film and Literature Classification's board voted on Monday to allow the book to be sold in book stores wrapped in plastic as a category-one publication only for those over 18.

The book, called The Peaceful Pill Handbook, offers advice and suicide tips, describing in detail a variety of suicide methods.

Approval of the book has been condemned as promoting suicide as a viable choice not just for the sick and elderly but also for troubled adolescents.

Co-written by Dr Nitschke and Fiona Stewart, the book describes how to clean up after a suicide and remove evidence.

Dr Nitschke had the first 45 copies of the book printed in the US but they were seized at Brisbane airport under Customs regulations that make documents that instruct in or incite suicide prohibited imports.

"Clearly, the federal Government wants to have them destroyed," Dr Nitschke said. "We're very happy the umpire has said they are OK."

He said he now planned for the book to be in stores by next month.

"We won't make the Christmas rush," he said.

A spokesman for Justice Minister Chris Ellison said the books were seized according to laws which came into effect in September 2002 that prohibited "absolutely" devices designed to be used to assist suicide and documents that instruct in or promote their use.

Customs also seized 69 pamphlets in Brisbane but returned them after they were assessed as not meeting the criteria of prohibited imports.

"The goods were not concealed," the spokesman said.

The decision to allow the book to be sold under the category-one classification was made despite objections of some board members who believed it should be banned under the anti-suicide-promotion laws.

Lecturer in law at the University of Western Sydney Katrina George last night condemned the publication of The Peaceful Pill Handbook as offering the elderly, sick and vulnerable very poor choices.

"It provides ready access to suicide methods," she said.

"It is a sad day when the best we can offer the sick and suffering is a do-it-yourself suicide manual. A truly compassionate strategy would provide improved access to and understanding of palliative care and expanded psychiatric services."


                                                                                _____
 

Telling it Straight, by John Edge,  Launched in Australia, September 2006 by Marshall Perron, and available through Exit International.    I personally hope that the book's publication does not result in a repeat of what happened to Lesley Martin "To die Like a Dog".   Mr Edge may carry its message like a warrior but what of the others left ..... I am yet to obtain a copy.

2006-09-19 From: News.com.AU
Charges may follow Crick death book
http://www.news.com.au/story/0,10117,20437852-421,00.html?from=public_rss

By Greg Stolz

September 19, 2006 07:34am

POLICE will consider reopening their investigation into the death of Gold Coast euthanasia crusader Nancy Crick after the publication of a new book detailing how she died.

One of Mrs Crick's key supporters has exposed himself and others present at her death four years ago to the renewed threat of criminal charges by writing the tell-all account, Telling It Straight, due to be launched today.

For the first time since the retired barmaid took a lethal cocktail of barbiturates, washed down with a glass of Irish liqueur, John Edge has admitted to disposing of evidence that could have been used to charge him and 20 mainly anonymous fellow supporters present at her suicide.

Mr Edge has also admitted to helping the great-grandmother obtain and hide the drugs she used to take her life on May 22, 2002.

Queensland police said they would examine the book to see whether it contained new evidence which could lead to Mr Edge and other supporters being charged with assisting her suicide – a crime that carries a maximum penalty of life imprisonment.

Mrs Crick had suffered from bowel cancer but an autopsy revealed she was cancer-free when she died.

After a two-year investigation, Police Commissioner Bob Atkinson announced in June 2004 that no charges would be laid against any of the 21 self-proclaimed "Nancy's Friends", some of whom had admitted they were present when she died.

But Mr Atkinson said any new information about the circumstances of Mrs Crick's death would be investigated.

Mr Edge, 70, said he had ignored legal advice and published Telling It Straight himself.

"I'm well aware of the legal implications and if I am charged, I'll wear that as a badge of honour in the long struggle for voluntary euthanasia legislation," he said.

In the book, Mr Edge details how the restricted drugs that killed Mrs Crick were obtained and how he buried them in her backyard. He names some of the people present at her death and tells how he washed the drug bottle, wiped his fingerprints from two other drug containers and threw a mobile phone into the Tweed River.

                                                                                _____________

2006-08-10 From: STUFF.co.NZ
They dare call it murder
http://www.stuff.co.nz/stuff/0,2106,3760628a4501,00.html

10 August 2006

By TIM UPPERTON

Lesley Martin revisits the euthanasia battle ground with the release of her new book To Cry Inside, Tim Upperton writes.

A daughter gives her mother an overdose of morphine. The mother does not die. The following night, the daughter places a pillow between the two of them and presses her mother to her chest until she stops breathing. The daughter is tried and convicted of attempted murder on the overdose charge, and is sentenced to 15 months imprisonment. A crime is committed, and justice is done.

CONTROVERSIAL: Lesley Martin                                             There was a photo of Lesley with her dog at this point:
believes euthanasia is a fundamental right.
DAVID FAIRLEY/Sunday Star Times

Such a summary of the Lesley Martin case is both accurate and utterly misleading. In this book, Martin conveys powerfully what happens in this country to an honest person whose compassion and integrity leads her to contravene an unjust law.

