Western Australia has been debating euthanasia for a while and in a new development, Health Minister and Deputy Premier Kim Hames has admitted that as a GP he administered the painkiller morphine to hasten a cancer patient's death. He said in his statement that what he had done was legal and not euthanasia – which he opposed. His reasoning was that the pain relieving medication was intended to ease a patient's suffering rather than end their life.
Dr. Hames said, “I recall the patient as though it was yesterday. Someone in the very last stages of dying from their cancer. The family all around. Having a lot of pain….I warned the family that the dose of painkiller I was about to administer was a respiratory suppressant and could stop the patient breathing. Did they want me to do that, did the patient want me to? And the patient and the family said yes, and so I administered that dose of painkiller…It wasn't huge, but because they were so severely ill the risk was there they would pass away as a result, and they did…There's a clear difference between administering a collection of substances to deliberately take a person's life and giving medication to stop pain that may inadvertently result in that patient dying slightly earlier than they would have.”
Greens MP Robin Chapple, who has introduced a voluntary euthanasia bill into state parliament, and euthanasia campaigner Philip Nitschke still fell that this is a grey area and doctors, patients and families needed legal surety. Mr Chapple's bill was expected to be put up for a vote late last night. Both the doctors felt that the use of high dose pain killers was not to ease suffering but to ease and hasten death. They felt doctors who thought otherwise were not being true to themselves.
The WA debate comes as euthanasia bills are set to be debated in both houses of South Australia's parliament, and federal Greens leader Bob Brown pushes to restore the Northern Territory and ACT's right to legislate on euthanasia.
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