Voluntary assisted dying calls on MPs to back bill
KELVIN Schmidt was forced to watch his father starve to death after eight years of suffering because he wasn’t given the opportunity to die with dignity.
First it was the blindness, followed by severe arthritis, then stroke after stroke. By the end, Mr Schmidt said his father couldn’t swallow, get out of bed or even call for help as he lay immobile and in pain, gurgling and choking on his own phlegm.
Mr Schmidt said the experience of his father’s death 14 years ago convinced him of the need for voluntary assisted dying laws in Queensland, and he is far from alone.
Polling by ABC VoteCompass in 2019 found that nearly 80 per cent of respondents in Toowoomba North supported voluntary assisted dying, while 76 per cent showed the same support in Toowoomba South.
Mr Schmidt said it was disgraceful that dying people were forced to suffer as a result of current legislation.
“The options we were given were to have a hole made in his throat and be fed through a tube once a night or let nature take its course,” he said.
“Nature was what we chose, and it took about seven days for him to literally starve to death.”
Mr Schmidt said his father retired to Toowoomba in about 1997, and while it was nice for the first few years, things soon deteriorated.
“Once he lost his sight and everything started building on that, and towards the end it became absolute misery and he suffered terribly - he was blind, suffering strokes, immobile, totally bedridden and frequently choking,” he said.
“The only alternative offered was nature to take its court and him starving to death.”
“We had the option to make a hole in his throat so he could be fed food paste, and for what? Just more suffering.
“I grew up in the country and we had animals, and if we saw animals suffer we made sure they didn’t suffer unnecessarily. We would give them feed and water, but when it got to the point of death we made sure they didn’t suffer.”.”
Voluntary assisted dying campaigner David Muir, who is the chair of the Clem Jones Trust which is part of the My Life My Choice coalition, said the proposed VAD bill was about giving choice and dignity to the terminally ill.
“At the moment the only choice available to them is palliative care, and we know that it helps most people at end of life but not all,” he said.
“The expert evidence indicates there’s a number of people with particular diseases that can’t get relief from intolerable pain so this bill allows these people to choose the timing of their death to relieve them of their intolerable suffering.
“It’s really important that these people have choice. The fact of the matter is most people hang onto life until the very end, but if you know that it’s there it alleviates suffering, it has a therapeutic effect so the anxiety which often causes pain ebbs away, you may not have to use it but you know it’s there, it’s a comfort. It’s one of those things, it’s a law built out of love and compassion, and it’s important to recognise that.”
Former palliative care nurse Jeanette Wiley, from Dying With Dignity Queensland, said while palliative care had an important role to play, it shouldn’t be the only option available to the terminally ill.
“I worked for 30 years in palliative care, and it’s marvellous, there should be more money poured into it, but no matter how good it is there’ll always be a dying patient who can’t be helped,” she said.
“All of our 93 state MPs need to recognise that under a VAD law there will not be a single extra death, but there will be a lot less suffering and that voluntary assisted dying is exactly that – voluntary – so those who may never want access to VAD are accommodated 100 per cent, but opponents should not deny choice to others.”