A law permitting assisted suicide has come into force in Austria in spite of the Catholic bishops warning the nation that it will help to create an era in which “every handicap or disease is seen as a failure that cannot be tolerated”.
From New Year’s Day, the law licences doctors to prescribe lethal drugs to either terminally ill adults or those with a permanent debilitating condition who request them to take their own lives.
At present, children and people suffering from mental health problems will not be considered eligible.
Safeguards include patient assessments by two doctors – one of whom must be a palliative care specialist – and a mandatory cooling off period of between two and 12 weeks from making an initial request.
People opposing the law say that all safeguards will not prevent expansion of eligibility because they are susceptible to removal or amendment once the law is active.
All jurisdictions in which either assisted suicide or euthanasia are permitted have seen so-called robust safeguards weakened or taken away as they are gradually reinterpreted as a “barriers to access”.
According to Vatican News, the Austrian bishops denounced assisted suicide as part of a “cultural trend by which the only form of life worth living is a full and active life”.
“Dying is a part of life, but not killing,” they said in a five-page letter to mark the Day for Life in June.
Archbishop Franz Lackner of Salzburg, the president of the Austrian bishops’ conference, said the new law was replete with “unacceptable flaws”.
He said it made assisted suicide a trivial medical prescription with virtually no criminal sanctions available to punish doctors who abused the law.
The archbishop also said activists had hijacked the language of compassion at the expense of the palliative care movement.
The new law, he said, was “unfair toward all those people who make it possible to die with dignity through reliable and attentive care and who will continue in the future”.
The country’s Parliament approved the new law in December after a constitutional court ruled that the prohibition against assisted suicide – punishable by up to five years in jail – was a violation of the “right of self-determination”.
Assisted suicide is legal in neighbouring Switzerland and in other European countries such as Spain and the Netherlands, as well as in some US states.
Euthanasia is also permitted in the Low Countries and in Spain as well as Canada, New Zealand and most of Australia.
Attempts are under way to legalise assisted suicide in England and Wales through the Assisted Dying Bill of Baroness Meacher which is progressing through the House of Lords while in Scotland the proposals for an assisted suicide law by Liam McArthur, a Lib Dem MSP, have just concluded their public consultation phase.
Baroness Meacher, the chair of Dignity in Dying – the group formerly known as the Voluntary Euthanasia Society – has also tabled an amendment to the Health and Social Care Bill in an attempt to make assisted suicide a component of palliative care. It will be considered by peers as early as next week.
Politicians on the Channel Island of Jersey, a British dependency, have meanwhile agreed in principle to legalise both euthanasia and assisted suicide.
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