Garth George: Call it what you like, it's simply legalised murder

I often wonder what goes through the minds of politicians like Peter Brown and Tim Barnett when they frame private member's bills on matters of morality, apparently for no reason at all. To use the modern jargon, I wonder where they're coming from.

The same goes for whoever it was who began in the last third-term National Government to agitate for lowering the drinking age, which has very quickly had horrendous ramifications for young people in particular and society as a whole.

Do they get bored with life as backbench MPs and seek to make names for themselves, to bask in a fleeting limelight, by latching on to something that is sure by its very nature to be controversial - in Mr Brown's case euthanasia, in Mr Barnett's case prostitution?

It's not as if there is any great demand in the community for the things they want to do. Mr Brown wants Parliament to legalise euthanasia, the circumlocutions for which are "death with dignity", "mercy killing" or the more accurate "doctor-assisted suicide" rather than what it really is, legalised murder.

Mr Barnett wants to revolutionise whoredom, making it easier and more profitable for all concerned to participate in this, the second oldest industry in the world (the first was war and soldiering). I have no argument with removing the law against soliciting, but that is as far as the matter ever needed to go.

Theoretically, Parliament has always existed to carry out the will of the people but there have always been those - and particularly in "democratic" socialist parties - who want to set the pace.

Which doesn't explain Mr Brown's behaviour, for he and his party are hardly socialist. So why does he come up with an issue pressed by no more than a handful of citizens with a specific bee in their bonnets?

The only thing that can be said in favour of his bill is that it demands a national referendum before any decision is made to legalise the killing of the sick. Which isn't saying much, really, considering the fate of the last two referendums.

According to this newspaper on Monday, a Massey University "survey" showed that more than 70 per cent of people supported doctor-assisted suicide for people with a painful, incurable disease.

Significantly, we are not told where this survey took place, how many people participated, what sort of people they were, what question was asked or anything but that bald statement of the perceived result.

This is the sort of propaganda that has become common these days, particularly among academics who want to ensure that their "research" fits a preconceived conclusion. Which probably helps to explain why things like making euthanasia readily available and trying to give harlotry a new respectability seem to take on a life of their own without any assistance from society at large.

It certainly doesn't help that so many journalists today, particularly in the electronic media, can't give us any answers because they haven't the faintest idea what the questions are.

When abortion was decriminalised back in the 1970s, the new law was hedged around with all sorts of apparent controls, all in the hands of the medical profession. Last year we had more than 16,000 abortions, most of them authorised by doctors on the grounds of a threat to the mental health of the mother.

Mr Brown's euthanasia bill also proposes to put the decisions in the hands of doctors, in this case psychiatrists and counsellors. I wonder if 25 years from now we will read that there were more than 16,000 cases of assisted suicide in the country the year before? And that 35,000 mad women had abortions.

I've had quite a bit to do with psychiatrists over the years and have found them all as demented as the people they set out to treat; and as for counsellors, if the mountain of advice available today was of any use, there wouldn't be a problem left.

Most of the arguments in favour of euthanasia are specious, particularly the one trotted out by Cass Avery in her column on this page on Monday: "Well, I'm not living to prove anyone else's point about science or morality. It's my choice."

Nothing changes. That's the same argument certain women used in support of decriminalising abortion - and look at the wholesale slaughter of our nation's heritage that has followed.

The man who has fronted Auckland's Voluntary Euthanasia Society (how many members, I wonder?) says the "cruelty" of not having legal mercy killing is that people are condemned to die in isolation.

What nonsense. After suffering for weeks in the terminal stages of brain cancer, my brother died surrounded by his family, including a 2 1/2-year-old grandson and toddler granddaughter and a number of lifetime intimate friends.

It was an experience none of them would have sought and had she been able to my sister-in-law would have ended her husband's suffering days before he finally gave up the ghost.

Yet you won't find any of them voting for mercy killing. They understand that the mystery of death - like the mystery of conception - is best left to God.

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