Bid to change SA judge’s ruling on assisted suicide

CAPE Town resident Robert Stransham-Ford, who won the right to die with a doctor’s help, was wrong when he said his terminal cancer robbed him of his constitutional right to dignity.

This is according to the Health Professions Council of SA’s appeal papers against the landmark ruling.

Stransham-Ford, 65, argued in legal papers that his slow death, pain, and inability to get to the toilet or eat was undignified. He wanted to choose when he would die, with his family around him.

In appeal papers filed this week, the profession’s council said: “The process of dying does not constitute an insult upon human dignity.

“Infirmity, incompetence, dementia and immobility, all of them of natural origins, limit human possibility. But sooner or later they are unavoidable, the products of inevitable bodily and/ or mental decay.”

The state appeal papers filed by the ministers of health and of justice and the director of public prosecutions state: “Dying is part of life, its completion.”

Three weeks ago, Judge Hans Fabricius ruled that the doctor who helped Stransham-Ford die would be protected from criminal and civil sanction and would not lose his medical licence.

Ironically, Stransham-Ford died naturally two hours before the ruling, unbeknown to his lawyers or the judge.

The state has asked that the order be rescinded, arguing it is moot because it only applied to Stransham Ford, who died before the ruling.

The order is precedent-setting, allowing other patients of sound mind and only weeks from death to approach the courts to ask for doctorassisted suicide.

The profession’s council argued that South Africa was not a place where euthanasia should take place due to the lack of good quality “palliative” care that helped dying people manage their physical and emotional pain. A lack of palliative care could lead terminally ill people to request assisted suicide out of desperation.