Voluntary euthanasia or murder?

When I read this article my first response was to groan, "Give the poor girls a break..." But when the initial indignation had settled and I actually thought about it, I realised that the issue of Voluntary Euthanasia is probably going to be settled by beginning in the criminal courts, and so it should be. There are two reasons I see as important, the first is that the real murderers need to be screened out somehow; without a system for the monitoring of voluntary euthenasia the criminal court is all Australia has. Secondly, the public needs to be reassured that voluntary euthanasia is not murder, and what better way than to convict someone of the lesser crime of assisting a suicide? Eventually someone who matters is going to realise that we're filling our prisons with well meaning people who said "yes" when people they loved asked for help with hastening death. They will realise that prison for these people is stupid (finally) and legislate to change the situation. But before that can happen they need to understand that assisted suicide is not murder, or at least, not murder in the morally meaningful sense that the person murdered did not want to die.

There are some folk out there who will think that distinction is meaningless, that murder is murder, period. That's nice dears *pats them on the head* go away and come back when you can handle a world that's not morally black and white, that is, the real world. In the real world palliative care does not work for everyone, some people would rather suffer because they are afraid of death, but there are some who would welcome the relief. Some people can do it on their own, some need help. In my opinion, those who fear death have every right to prolong their suffering; those in their right minds who wish to die have a right to that too.

The Netherlands has a system where one can make a formal request for assisted suicide. One is assessed by at least one doctor and one psychiatrist and more requests are denied than granted. The Netherlands has now produced data showing that the slippery slope many people feared did not eventuate. Peter Singer's Rethinking Life and Death has a good chapter on assisted suicide in the Netherlands, and is worth checking out for anyone interested in having an informed opinion on the topic.

Update 13/5/2008

I didn't want to be right (ok, ok, I really do like to be right), but this and this are both reasons why we need the criminal justice system at the moment, and strong regulation and control of voluntary euthanasia in the future.