END-OF-LIFE DELIBERATIONS

In 2015, as a supporter of the right-to-die movement, I appeared before the health select committee, which spent about 18 months travelling around the country reading and hearing submissions.

Unsubstantiated claims, repeated hundreds of times, were made and accepted at face value. There was no attempt to determine their veracity.

The concluding report summarised the reasons for and against assisted dying. There was nothing that we didn’t already know from decades of letters to editors, public talks, informal polls and journalistic articles. There were no recommendations. Taxpayers paid for this non-outcome.

Now that David Seymour’s End of Life Choice Bill has passed its first reading in Parliament, we have the opportunity to again make submissions on the issue, this time to the justice select committee. The difference is we are being asked to comment on an actual bill, not just a concept. The deadline is February 20.

Will the same unsubstantiated “evidence” (claims of

coercion, abuse, a “slippery slope”) go unchallenged? Parliamentary committees in Canada and Victoria have been through this process before concluding that assisted dying should be legalised and this has since happened in both jurisdictions.

Will the justice select committee come to the same conclusion or is this just another box-ticking step before yet another non-outcome is announced?

Ann David (Waikanae)