Canadian euthanasia opponent Amanda Achtman is a most cheerful person with whom to speak about death and dying.
As her country seeks to further expand its euthanasia and assisted suicide regime, now firmly embedded in the healthcare system, she continues to fight back by expanding what she says is her “hobby” of spending time listening to and sharing life stories of older and otherwise vulnerable people and passing on their wisdom.
Amanda visited Sydney last week and addressed medical professionals, students and others at Warrane College UNSW and the University of Sydney—events co-hosted by the Plunkett Centre for Ethics and organised by University Catholics respectively—about the experience of so-called ‘assisted dying’ in Canada and her efforts at cultural renewal around suffering, disability, and death through her Dying to Meet You short films project.
She argues that once euthanasia becomes legal, as it is now across Canada and every Australian state and the ACT, it cannot remain limited but is always expanded on the grounds of equality, and that ultimately it represents not a declaration of human freedom but one of a failure to extend proper care to people when they need it.
In Canada, she explains, a person suffering severe depression may wait up to 18 months for an appointment with a psychiatrist but may be euthanised on the same day of submitting a request, if death is reasonably foreseeable, otherwise within 90 days.
“And it’s free because it’s public health care, but everything else costs money,” she adds.
One of the reasons for Achtman’s hope is she sees the issue of euthanasia as a “tremendous field for evangelisation.”
“The church is an expert in humanity, as Pope Paul VI said, and so we are able to rise to this occasion, whether in Australia or in Canada,” she told The Catholic Weekly.
“When else do you have people within the society attending to questions of suffering, death, meaning, and hope? And many people whether they have faith or not, because these are the deeply human questions, are prepared to discuss and confront them at some level.
“We lose people and that is a tragedy and yet the truth remains and is a basis for hope, that the dignity of the person is never lost, and that we can love those in the world and to the end, as Christ showed us.
“The good we seek is so noble. It is the person fully alive, and love fully expressed.
“We believers are used to be degraded in public life, and yet when we take the positive aspirational outlook that the church has something so exceedingly beautiful to propose and an ideal and a standard so noble and so worthy of us, it is attractive.
“People want to come out to the side that is winning, and we are actually winning, as Pope Benedict said during World Youth Day when he came to Sydney, and was asked, ‘Can you be hopeful about the church in Australia?’
“And he said, ‘I think there will be in a certain sense in this Western world a crisis of our faith, but we will always also have a revival of the faith because Christian faith is simply true and the truth will always be present in the human world, and God will always be truth.”
Rather than becoming discouraged by so many leaders in her country, and others, taking a different path, she says her work of advocacy for the vulnerable is “existentially satisfying.”