Facts and data and conclusions derived from scientific studies, published in reputable journals, establish that allegations of coercion of elderly candidates for physician-assisted dying are not borne out in practice. Those facts are simply dismissed by the anti-choice faction.
Aside from a striking disrespect for the cognitive capacities of the elderly or the disabled, these sympathies run thin when it comes to actually doing something to improve the lives of the sick or the elderly or the disabled. Apparently, using them as a prop to generate fear of "a slippery slope" is sufficient.
In the face of significant public support for allowing competent, terminally ill people to have a choice in the time and means of ending their suffering, Barry's group is determined to make that awesome choice an institutional or a medical one, rather than respect the rights and dignity of an individual human being.
Barry has offered her own bill, one that purports to make palliative care more available but is in effect a bill, if enacted, that would make palliative care in the face of dying mandatory.
The mandatory aspects to be outlined, were it to become law, would foreclose choice to end one's life for a minimum waiting period of three months.
As the original End of Life Choice bill is intended for people with terminal illness - an expectation of six months to live - the mandatory provisions of the Barry bill are not just a slippery slope but a wall into which the wishes of a dying patient are slammed.
Putting aside the conflict of interest of palliative care physicians who stand to gain financially from such legislation, the bill places the power and decision of determining when and how to "hasten death" in the hands of the doctor, not the patient.
Barry expressed her confidence to me in the judgment of the doctor who would, in his conscientious kindness, administer morphine to alleviate pain, knowing that this may "hasten death".
A more explicit description is that it's okay if the doctor decides to kill the patient out of mercy, but not okay for the patient having the chance to have a say.
Death and dying are subjects that evoke strong emotions from people, emotions like anger and guilt.
Around death, many feel a sense of guilty helplessness - "If only I had done more ... to save the loved one". Religion may help to alleviate that guilt and I have no quarrel with religion on that score - only with having that religion-based view forced on others.
Choice, the making of decisions by that intimate core of our being, our brains, is the hallmark of adult life. We make choices daily, creating our sentient selves, and our choices reflect and maintain the integrity of the person we are and whom we become.
As that life becomes foreclosed through severe illness, it is the choice of how and when we die that provides the final dignity of our last conscious moments, free of the final fear of loss of that dignity.
It is that ultimate dignity which Maggie Barry, Simon O'Connor and the anti-choice faction would actively and coercively strip away in the name of saving us from imaginary coercion.
■Jay Kuten is an American-trained forensic psychiatrist who emigrated to New Zealand for the fly fishing. He spent 40 years comforting the afflicted and intends to spend the rest afflicting the comfortable.
