End-of-Life Questions

I’m not sure if I should roll up to an electorate meeting on the End of Life Choice Bill tonight — it’s not my electorate and I am already a bit cross that anti-Bill protestors attend meetings all over the place and distort the vote that is usually taken at these events.

But if I go—and can pluck up the courage!—I’d like to ask a couple of questions of each candidate:—

(I am 84, have advanced metastatic spinal compression prostate cancer. I have no other life-threatening issues but I do have a history of undiagnosed and untreated tetany spasms after one surgery. If this cancer is allowed to take its course I can expect significant paralysis, double incontinence and a prolonged, undignified, painful death, possibly without adequate relief of suffering. I don’t actually want that, so—)

1.       Are you personally satisfied with the present law that says it is not a crime if I decide to take my own life rather than let my disease take its course? Yes or No.

2.       Are you then personally comfortable with my reality that if this Bill is not put into law quite soon I may plan to end my life now while I can still manage to drive my car into a bridge abutment or can shut myself up in our garage with the engine running (oh, damn, that won’t work—our car is all-electric!) or get to town to buy a party kit and figure out how to make that do what it was never designed for?

"Turkey" O'Connor strikes again!

So "Turkey" O'Connor has struck again...
It was appalling that he did not stand aside as Chair of the Parliamentary Health Committee on End of Life Choice a couple of years ago - he forfeited his moral right to head up the investigation when he made a public statement of his personal point of view. It was worse when he urged Catholics to send in "submissions" favouring his point of view. It was pretty bad when his Committee produced a mealy-mouthed report that did not really move the issue in either direction. And his public statement after the Committee finished its work was a masterpiece of subterfuge and misstatement.
Now he has revealed that after listening to some 1800 personally presented submissions he still doesn't understand the distinction between end of life choice for terminally ill aged people and the desperate plight of physically well people who feel that suicide is their only choice.
When I first criticised O'Connor for maintaining that it was OK to publicly promote a point of view at the same time as presiding over an investigation into the issue one of my readers observed that it was like asking a turkey to preside over a committee discussing the future of Thanksgiving.
Well, to mix a metaphor, the turkey hasn't changed its spots

Suicide Statistics

While the official in charge of Mental Health in NZ is doing his belated homework and trying to find out how many people committed suicide each year on his watch, I'd like him to tell us also how many of those suicides were of suffering, elderly people who, fearing they were about to lose control of their lives decided to take matters into their own hands.
Other more conscientious researchers are telling us that this number is increasing substantially in this country in the absence of any serious plan for introducing a more orderly alternative. It would be interesting to know if the present ballooning in the number of suicides is actually of the young people with whom entertainer Mike King does such a great job. But it's possible that the increase could be among the suffering and scared elderly, in whom nobody seems much interested. We need to talk more about this....