Australian doctor Philip Nitschke is not like other euthanasia advocates, or at least, he does not put on the same facade as its other champions.
Most of those who push for euthanasia and assisted suicide concede that there should be restrictions on who should be provided with lethal drugs.
Some might draw the line at those who have only six months to live, some 12, some for all terminally ill persons, but with no legislated prognosis.
Others, like those who have been at the forefront of Canada’s ever-expanding regime point to chronic illness or even mental anguish as the appropriate measure for whether a person is sufficiently suffering in order for the state to not only sanction but sponsor their death.
Nitschke has long been on the record as considering an element of suffering to be unnecessary, advocating rather for what he calls “rational suicide,” the right of every adult who has decision-making capacity to choose the timing and manner of their death.
This suggestion has always proved controversial but—if advocates are honest—it is the logical conclusion to their euthanasia advocacy because the so-called safeguards are arbitrary and capable of amendment, depending on the political appetite for legal death.
Like abortion, the choice for legalised euthanasia is binary: either you agree that the state should permit and facilitate the killing of some members of the human family, or it should not. That you might draw a line where others do not does not make a difference to the moral calculus.
But now Nitschke has gone a step further, hoping to extend assisted suicide not only to those who are rational enough to choose their death at the time of their death, but to also provide the means for people to book a day and time for their death for those who might lose mental capacity.
Nitschke is close to trialling a “death implant,” which would be surgically inserted into a person’s body and programmed to release a lethal dose of drugs into their bloodstream at a chosen time.
As the time set by the person approached, the device would start beeping and a person would have to actively resist its deployment by pressing a button or taking similar action. If they did not do so, the lethal dose would be released, and the person would die.
It appears the idea behind the device is to accommodate those diagnosed with dementia or another illness that might affect their decision-making capacity in later life. Such a person would be able to have the death switch implanted and set to some day in the future.
But the reality is that it is a move from voluntary assisted dying to involuntary assisted dying.
If the person is still of sound mind and decides they don’t want to go through with it, they would press the cancel button and keep on living. But if the person is no longer of sound mind or has at least lost enough of their mental capabilities so they forget they had the switch implanted in the first place, they would not be able to turn it off and they would die.
VAD turns into IAD very quickly in these circumstances and would open up a point of no return for assisted dying.
A person may have changed their mind and no longer want to die on the date programmed into the ticking time bomb in their arm, but if they are not physically or mentally capable of communicating this to their doctor or a family member and can’t manage to diffuse the bomb to which they once consented, they die.
We have all seen those movies where a person is strapped to a ticking time bomb and the hero just manages to diffuse it in time to save the person’s life. Nitschke wants to change the ending, with the person dying and the guy who planted the bomb on them labelled the hero.
We’re not buying it.