Her account is more powerful for the space she allows for hostile voices: her own sister's victim- impact statement, for instance, or the judge's summing up of the case.

What was most apparent to me after reading this book was that human behaviour is subtle and various, and that the law that regulates it is blunt and indiscriminate: a bulldozer chasing a rabbit. Lesley Martin's mother was dying of rectal cancer. Martin's actions shortened a pain-wracked life by a day, perhaps days: in the not-so-compassionate words of the palliative care nurse assigned to her care, "Your mother is not so bad. She could last several days on the flesh she's carrying."

In a grim trial, alleviated by moments of pure farce that make Boston Legal look like realism, Martin was found not guilty on the charge of smothering her mother with a pillow. A jury is not required to give its reasons, but presumably this verdict was reached because of the difficulty in proving intent, and because asphyxiation/suffocation was not identified as a cause of death.

That left the morphine charge. This was more complex than it might seem, as accounts of precisely what happened varied. Martin walks us through this complexity, and reveals why there were differing accounts. She also explains how she came to be in the position of giving her mother a morphine overdose – a mother whom no-one disputes she loved dearly.

Martin packed up from the Gold Coast and came home to New Zealand when she heard her mother was sick. Her early life is summarised in the first chapter, with a writer's eye for what's relevant: her first marriage, for instance, is dismissed in two sentences.

But even summary description is revealing: a solo mother, she qualified as a nurse and completed various postgraduate nursing qualifications; she obtained her commercial pilot's licence; she spent a year nursing in Saudi Arabia. She also trained to become a counsellor with Lifeline Australia. Not exactly the profile of a murderer, one would have thought.

As a registered nurse, the care of her mother fell solely on her until the final days, when palliative care was also provided by her mother's GP and the local hospice. The administration of morphine at such a time, as anyone who has witnessed the dying of someone from terminal illness will know, is common practice.

Dosages are high, inducing the so-called "double effect" of relieving pain but also shortening life. This kind of euthanasia happens in hospitals and hospices around the country every day, but no-one is ever likely to be prosecuted for it.

Lesley Martin's mother knew she was dying, and she commented on the irony that, whereas we euthanase animals that are dying in pain, we are far less humane when it comes to people (Martin's first book alludes to this in its title, To Die Like A Dog).

She asked her daughter not to let her die slowly and miserably. A promise was made, and kept. But how was the 60mg of morphine Martin was accused of giving her mother administered? As a single dose? Or in several doses over time (which would be indistinguishable in intention from the "double effect" dosages commonly administered in palliative situations)?

Martin attributes the differing accounts to what psychologists call "cognitive dissonance" (she uses the plainer expression "crisis of soul").

She had made a promise not to let her mother die slowly and in pain, yet her mother was doing exactly that. She had made a promise that she wanted to keep. She did not want to kill her mother.

These contradictions can lead a person to provide differing accounts: Martin wanted to believe that she had kept her promise to her mother in her last hours, and one account supports this; she did not want her mother to die, and another account supports that. If this sounds like psychological gobbledegook for lying, consider that criminals in the dock tell lies to avoid incrimination.

The account that swayed the jurors was the account represented in Martin's first book: one dose of 60mg. It was that published account that led to Martin's arrest, and ultimately to her conviction – but it differed from other accounts that suggest several doses.

This is where the story becomes truly astonishing. If Martin had never published her first book, she would never have been arrested. There is a strong sense, here, that everyone wanted the case to go away, but publication of this first book – with that incriminating detail of a single 60mg dose of morphine – made what followed inevitable. Martin did not want the case to go away. She was convinced that what she had done was compassionate and right, and that if one is dying of a painful illness, then the choice of the manner of one's death is profoundly private, and not a matter for the law.

The law still disagrees. Martin served 7½ months in Arohata Prison (of which she provides a vivid and moving evocation) for a crime that is carried out covertly in New Zealand every day of the week.

When an elderly relative of mine, senile and in hospital but physically quite well, aspirated food into her lungs, doctors said that in a few days she would develop pneumonia. They could administer antibiotics to head the pneumonia off – or not. They didn't, and a few days later, my relative died.

I mentioned to a friend that I was reviewing this book, and was told that an acquaintance of hers with a terminal illness was being offered the option of "floating away" on morphine. It's covert, it's behind closed doors, and it's illegal, but dying people all over the country are exercising a fundamental right, and humane doctors, nurses and families are helping them.

In poll after poll, New Zealanders have said that voluntary euthanasia should be legalised, and a Private Member's Bill was narrowly defeated in 2003 (as it happened, on the same day Lesley Martin was arrested) by one non-vote and an abstention.

Yes, such legislation is fraught with dangers. Yes, it will require careful drafting, so that elderly people are not killed off by inheritance-hungry relatives. But justice is not being done, and the Lesley Martin case is proof of that.

For honouring a promise to her mother, Martin lost her home, her livelihood, her freedom and her marriage. Her face looks calmly at the reader from the cover, her eyes direct and steady. "What would you do?" is her unspoken question. Well? What would you do?

