Tag: Victoria (Australia)

Victoria, Australia: Voluntary Assisted Dying Bill 2017

Comment

Sean Murphy*

A  euthanasia and assisted suicide bill introduced in the Parliament of Victoria, Australia, includes several provisions that pertain to legal protection of freedom of conscience.  Concerning these:

  • Freedom of conscience provisions concern only individual practitioners, not health care facilities.  Freedom of conscience presumably includes acting upon moral or ethical beliefs grounded in religious teaching.
  • Statements of principles that require encouragement and promotion of an individual “preferences and values,” that people should be “supported” in conversations about treatment and care and “shown respect” for their beliefs, etc. can be interpreted to require affirmation of moral or ethical choices.
    • While the principles may have no direct legal effect, they could be cited by professional regulatory authorities against those who refuse to encourage, promote, or affirm the acceptability of euthanasia and assisted suicide.
  • Registered medical practitioner is not defined, but all would be encompassed by the definition of health care practitioner.
  • All health care practitioners are protected by Section 7.
  • Section 7(b) allows for refusal to participate in the request and assessment process and Section 7(c) protects refusal to be present when lethal medication is administered, but Section 7
    • does not include protection for refusal to participate in the administration of lethal medication, by, for example, inserting an IV line in advance, or by other means
    • does not include protection for refusal to participate in dispensing lethal medication
  • “Participate” in Section 7(b) is broad enough to encompass referral.  However, the bill would be improved by providing protection against coerced indirect participation in administering or dispensing lethal medication.
  • The bill does not require falsification of death certificates, but does require the falsification of the cause of death in the registration of deaths.  The bill includes no protection for a registrar who, for reasons of conscience, is unwilling to falsify a registry entry.

116 Victorian patients refuse lifesaving treatment

The Advertiser

Grant McAurthur

FOUR Victorians a week are taking legal action to prevent doctors giving them lifesaving treatment, with the number expected to multiply next year when new regulations make refusing care easier.

As the Victorian parliament prepares to debate voluntary euthanasia laws in coming months, the Herald Sun can reveal 116 patients have already used legally binding certificates to ban hospitals prolonging their lives this year; however, the measures stop short of assisting them to die.

The issue arose last month when a failed suicide pact saw emergency doctors at Monash Medical Centre forced to save an elderly patient against her wishes because no legally binding Refusal of Treatment Certificate had been lodged to reinforce the demands. . . [Full text]

 

Politicians wrestle with doctors’ consciences in Victoria

Conscientious objection needs to be protected

MercatorNet
Reproduced with permission

Paul Russell*

As the Victorian Ministerial Advisory Panel on “assisted dying” makes ready to release its interim report sometime in April, The Age newspaper turned its attention to the matter of conscience whether a doctor may refuse to take part in any action that would bring about the premature and deliberate death of a person.

Conscience – or the ability to draw upon one’s own personal belief system in making a decision about an action – plays out at different levels in any debate on euthanasia and assisted suicide. . . [Full text]

 

Victorian Premier and Opposition Leader pledge to allow conscience vote on forcing doctors to participate in abortion

News Release

Australian Christian Lobby

The Victorian Premier and Opposition Leader will allow a conscience vote if a private members’ bill is introduced to restore freedom to doctors to decline to participate in abortion.

Denis Napthine and Daniel Andrews were responding to questions from Christian leaders at the Australian Christian Lobby’s Make it Count forum at Queens’ Hall, Parliament House last night.

Their commitments come following sanctions imposed on Melbourne Doctor Mark Hobart, who declined to assist a couple who wanted their baby girl aborted so they could try again for a boy.

“If a private members’ bill was introduced then we would certainly allow a conscience vote,” Dr. Napthine said.

“My position would be to afford a conscience vote,” Mr Andrews said.

ACL Victorian Director Dan Flynn welcomed the leaders’ commitments to allow a parliamentary vote on whether or not doctors should be forced to participate in abortion by making a referral for an abortion.

“No one should be forced to go against their conscience on an issue which involves the taking of a human life,” Mr Flynn said.

The leaders were asked about a range of issues including domestic violence, freedom of religion, poker machine reform and the ice epidemic.

Asked whether “your Government (would) commission independent research into whether there are features in poker machines that lead to gambling addiction”, Mr Andrews committed to examining “the best research, the best evidence”.

On family violence, Dr. Napthine said: “Men particularly need to stand up”.

Mr. Andrews said family violence was the leading cause of death or disability for women aged 45 and under and was “national disgrace”.

On religious freedom, Mr Flynn expressed disappointment about Labor’s election policy, reiterated last night by Mr Andrews, to amend Equal Opportunity laws to diminish the freedom of faith-based schools to employ staff who share their ethos.

Dr. Napthine was called away from the forum to deal with last night’s terrorism-related shooting of an Islamic extremist just moments before Mr Andrews concluded taking questions.

The pre-election Make it Count event was attended by 150 Christian leaders from a wide cross-section of denominations and churches.

Fundamental freedoms

 Why the right to conscientious objection must be restored

Presentation to the Life Dinner
Melbourne, Australia

David van Gend*

I feel a little out of place coming from Queensland to speak about the wretched situation in Victoria: coming from a State where it is always sunny, where the people are always nice, and where we don’t have oppressive laws that try to compel the conscience of free citizens.

But we are all in this together: an assault on fundamental freedoms in one State will become a precedent for similar abuses in other States.

Uncivil society

It was a Melbourne man, Julian Savulescu, now an ethics professor at Oxford, who declared that doctors who will not provide abortion should be “punished through removal of license to practice”. He wrote in the British Medical Journal in 2006:

A doctors’ conscience has little place in the delivery of modern medical care. What should be provided to patients is defined by the law… If people are not prepared to offer legally permitted, efficient, and beneficial care to a patient because it conflicts with their values, they should not be doctors.1

Crucial to his argument is that, “when society has already decided that a service is legal”, it is not for doctors to “compromise the delivery of services”. When Savulescu’s article was discussed in 2006 in the medical newspaper Australian Doctor, I was given as an example of the sort of doctor who, in his view, “should either get out of the specialty or the profession altogether.”2  I gave a different angle to Australian Doctor: that abortion as commonly practiced is not a medical service; it is a “medical abuse” which doctors are bound by their Hippocratic principles and humane conscience not to commit.

And no law, no professional board, has the authority to compel any doctor to violate the principles of their vocation or mutilate their own conscience by collaborating in intentional killing.

Yet in Victoria, under section 8 of the Abortion Law Reform Act 2008,3 that compulsion by the authorities is exactly what doctors and nurses face.

Not long ago society was a little more civil and did not contemplate using the force of law to compel the conscience of fellow citizens. . . [Full text]