TD warns against moves to legalise euthanasia
Limerick West TD Dan Neville predicted yesterday that the Courts were likely soon to face a test case involving a call to adjudicate on a request by a person to take their own life.
Mr Neville, who is also president of the Irish Association of Suicidology, said judges could also expect to be asked to exempt anyone who helped to end that life from prosecution. “The increased control over biological life due to improvement in medical treatment makes this situation inevitable.”
He pointed out that international opinion on the issue of euthanasia in cases involving people with serious physical illness had become more liberal in recent years. It was inevitable that pressure would come to change existing laws under which a person found guilty of assisting a suicide could face a jail sentence of up to 14 years.
His comments come after a study due to be published next week claims the true extent of suicide is over 100 more than the official figure of 409 deaths by suicide recorded in 2006.
The Fine Gael deputy health spokesperson said the main reason to oppose euthanasia was the danger of the issue becoming a slippery slope where the boundaries of what is considered lawful killing become ever wider.
Mr Neville claimed such a scenario had already happened in the Netherlands where euthanasia had been decriminalised and assisted suicide was lawful in certain restricted circumstances, even involving children.
He cited a recent Dutch legal case in which a physically fit 50-year-old woman with no mental or physical disorder wanted to take her own life following her divorce from an abusive husband and the death of her two children.
The doctor who assisted her to die was found guilty of unlawful assisted suicide by the Dutch Supreme Court having earlier been found not guilty of the offence by lower courts on the basis that none of the other doctors whom he had consulted, as required by law, had personally seen or examined the woman.
However, Mr Neville said the ruling set a precedent that a person does not need to be terminally ill for euthanasia to be permissible.
“There is a blurring between voluntary and involuntary euthanasia. It is possible that the elderly (especially those who are elderly and rich) become dispensable,” he warned.