TO CRY INSIDE by Lesley Martin. Penguin, 338 pp, $29.95.

Tim Upperton tutors creative writing in Palmerston North.
                                                        ______________

THE LAST RIGHT? AUSTRALIANS TAKE SIDES ON THE RIGHT TO DIE

Simon Chapman - Stephen Leeder (eds.)

Biographer

Simon Chapman,

Is Professor in Public Health at the University of Sydney. He is a sociologist with a PhD on the semiotics of cigarette advertising, author of 10 books and major government reports and 160 papers in peer reviewed journals. His books include Over our dead bodies: Gun law reform after Port Arthur (

 1998); The Last Right? Australians take sides on the right to die (Sydney:Mandarin 1995); The Fight for Public Health: Principles and Practice of Media Advocacy (BMJ Books 1994 with Deborah Lupton); Tobacco in the Third World: a resource Atlas (International Organisation of Consumers' Unions 1990) Great Expectorations: Advertising and the tobacco industry (London:Comedia, 1986);and The Lung Goodbye: tactics for counteracting the tobacco industry in the 1980s (IOCU 1983). His main research interests are in tobacco control, media discourses on health and illness, and risk communication. He teaches annual courses in Public Health Advocacy and Tobacco Control in the University of Sydney's MPH program.

In 1997 he won the World Health Organisation's World No Tobacco Day Medal; in 1999, the National Heart Foundation of Australia's gold medal; and in 2003 he was voted by his international peers to be awarded the American Cancer Society's Luther Terry Award for outstanding individual leadership in tobacco control. He is editor of the British Medical Journal's specialist journal, Tobacco Control.

He is a life member of the Australian Consumers' Association and was its chairman 1999-2002.
He was a key member of the Coalition for Gun Control which won the 1996 Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission's community Human Rights award.
 

Stephen Leeder:

Professor Leeder¿s research interests as a clinical epidemiologist centre on asthma and cardiovascular disease. In 2003-04, Professor Leeder worked at Columbia University to assess the impending effects of diseases such as cancer, mental illness, heart disease and stroke on developing economies. The Center for Global Health and Economic Development at Columbia published the report in April ¿04. (http://www.ahpi.health.usyd.edu.au/pdfs/colloquia2004/leederracepaper.pdf).

Professor Leeder is currently director of the Australian Health Policy Institute at the University of Sydney. The Institute provides independent analysis of major health policy questions which confront Australian and international health systems. The Institute hosts seminars to promote academic, professional and public debate on policy issues and provides an educational capacity in health policy, policy analysis and policy research in the University's teaching programs. The Institute has four themes: equity; futures; serious continuing illness; and governance.

Associations:
-Chairs the NSW Population Health Priority Taskforce and is a Member of the NSW Area Health Service Advisory Committee
-Chairs the Sydney West Area Health Service Human Research Ethics Committee, and the New Interventional Procedure Assessment Committee.
-Member of the Research and Development Advisory Committee of The George Institute for International Health.
-Chair, Cancer Institute NSW Ethics Committee.
-Board Member of The Sax Institute (formerly Institute for Health Research) which is a coalition of universities and research centres in NSW, working to foster world-class research to improve health outcomes, services and planning.
-Member of the Research Advisory Commitee of the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre.
-Member of the Global Health Institute
-Co-director of the Menzies Centre for Public Health Policy and Practice.
-Member of the Oxford Health Alliance (OHA) Economic Working Group.

Choices Comments:   Unfortunately the book is now out of print and sixteen book shops later including one specialising in out of print books has failed to turn up another copy.  I don't like the chances of trying to find one alive but I'll keep trying.  I've scanned this one and spent hours repairing it for readers, plus having the Web Mistress bookmark it for easier access.   I am unsure about copyright honestly speaking but I will make contact with the authors and seek their permission to permit me to leave it on this website.   Of course, if they insist I will have to remove it but it makes for great reading for such a contentious subject. April 20, 2006.  Received confirmation from Prof Leeder permission today, however I am informed Prof Chapman is overseas until September 2006. (also I have purchased a second copy off the web so I now feel at peace with myself.)

Index of contributors (click their name to go straight to their view)

Going To Sleep

Now the day has wearied me.
And my ardent longing shall
the stormy night in friendship
enfold me like a tired child

Hands, leave all work;
brow, forget all thought.
Now all my senses
long to sink themselves in slumber.

And the spirit unguarded
longs to soar on free wings
so that,in the magic circle of night,
it may live deeply, and a thousandfold.

Hermann Hesse (from Richard Strauss' Last four Songs)

At Gloaming

Through want and joy we have
walked hand in hand,
we are both resting from our travels
now,in the quiet countryside

Around us the valleys fold up,
already the air glows dark,
only two larks still soar
wistfully into the balmy sky.

Come here, and let them fly about;
soon it is time to sleep
We must not go astray
in this solitude

Joseph von Eichendorff (from Richard Strauss' Last four Songs)

Preface At 3.15am on the morning of May 26 1995, the Northern Territory's Assembly became the first legislature anywhere in the world to pass a bill which allowed doctors to actively assist patients to die.

