It was 3:45 in
the morning when the vote was finally taken. After six months of arguing and
final 16 hours of hot parliamentary debates, Australia's Northern Territory
became the first legal authority in the world to allow doctors to take the lives
of incur able ill patients who wish to die. The measure passed by the convincing
vote of 15 to 10. Almost immediately word flashed on the Internet and was picked
up, half a world away, by John Hofsess, executive director of the Right to Die
Society of Canada. He sent it on via the group's on-line service, Death NET.
Says Hofsess: "We posted bulletins all day long, because of course this isn't
just something that happened in Australia. It's world history."
The full import may take a while to sink in. The NT Rights of the
Terminally Ill law has left physicians and citizens alike trying to deal with
its moral and practical implications. Some have breathed sighs of relief,
others, including churches, right-to-life groups and the Australian Medical
Association bitterly attacked the bill and the haste of its passage. But the
tide is unlikely to turn back. In Australia—where an aging population,
life—extending technology and changing community attitudes have all played their
part-other states are going to consider making a similar law to deal with
euthanasia. In the US and Canada, where the right-to-die movement is gathering
strength, observers are waiting for the dominoes to start falling.
Under the new Northern Territory law, an adult patient can request
death—probably by a deadly injection or pill—to put an end to suffering. The
patient must be diagnosed as terminally ill by two doctors. After a "cooling
off" period of seven days, the patient can sign a certificate of request. After
48 hours the wish for death can be met. "I'm not afraid of dying from a
spiritual point of view, but what I was afraid of was how I'd go, because I've
watched people die in the hospital fighting for oxygen and clawing at their
masks, "said Lloyd Nickson, a 54-year-old Darwin resident suffering from lung
cancer.