Radio Netherlands discusses assisted suicide internationally

A Radio Netherlands report called "Living and dying with dignity" includes an interview with American Not Dead Yet activist Stephen Drake:

The question of whether people have the right to choose when and how they die has long been debated all over the world. It was back in the headlines this week when a 13-year-old girl from the UK won her fight to choose not to have a heart transplant - even though she will almost certainly die without one. She argued that she would rather die with dignity than spend the rest of her life in and out of hospitals.

And in Italy, a father has won the right to disconnect the feeding tube that has been keeping his daughter alive for the last 16 years. She was seriously injured in a car crash in 1992 and has been in a coma ever since.

Campaigners for the right to die welcomed both these verdicts but even amongst those who support euthanasia, there's a lot of room for debate over who exactly should be entitled to it.

The Netherlands is one country where euthanasia is legal - if the patient requests it and is judged by two doctors to be in unbearable suffering without prospect of relief. Dr. Bert Keizer (pictured right) works at a chronic care facility in Amsterdam. He stresses that "euthanasia is never tied to a diagnosis. Never. You cannot say dementia, AIDS, leukaemia, oh, that's alright. It depends on how the leukaemia grabs you and how you cope with your leukaemia. It's about suffering."(listen to an extended interview with Dr. Keizer here).

This has allowed the law to be applied to terminally ill infants and to people suffering from chronic depression. And for some, that's taking things too far.

Edward Turner is a trustee of the UK based Dignity in Dying. His organization campaigns for euthanasia to be legalized in Britain in cases of terminally ill patients. But Turner thinks the law should make a clear distinction between what he calls assisted dying -- where the patient has a terminal medical condition -- and assisted suicide - where a person might want to die because of depression or paralysis, for example, but who isn't terminally ill.

At the other end of the spectrum, there are many people who reject all forms of euthanasia or assisted death. For some, it's for religious reasons but for others it's about the kind of divisions it can create within our society.

Stephen Drake of the disability rights group Not Dead Yet argues that any law that permits assisted dying for one group of people - for example the old, ill and disabled - but not for everyone, is implicitly discriminating against that group and undermining their value as human beings. As he sees it, "euthanasia and assisted suicide gives society a great way to divest itself of people that they see as a burden while patting themselves on the back as being compassionate and noble".

These questions and arguments persist. As Stephen Drake also says, "the importance is to have that discussion. To have everything on the table. The thing is, we have competing nightmares at work, and whose nightmares get heard?"