The crescendo of debate leading up to and following Marshall Perron's bill has engaged the whole country. In March seven Victorian doctors "came out" on the front page of the Melbourne Age declaring their past participation in voluntary euthanasia. Since then the Age and many other newspapers have been alive with opinion. As we write, the Australian Capital Territory and South Australian legislatures are grappling with the issues. Impassioned speeches documenting the extremes of suffering are up against thundering spirituality and the potent claims being made for high tech palliative care. What started out as a whisper a mere three months before the parliamentary assent in the tropics has become a pre occupation of politicians everywhere. Jeff Kennett has proposed a consensus debate within the medical profession; Bob Carr has announced his willingness to debate as long as direction comes from the public first; and Carmen Lawrence has proposed wide community debate involving all concerned. At present both major political parties seem unwilling to hang their hats on one side of the debate or the other, perhaps mindful of the potential to alienate voters in critical seats. Of all the politicians we approached to contribute to this book, only two -- Marshall Perron and Michael Wooldridge -- agreed to declare their hands.

The preferred political route seems to be that exemplified by the Northern Territory, private members' bills with politicians free to exercise their consciences. The fears are well founded -- there can be no more dangerous area in which to legislate than life and death itself. The heavy weight of responsibility is evidenced by the torrent of passion the events in the Northern Territory have unleashed.

The medical profession is divided on the issue. On the surface orthodox medical opinion as espoused by the AMA stands against legalising euthanasia, whilst reformist opinion is in support. However, once you scratch the surface the reality is somewhat more murky with doctors from both camps swearing unswerving loyalty to one side of the debate or the other. In a recent editorial in the Medical Journal of Australia, editor Martin Van Der Weyden highlighted the gravity of the issue for doctors; 50% have been asked by patients to hasten their deaths and 19% 27% have taken active steps to bring about the death of a terminally ill patient, and a majority of public opinion has repeatedly approved of euthanasia or other form of supported death.

The most recent poll published as we go to press. AGB-McNair polled 2,061 Australians on June 2-4 1995 and asked "Lately there has been much talk about euthanasia. Would you support or oppose the introduction of a law which protects doctors who assist terminally ill patients who choose to end their own lives?" Seventy five percent of those polled said they supported such a law, 16 percent were opposed, 6 percent were neither for nor against and 3 percent said they did not know .

We can only echo Dr Van der Weyden's sentiments when he declared that "The time has surely come for society to openly address the taboo of dying. Active euthanasia should be widely discussed in an open forum free of the polemics of opponents and advocates, and without the political, religious and legal prohibitions that have stifled the debate" .

We were inspired to take the "sides" approach to this book by three similar projects undertaken in Britain in 1937 (by WH Auden, Pablo Neruda and others) about fascism and the Spanish civil war (Authors Take Sides on the Spanish War; in 1967 about American involvement in Vietnam (Authors Take Sides on Vietnam); and in 1982 (Authors Take Sides on the Falklands). Euthanasia is of course not a war, although arguments about it have often become very heated and sometimes violent.


Whatever one's views on the end of life, it seemed to us that there was no fudging two core questions that lie at the heart of most debates now occurring in many countries about euthanasia and the right to die.

"Are you for, or against, the proposal that a person with a terminal or incurable severe illness should be able to have their request granted that their life should end?"

"Do you believe that doctors should be able (with legal impunity) to actively assist such people who request that their lives be ended through euthanasia?"

We put these to each of the people who have contributed to the book and asked them to respond. The list of people we approached was designed to cover a wide spectrum of both prominent Australians and some who are not so well known but who have special interest or experience in questions of death, dying, chronic disease, ethics and religion. Brief details about each contributor precede each response. With the prominent Australians, we had no idea of which way they would respond. Some of those from health, medical, ethics and religious backgrounds have been participants in public debate about this topic, so here we knew what to expect. In writing to these people, we tried to balance our invitations between an equal number of people who would take each side.

Our original invitation list had 206 names. Fifty five people sent their responses; 37 declined usually citing pressure of work; XX failed to respond; and XX promised contributions but did not deliver. We offered no payment and asked that people respond in whatever way seemed most appropriate.

The 55 contributions in this book show that while both questions could be answered with a simple yes or no (Gough Whitlam apologising for being too busy to respond, sent a message that he supported both questions) there are deeply personal and moral ravines in which many contributors wandered on their way to an answer.

Until events in the Northern Territory euthanasia was somewhat of a sleeping giant. Debate has been largely confined within the church and to the medical profession. Unfortunately professional opinion has masqueraded as community values leaving little space for the voices of ordinary men and women. Our own mortality and the mortality of family and friends gives us all a stake in how our communities deal with life and death. We hope that these contributions will help fill in some of the silences. Tragedy and spirituality are integral to the human condition, by sharing the thoughts of other Australians we hope to provide an entry point for all to participate so that consensus and tolerance can be achieved.

