Page 4392 - Week 15 - Tuesday, 19 November 1991
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Euthanasia is such a formidable and important subject that I would not want my comments today to be regarded as final or definitive. I believe that this is a useful preliminary discussion only and, from what the Chief Minister has said, I can see that that is the case. Indeed, I welcome the suggestion about the Social Policy Committee. This matter is obviously - like any other major moral, ethical and social issue related to life and death issues - a matter of conscience, and I understand the point that has been made. I will certainly respect all comments today from all members as representing their individual views, and I agree about the difficulty of grey areas.
I do not speak personally out of some kind of dogmatic religious ideology. I do respect, however, the views of those religious and faith groups which put this matter under the general heading of the sanctity of life or the sacredness of life. We must hear those views and be responsive to them. Speaking for myself, which surely in this matter is what all of us must do, I would like to say quickly that the Residents Rally does not have a view here. Some of our members may have quite opposite views on this matter.
The Religious Society of Friends - Quakers - does have strong views on the taking of life. I would like to quote one view of this from Christian faith and practice in the experience of the Society of Friends, a 1966 reprint of the 1960 edition. Forgive that rather academic reference, but the body of material from which I am about to quote is itself being revised, and this particular matter may itself be in need of revision; but what that 1960 view said about capital punishment - in other words, about the taking of life by the state - was this:
the sanctioning by the State of the taking of human life has a debasing effect on the community, and tends to produce the very brutality which it seeks to prevent.
That comment was in relation to capital punishment, but there is a carry-over impact which equally applies to a process which would approve of the legal power of taking life under circumstances which relate to the choice of individuals to have their lives brought to an end. Whether people do or do not have the right to take their own lives is itself a huge moral debate. Whether people, having decided to end their own life, should allow another person to take their life is an even larger ethical and moral debate. In the case of capital punishment, there has to be an executioner or executioners. In the case of medical procedures which would either remove life support systems or actively bring about a clinical death, there is, inevitably, the need for a passive or active process which involves someone in taking that life.
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