The media in Australia and New Zealand are shocked that Philip Nitschke—the Down Under Jack Kevorkian—would help a woman commit suicide who wasn’t terminally ill. What amazes me is that they are seemingly surprised. He’s done it before in the Nancy Crick case, in which he admitted both that he and Crick knew she wasn’t terminally ill when he counseled her to commit suicide and that he and she had lied to the media before the event claiming she was dying in order to gain sympathetic coverage. From the current story: Australian euthanasia advocate Philip Nitschke has been accused of advising a depressed woman who took her own life about smuggling lethal drugs from Mexico. The Sunday Star-Times reported that the 68-year-old woman, who was not terminally ill, killed herself in 2006 with drugs she smuggled home from Mexico after seeking advice from Dr Nitschke.
With regard to assisted suicide not really being about terminal illness: Many just don’t want to see the evidence that is before their very eyes. Here is just a sampling:
- Euthanasia/assisted suicide is available to the depressed in the Netherlands.
- The Swiss Supreme Court recently created a constitutional right to assisted suicide for the mentally ill.
- There is advocacy in very high places here in the USA for the same thing.
- Most of Jack Kevorkian’s “patients” were not terminally ill, and five weren’t even sick upon autopsy.
- At least one non terminally ill patient (as defined by the Oregon law) has received a lethal prescription in that state. Despite it being revealed in a peer reviewed journal article, the state took no action against the prescribing doctor.
- In Canada, Tracy Latimer, murdered by her father because she had cerebral palsy was not terminally ill—and he was supported by a wide swath of the public and media commentators.
I could go on. But you know the old saying, none are so blind as those who refuse to see.
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