Finally, we would like to thank all the contributors who responded to our letter. Thanks also go to Jennifer Byrne at Reed Books who shared our sense of how important a book on this subject done in this way could be. Thanks also to Darlene Sebalj for chasing the addresses of many of our contributors, and to Peter Singer and Helga Kuhse for their advice on the project in its early days.

Simon Chapman
Stephen Leeder 9 June 1995

Phillip Adams is a writer, broadcaster and film-maker. He is a weekly columnist for the Weekend Australian and presenter for Radio National's Late Night Live.

I've been campaigning for voluntary euthanasia for decades. Not only do I believe that a person with terminal or severe illness should be able to request that their life be ended, but I believe, equally, that we have a right to register our desire for this long in advance of need. People supporting voluntary euthanasia might not be in a position to plead their case, so such a request could be made a part of a wider declaration involving, for example, one's willingness to donate organs.

I find it intolerable that religions can impose their theologies on a secular society, overruling the passionate convictions of others, in particular my fellow atheists and agnostics.

Yes, I believe that doctors should be able to actively assist people requesting that their lives be ended, without fear of state or professional retribution.

Lately there's been an attempt to derail this debate onto issues of pain control. My support for voluntary euthanasia is not predicated on the notion that a patient should be saved from physical suffering. Let us assume that, in future, physical pain can be entirely eliminated through medication.

There are those of us who would still wish to end our lives for psychological or philosophical reasons, involving notions of human dignity. Whilst we cannot choose to be born we most emphatically have the right to choose our time of death and an efficient form of suicide will not always be available or doable.

Fr. Eugene Ahern is pastor of St Francis of Assisi Parish, Mill Park, an outer suburb of Melbourne. He made the special focus of his theological course in Rome a study of natural law theory. He has had a long involvement with the Right to Life movement and is on the board of Right to Life Australia. He has participated in various forms of non-violent direct action to oppose abortion in Australia and in the United States.

No one likes the idea of suicide. It is seen as a tragedy when people take the step to kill themselves. Euthanasia is about exactly that, the decision to take steps to kill oneself or have oneself killed believing mistakenly that one would be better off dead.

Of course we all want to have a good death. Unfortunately the phrase "die with dignity" has become a euphemism for euthanasia. In the Northern Territory a recent poll showed most people were confused about what euthanasia actually involves. Many thought it involved simply pulling the plug or turning off life support systems. Let's get it clear that euthanasia is when a doctor, not an illness, kills a patient.

The fact that patients may request to be assisted to commit suicide or that they are seriously ill are not the decisive elements in justifying euthanasia. A bleak prognosis is no ground on which to justify in the doctor's mind the plea to be killed, even if the doctor genuinely believes the patient is dying. The emphasis given in the case for euthanasia to the voluntary nature of the request is at best a smoke screen. Though presented as a safeguard, it is no safeguard at all.

The supposed safeguard that access to patient killing be limited to those terminally ill is equally spurious, apart from being totally arbitrary. In the end what difference does it make whether the deceased had been terminally ill or not?

The vital element is the doctor's own judgement that "this patient would be better off dead." The nail is struck in the coffin by the doctor's judgement. Once a doctor, or for that matter anybody else, has made that crucial judgement regarding a patient then it is a small but decisive step to entertain the thought of deliberately ending the patient's life. Put simply, it is the judgement that death is seen as preferable to life. Put philosophically it is that non existence is preferable to existence.

Such a judgement is profoundly inhuman. It strikes at the sense of the inherent value of every human life which is the basis of human society. It is a direct attack on the fundamental sense of equality of all humans, and so subversive of justice for all.

When one decides that a particular person would be better off dead one is concluding that the person no longer has a worthwhile life. It is that judgement which really strikes at the worth and dignity of every human life without exception. The phrase "worthwhile life" immediately reminds us of the great catchcry "life unworthy of life", of the German euthanasia movement, after the publication in 1920 of Hoch and Binding's book Permission for the Destruction of Life Unworthy of Life which propagated the idea
that euthanasia was the throwing overboard of dead ballast from the Ship of Fools.

Put very simply the justification for euthanasia is based on the assumption, and I would say false assumption, that human life does not possess in inherent value. This denies the basic dignity, and equality of every human being.

Our nation along with almost every nation in the world has had and continues to have a long and painful struggle to recognise the true dignity and worth of every human person without exception. One immediately thinks of the discrimination in our nation on the basis of colour and race which has been not only a denial of true equality, but a denial of the true dignity of those being discriminated against. The absurdity of the situation was that discrimination was often justified in the most high sounding terms of taking "proper care" of Aboriginal people but was only a cloak for a very negative judgement as to their true dignity, The removal of aboriginal children from their families is a glaring example. Much the same can be said of our mistreatment of disabled persons. I almost hesitate to even refer to the terrible way in which people with Down's Syndrome were labelled as "Mongols." The true dignity of these people was almost totally denied. To accept euthanasia would go against the positive achievements of this century.

