Maryanne Spurdle
Auckland, December 2, 2024
Opinion
While the country’s attention was fixed on the hikoi’s arrival at Parliament, the Ministry of Health’s obligatory review of the 2021 Euthanasia Legislation silently appeared online.
It reveals a tug-of-war between preserving safeguards for the vulnerable and actively increasing access. And though it acknowledges the need for better safeguards, recommendations repeatedly favour expansion.
The review begins by saying that the legislation has “largely been operating well,” which is accurate in the sense that 978 people who successfully applied to end their lives are now dead.
By any other definition, it has not. Recall that Members of the Ministry’s own Review Committee expressed alarm at procedural gaps, with one saying that they “would not have known if someone had died wrongly.”
Nevertheless, the “Ministry is confident that everyone who has received an assisted death met the eligibility requirements set out in the Act and had chosen an assisted death.” This is qualified by an oblique reference to “a small number of potential breaches,” one of which has been referred to the Police.
Absent Considerations
The review’s recommendations include defining the responsibilities of the Registrar and Review Committee so that they have the power to minimise such “breaches,” training for medical practitioners, specifying what patient examinations should entail, and creating specific offences in the Crimes Act.
With these basic considerations absent from the current legislation, no wonder there have been breaches.
The Ministry is still keen to abolish safeguards in the interest of access, though.
Currently, Doctors cannot discuss euthanasia with eligible patients unless patients request it, a limitation the review calls “out of step with how health services are usually provided.”
Health services lest we forget preserve life; euthanasia does not. The presence of neither drugs nor Doctors changes the fact that suicide assistance can never be provided the way health services are. The review acknowledges this and then returns to advocating for equal access that universally beneficial services, such as palliative care, have not achieved.
The review recommends amending legislation so that Doctors can, and even should, introduce euthanasia in discussions about end-of-life care. The rationale that consumers have a right to know options is flimsy. Euthanasia has been legal since 2021, and we have had a national referendum on the issue with years of media coverage. We all know it is an option.
Mandate Care Facilities
What is more harmful than someone dying a natural death because they missed the news? Or is someone with no desire to kill themselves being blindsided by a Doctor suggesting they consider it?
The Reviewers would also mandate care facilities to allow euthanasia on site, with no consideration for Residents’ or Workers’ preferences. And they would compel Doctors who object to assisting suicides to support euthanasia assessments for their patients and refer them to the Assisted Dying Service. This reinterprets their conscientious objection rights in a cynically narrow way.
It is a subtle but significant shift from “practitioners and facilities must be free to provide euthanasia” to “practitioners and facilities must provide for euthanasia.”
And if we take that leap, how soon before the cultural consensus that “certain types of patients should be free to choose euthanasia” becomes “certain types of patients should choose euthanasia”?
Maryanne Spurdle is a Researcher at the Auckland-based Maxim Institute, an independent think tank working to promote the dignity of every person in New Zealand by standing for freedom, justice, compassion, and hope.
