Last week Matthew Jansen took umbrage at my statement that his exploitation of a Belgian teen's death to further his cause was vile, because I had never met him. But nor had he met the Belgian teen whose death he was so quick to judge. Nor had he or the Care Alliance met my wife, Lecretia Seales, before intervening to obstruct her plea to the High Court. I know Jansen more than he knew either of those people.
Lecretia would agree with John Roughan, who said last weekend, "there is in fact dignity in living with pain and incapacity and we should not take it away". But she distinguished between living and dying, and she would have also said that the dignity of dying with pain and incapacity is subjective. She would never presume to question those who value redemptive suffering until death, but she, like many others, did not.
In December, Roughan accused me of being dishonest about my wife's death because I hadn't immediately shared the depth of her suffering in a tribute I wrote shortly after she died, ignoring the possibility that perhaps, as a grieving husband who had just lost his wife, I wasn't willing to share those details publicly and have the media argue whether she'd suffered enough.
He also suggested that Lecretia could have been palliatively sedated, despite Lecretia being quite clear in her affidavits that that was not what she wanted. Perhaps Roughan could accept that all I want for my wife was what she wanted for herself and others: to have her autonomy respected and to not to be judged by others for it.
Both Roughan and Jansen argue against legalising assisted dying because of the risk of a "slippery slope", claiming that if moderate legislative change is made then more extreme change will surely follow. It is demonstrably fallacious. When same sex marriage was proposed, opponents protested that it would lead to legalisation of group marriage, bestiality and worse. None of those things have eventuated.
