If the End of Life Choice Act passes, people will be wrongfully killed - can you live with that?

We are now just days away from the offical NZ polling day, which this year also includes a binding referendum on whether or not the End of Life Choice Act should come into force.

This isn’t merely a survey about our personal views on euthanasia and assisted suicide. We are being asked to reject or pass a piece of legislation (the End of Life Choice Act) which has already been through Parliament and can no longer be returned there to be fixed.

The most important issue of all now are the so-called ‘safeguards’ that the End of Life Choice Act (EOLCA) contains.

If this Act manages to pass into law, these proposed ‘safety’ clauses will literally become the last and only line of defence against the wrongful killing of vulnerable people.

To put it mildly, it is frightening how unsafe and deficient these so-called protections actually are.

By way of comparison, only two years ago the Australian state of Victoria legalised euthanasia and assisted suicide. Their law contains the following six protective measures to try and prevent wrongful killings:

• Independent witnesses to the process are required 

• A mandatory cooling off period before final sign off is required

• Specialist medical advice is required 

• The patient must be assessed for competence at the time the lethal dose is administered 

• Pressuring someone into it is an offence 

• Mandatory training for doctors is a requirement 

The EOLCA contains NONE of these safeguards.

Yes, you did read that right, the EOLCA, which is seeking to give doctors the legal power to assist in patient suicides or deliberately end their lives with a lethal injection does not contain ANY of the above safeguards.

As if that wasn’t bad enough though, there are other serious safety flaws in the EOLCA as well.

There is no reliable safeguard to prevent someone being pressured into euthanasia or assisted suicide. The EOLCA simply requires one doctor to ‘do their best’ to detect pressure, and they can only speak to people that the patient lets them speak to.

It is not at all unreasonable to envisage a situation in which a vulnerable patient could be pressured into taking a lethal dose, and that the person doing the pressuring could also end up being the only person that the doctor is given permission to speak with about whether the patient is being coerced or not.

There is no protection against secret euthanasia or assisted suicide. Family members do not have to be consulted, or even informed, and the person ending their life in such a scenario could be as young as 18 years old.

There is no protection in the EOLCA for terminally ill people who are also depressed or mentally ill.

Yes, euthanasia and assisted suicide on the grounds of mental illness are prohibited in the EOLCA (other overseas jurisdictions are now allowing it), but what about people who have a pre-existing mental illness and who then subsequently go on to develop a qualifying terminal illness as well?

If such a person makes a request for assisted suicide, for example, is that the mental illness or the terminal illness that is motivating such a request? The EOLCA contains no protections for people in this category - of which there will be a lot in our country.

There’s a really good reason why more than 200 lawyers (including QCs, top lawyers and legal academics) and almost 1800 doctors have publicly denounced this Act as a very dangerous and flawed piece of legislation.

Which brings us to the important crux of all of this - if the End of Life Choice Act is allowed to pass into law, vulnerable people will be wrongfully killed.

This is not emotive hyperbole, this is simply the cold hard reality of how things unfold when the imperfections of human nurture manifest themselves in institutions and legal systems.

This has been the outcome in the minority of other overseas jurisdictions that have legalised euthanasia and assisted suicide, and have done so with much stronger safeguards than the EOLCA.

These failings have even included the killing of people without consent.

The reason such problems occur is because no legal safeguard is ever infallible or immune to the worst excesses or basic flaws of human nature.

The EOLCA is no different in this regard.

At the end of the day, what is being proposed here is the creation of an institutionalised system for terminating or assisting in the suicides of unwell New Zealanders.

This system will be staffed, managed, and supervised by fallible human beings. Human beings who make mistakes, cut corners, fail to notice important details, or even act with self-interest and maliliocius intent.

Anyone claiming that there will never be a mistake leading to the wrongful killing of a vulnerable person in such a system is not speaking truthfully.

To believe this would require us to accept the completely irrational idea that every single person who is involved will always act with infallible perfection, and that this will be the case for every single request or act of euthanasia that ever happens.

Life in the real world doesn’t function this way. Mistakes will be made, and when those mistakes happen, wrongful deaths will be the outcome.

This is not a matter of if, it is a matter of when - and with the serious safety flaws in the EOLCA it probably won’t take long for vulnerable people to start falling victim to this Act.

Regardless of where you personally stand on the ethics of euthanasia, there is no doubting that the End of Life Choice Act is seeking to legalise something which carries the most extreme of risks.

So the vitally important question we all need to ask ourselves before voting in this referendum is:

Am I comfortable giving my vote in support of a system which will result in the wrongful killing of vulnerable people? 

If you’re not, and you don’t want vulnerable New Zealanders to be placed at such great risk, voting NO is the only option.