Some euthanasia advocates claim they recognise the dignity of the person to be killed while they argue that the person is better off dead. It is arguing that the continued life of the person is a negative value and that death itself is thought of as a positive value. This argumentation is not only fallacious but dangerous. It is fallacious because it is based on an assessment that non existence can have a higher value than existence. It is dangerous because it can be invoked to justify the elimination of many in society starting
with those whose demise is justified on the grounds that they request it. But if its logic was to be accepted it would be a mercy to grant the same fate to other groups judged "better off dead".

The so called "right to die" deserves close scrutiny. It is a demand for a right to be able to decide when one kills oneself or is to be killed by another. Now if a person demands such a right, it would impose a duty on others to agree with that demand. It
would mean a duty to stand by and watch people kill themselves or worse, a duty to kill the people claiming the "right to die". No caring person would agree with that. Refusing the request for euthanasia is equivalent to refusing to push someone, who asked for it, over a cliff. The "right to die" is no right. It is a cruel hoax.

A case is made for euthanasia on the basis of personal autonomy, a so called right to privacy or to free choice. A closer analysis reveals that the right to free choice, like all rights, is not unbridled or unrestricted. We may have free choices but they are always exercised in the context of the common good of society. No right is absolute or unfettered. The state has a prevailing interest in upholding the value and dignity of life. It is precisely that interest which is implicitly accepted by euthanasia advocates in their acceptance of restrictions on the availability of euthanasia. The state quite properly judges that it will restrict any right to free choice or freedom of conscience in order to protect the value of human life even to the extent of outlawing acts of deliberate killing. Pursuing this logic, the Canadian Supreme Court in 1998 decided there was no right to assisted suicide in the Rodriguez case.

Given the lament over our high suicide rates, it is unconscionable that our community would endorse not just patient suicide, but cross a huge gulf and license suicide actively assisted by doctors, under the guise of false compassion. Gradually we will see the need for strong laws to protect lives threatened by quick fix solutions labelled as "euthanasia"

In the drama of life the cry of pain is not a demand to be dispatched out into the cold of death. It is a cry of anguish, the anguish of mistakenly thinking one would be better off dead! The truly human response is a loving embrace and the gentle words, "I would miss you if you were to die." People want to be needed, even missed.

A strong antidote to the pessimism of the euthanasia movement is the recently published encyclical letter of Pope John Paul II The Gospel of Life. Having lived through the attacks on life by two totalitarian regimes, the Pope founds his hope filled teachings on the life issues on the incomparable worth of the human person.

The collective wisdom of over two thousand years since Hippocrates is that society must never sanction medical killing. Doctors must be healers and carers, never purveyors of legal potions.

Yvonne Allen is a psychologist, author, public speaker and founder of Yvonne Allen and Associates, Human Relations Consultants and Introduction Services. Her mother Betty Patricia Allen died on 4th October 1994.


As I think about the dilemmas associated with the controversial issue of euthanasia, my mind turns back to the torment of the pain-filled months that preceded my mother's recent death. On many occasions during that awful time I was tempted to ask her what she thought about the option of choosing to decide to die when faced with inevitable death through terminal illness -- but I hesitated, knowing that her Catholic faith would make this impossible for her to contemplate, no matter how desirable a choice it might seem.

As someone who does not identify with nay particular creed, I can perhaps more readily speak my mind about what I regard as the inalienable right we have to decide to terminate our own existence once life has become unbearable, and when the circumstances are unlikely to ever improve. This is surely the case for many, like my mother, who are sentenced to death by a terminal illness. In her instance the diagnosis was an incurable tumour on the brain and the initial prognosis of six months stretched out to eighteen. It is sad to reflect on just how much pain and distress she endured as her body and mind succumbed to her terrible disease. It was hell on earth -- and not just for Mum but for all who loved her.

It would seem that in many instances the argument against an individual's right to choose death with dignity comes from those who just do not want to see a loved one die. To me this is a selfish motive on the part of those who are to be "left behind" -- in some cases it could even be deemed to be sadistic. Surely love would say "go in peace" rather than "linger on in torment" when suffering is all that is left in store for a person who is dying!

Life at any cost seems a spurious value. If it is judged heroic to die in the name of one's god or country through war, how can it be considered criminal to choose to meet one's god or destiny by seeking peace?

Rabbi Raymond Apple has been Senior Rabbi of the Great Synagogue, Sydney since December 1972. He is lecturer in Judaic Studies at the University of Sydney. His services to the community have been recognised by the award of Member of the Order of Australia, the Queen's Silver Jubilee Medal and the Reserve Force Decoration.

Euthanasia is not a new issue brought into focus by advances in medical technology. As far back as the time of the Biblical king Saul there were those who believed it was a mercy to put a suffering person out of his agony: II Samuel, chapter 1, records that Saul, mortally wounded, asked an Amalekite to slay him in order to hasten his death.

In most circumstances, death is the great enemy, to be opposed with heart, soul and might. Life is the great friend, to be loved, cherished and hung on to. One waxes poetical. Life is the great blessing, the great privilege, the great opportunity. Every ounce of life, my own and every other person's is precious and must be guarded and preserved at whatever cost.

But there are times when the poetry becomes a mockery, when it is death that becomes the great friend and life ceases to be such a blessing. It is then that the plea is heard, "Let me die in dignity". The implication is "I can no longer live in dignity".

The problem is that any deliberate induction of death sends shudders through most people. It certainly raises moral issues of massive dimensions. Can we afford to pay its price? The arguments have been articulated so often that they hardly need to be repeated. But better than the conventional distinction between active and passive euthanasia is the
question "What are we talking about shortening life, or shortening dying?"

If it is shortening life that is the issue, the clear principle surely has to be that life, every life, has inherent value and sanctity, and even the noblest, best intentioned induction of death is a violation of the right to stay alive, however limited the quality or duration of a given life might seem to be. Euthanasia is too easy an option.

What right do I have to dispose of or write off my own or another person's body? The question of who owns my body is complicated in law, but in religious morality it is unequivocally the property of God, given to me as a trust, not a possession. To make decisions about disposing of it is to meddle in matters that belong in another dimension.

Who am I (doctor, minister, counsellor, relative) to judge that a life is now no life? ("Who made you a prince and a judge over us? Thinkest thou to kill me?" asks Exodus 2:14). Do I have my own agenda or vested interests? Whose life is it that is in the balance? Does it make a difference that the patient may be old, poor, lonely, black, or homosexual, or belong to some other category that the Nazis used to call "useless eaters"?

What does the phrase "quality of life" mean? Is it limited to active participation in social interaction? Does quality of life not fluctuate? Aren't there times when it is less visible than at other times? And whose quality of life am I concerned with the patient's, or my own (I may suffer diminished quality of life if I have responsibility for a gravely ill patient).


Where will it all lead? If I start diminishing human lives will a banality of euthanasia set in so that I find I no longer exert myself too greatly to preserve life? Will there come a time when I do not wait for the consent of the patient or relatives and perform involuntary euthanasia because I deem it to be in the patient's (or society's) best interest?

Yet if the issue is not the shortening of living but the shortening of dying, the situation changes. One has a right to live. One also, when the time comes, has a right to die. If the natural life forces are clearly ebbing, why should they be artificially held back by machinery or medical instrumentation that prevents death from occurring? Interestingly, rabbinic tradition, which by definition believes in the efficacy of prayer, asserts that as there is a time to pray that a person live, so too there is a time to pray that they may die. Indeed, a Jewish legend finds God imploring His creatures, "Do not try to take away the sword of the angel of death; My world needs death!"

But the circumstances in which it is legitimate to withdraw artificial impediments to dying have to be properly addressed. Amongst rabbinic ethicists, Moshe Feinstein asserts that when a patient is gripped by unbearable pain and suffering, nature should be allowed to take its course. Thus when a patient is on a respirator and the machine is temporarily removed for servicing, if the patient shows no signs of life the patient need not be restored.

The distinction between shortening life and shortening death is helpful but there is a difficult grey area between the two. Making day to day decisions in that area is not likely to be carried out frivolously, but guidelines and safeguards need to be developed by the medical profession in consultation with ethicists.

But even that is not the only question that has complicated our agendas. Sonya Rudikoff, in an article in Commentary as long ago as February 1974, makes the important observation that medical treatment is so complex today that almost any death is in some way an act of euthanasia; "Recent developments," she writes, "are troubling, and they provide ample warrant for wondering whether anyone can die his own death any more". Indeed, the possibility of euthanasia in an extended sense is there from the moment I first visit my doctor and repose my trust in him to make the right decisions about my treatment and ultimately my life.

It is clear, then, that society has to ensure it sets its standards.

Peter Baume is a physician. He is Professor of Community Medicine at the University of New South Wales, Chancellor of the Australian National University, Chair of the Australian Sports Drug Agency, a Commissioner of the Australian Law Reform Commission and Patron of the Voluntary Euthanasia Society of New South Wales. He was a Senator for New South Wales from 1974 91 during which time he was a Minister in Cabinet.

Have you ever seen a person die of terminal cancer? Or of AIDS? Or of motor neurone disease? Each of them is, more often than not, a bad way to die and the dying is often associated with awful suffering.

It is emotionally shattering to sit with a person with unrelieved symptoms and watch a bad death. Since we are all to die, it is the manner of that death which becomes important. For some people I have treated, the fear of unrelieved symptoms has dominated their thoughts and their remaining lives: for other it is fear of (and dealing with:) the loss of dignity and control that so often accompany dying.

No one should have their life ended without their specific request. To allege that acceptance of voluntary euthanasia will lead to nonvoluntary and then to involuntary euthanasia is convenient but unsupported and logically nonsensical. No practitioner should be party to non-voluntary or to involuntary euthanasia (just as no medical practitioner should have anything to do with official executions. No patient should have to give up all their dignity or control at the behest of those for whom social control of others is a
goal.

Where a person has requested that their own death be hastened, that request should be taken seriously and assessed. People with endogenous depression should be identified and treated. Safeguards can be developed to ensure that requests for voluntary euthanasia are genuine and sustained.

But people are masters and mistresses of their own destiny. Personal autonomy and personal sovereignty are supreme values. Doctors and third parties are only agents and society has no proper role in attempting to control this part of peoples' lives.

Not only should medical practitioners accede to considered requests from patients that their lives should end, but many do so already. Fourteen percent of a large sample of practitioners in New South Wales already acknowledge that they have practised voluntary
euthanasia , some more than once. Most believe they have acted correctly, and a majority of all doctors want some change to the law to regulate and regularise what now goes on outside the law.

Medical practitioners act now in defiance of law whenever they assist in the practice of voluntary euthanasia. Since most practitioners wish to be law abiding people, it follows that some alteration to law is needed. First, the decision belongs to the patient and not to the attending practitioner or to churches or to relatives, or to the society. Second, if the patient makes a request for voluntary euthanasia, then practitioners who assist should be immune from prosecution, provided that they comply with appropriate guidelines and procedures.

The Northern Territory legislature has attempted to progress the law on this matter. Objections based on religious doctrine are not sufficient if they deny to people a right to make decisions for themselves -- after all, each such personal decision is amenable to God's influence, if theologians are correct.

Social control policies to limit private actions are generally unwelcome and inappropriate in whatever policy arena they occur. Policies in area designed to control the private and personal actions of others are as ill founded any other.

Charles Birch is emeritus professor at the University of Sydney where he was formerly Challis Professor of Biology. He was written extensively on ethical and philosophical problems in biology and in 1990 was the joint recipient of the $725,000 international Templeton Prize for progress in religion.

There is a prima facie case for one's right to die rather than being forced to live on in a degenerating condition, should these become one's only options. We should question why does society assume that it has the responsibility to keep one alive even against one's
desires and to the benefit of on one. Why do individual persons not have the right to decide for themselves? That is the issue I wish to face in this essay. It is different from the issue of euthanasia when decisions by one group of people are made about the life and death of others. That is an important aspect of the right to die that should not be avoided but it is not primarily the issue I am concerned with here. The question here is does anyone have the right to force another to live when that other wants to die.

There are five serious arguments directed against the right to die that need to be considered seriously. However it is a mistake to regard any one of them as having an absoluteness.

The first argument raised against the right to die is that humans should not 'play God'. This expression is used in the sense of trying to replace God as a primary determiner of the course of events in the world, some would even say the only determiner. However, for at least two centuries people have 'played God' in the sense of taking human destiny into their hands. The scientific revolution is but one example of how we have accepted science and technology as shapers of human destiny. The experiment has had mixed results. The future has become more precarious while we appraise the benefits of the technological revolution against its negative impact on the environment and on the possibility of nuclear war. Yet few would give up the enormous benefits of science and medicine. We `play God' by prolonging lives, by inoculations against diseases, by taking medicines and by keeping people alive who would have died without human intervention. People `play God' in family planning to avoid unwanted children. People also `play God' in self defence, punishing criminals and going to war. We exercise human control over many aspects of our lives from birth onwards. Why then exclude what happens at the one event at the very end? The justification for this cannot be found in a general prohibition against `playing God'.

A second argument against the right to die is that human life is sacred. But what does sacred mean? Often the word is replaced by the phrase 'infinite value'. That has been a core belief of much of the modern world. But the words 'sacred' and ' infinite' are
designed to do away with conditionals. This absoluteness, if taken with complete consistency leads to conclusions drawn only by a few. These few oppose killing in self defence or defence of loved ones and refuse to participate in military service. Furthermore it is argued that the affirmation of sacred or infinite value to human life is necessary for the avoidance of slavery and of the holocaust mentality of those Nazis who had no respect for human life. No doubt absolute respect has been important in leading to desirable laws to check exploitation of the weak by the powerful. But it has yet to be shown that only absolutist formulations can protect against these evils.

The absolutist ethic implied in the words sacred and infinite value needs to be reassessed. A way of doing this is to make a distinction between the instrumental value of life and the intrinsic value of life. Instrumental value refers to the useful value of a life
to the world. It is petty small at the beginning, perhaps it reaches a maximum and at some stage declines when one become incompetent. We should not judge people by their instrumental value alone. That is to regard a person as an object and not as a subject. Each one of us has a value independent of our usefulness to society. It is the value of our life in itself to ourselves and if you will to God. This is our intrinsic value. It is our intrinsic value that makes us subjects and not just objects. The phrase "infinite value" suggests that our intrinsic value remains unchanged from birth to death. But that really does not make much sense. A measure of intrinsic value is the richness of our experience. That is pretty small when we are embryos and when newly born. It rises to a peak as life matures. Then at some stage decline sets in for most people. And for some the intrinsic value, in the sense of the quality of life, must get close to zero when the person has a mere `vegetable' existence. I am thinking of a friend of mine whose aged wife has been in a nursing home with Alzheimer's disease for many years. She no longer recognises him. He said to me recently "she really died several years ago." At that stage of life it makes no sense to talk of infinite value. It does make sense to talk of a reduced intrinsic value and reduced quality of life for