LAUNCH OF TO KILL OR NOT TO KILL: EUTHANASIA IN A SOCIETY WITH A CULTURAL DEATH WISH (AUSTIN MACAULEY PUBLISHERS, 2021) BY JOHN FLEMING

It is an honour to have been asked to launch this outstanding, timely and “essential” book, and I pay tribute to John’s equally outstanding summary of the core issues of the book in his opening remarks.

Book launches are normally happy occasions.  There are two reasons why this launch is less so than normal.  The first is its subject matter, which charts the progress of an intrinsic evil.  The second is that Australia faces two upcoming parliamentary debates which might well have the effect of ensuring legal euthanasia across the breadth of our land.  So, this is a sober book launch.  It is a book launch coinciding with a political campaign.

The proponents of euthanasia claim momentum.  This is not so, certainly not so internationally.  While we may have all six states practising euthanasia if the legislation passes in NSW and Queensland, only eight of 50 states in the USA have something approximating what is proposed here.  And only a few countries across the globe have implemented euthanasia.  People are, indeed, marching in the streets – for freedom – as we speak, but there is no similar popular clamouring for the legislation shortly to be debated.

The countries where euthanasia is legally practised are mostly Western so-called liberal democracies which have all been infected by a philosophical shift away from fundamental human rights to a darker philosophy – whether termed secularism, radical individualism, post-modernist relativism – that has its roots in theories that seek to undermine our way of life.  These roots are explored in detail in Fr Fleming’s book, which concerns itself, quite literally, with matters of life and death.

Who is John Fleming?  He is an old friend and colleague from Campion College, one of the few green shoots and an educational oasis of liberalism in its best sense, where John was the outstanding inaugural President and who gave it the start it needed to grow into the wonderful institution it is today.  John was also the inaugural President of the Southern Cross Bioethics Institute in Adelaide, another institution of direct relevance to today’s event to which John provided wonderful leadership and initial direction.

Why the book, and why now?  I think of this book and of its author as resisting “the culture of death”, a phrase popularised by St John Paul II.  Interestingly, there is another phrase popularised by John Paul’s papal successor, Pope Benedict XVI, “the dictatorship of relativism”, which very accurately sums up the guiding philosophy of our age and which gives rise to the push for euthanasia.

One of John Fleming’s motivations is the get past the emotionalism, the philosophical clutter, the appeal to personally familiar hard cases of late-life suffering and pain, and the sheer superficiality of much of the debate, to uncover the deeper and broader issues, and to promote a discussion based on reason and proper argument.  It might be called a superficial and populist (in its worst sense) debate.  Equally, it could be called a push based upon lies, exaggerations, half-truths, and false promises.  In many ways, the movement for euthanasia is like Black Lives Matter, which appeals to widely-held views yet conceals much of its real motivations.

John and the Hon Greg Donnelly MLC – to whom we owe great thanks for hosting this launch – have both worried that there is very little pushback in this debate.  Hence the timeliness and the urgent need for this book.  Not only are the arguments often superficial.  To an extent, they are non-existent, and this is of great concern to our democracy.

The book describes a war on many fronts, and this wrecking ball of a book deals with them all.  Euthanasia is a battle in a far broader war.  While it describes an intrinsic evil, the book has many sub-themes of great interest to all who might be concerned with this debate.  These include:

  • The question of “slippery slope” arguments, often derided but which describe a basic and very real danger when seemingly innocuous new laws with malevolent intent are introduced and are, right away, open to abuse and inevitable expansion, both in terms of the conditions covered and the age of the patient;
  • The whole question of eugenics and euthanasia, once openly popular and now, perhaps equally popular yet cleverly hidden by its proponents such as Bill Gates Sr (and possibly his more famous son);
  • The role of religious secularism as a universal philosophy in driving the euthanasia argument;
  • The roll of polling with loaded questions in establishing the false claim that euthanasia has almost universal support;
  • The use of language to shape debate, especially the deployment of euphemistic soft-sell terms – as in the debates over traditional marriage and abortion – like “dignity”, “choice” and “love” in order to sugar-coat lethal intent, not to mention the classic avoidance of “suicide”, something that is regarded by most as tragic and to-be-avoided, and its replacement by “voluntary assisted dying”;
  • The useful historical primer on medical ethics.

The book’s case study of Belgium is a go-to guide on the question of slippery slopes.  But these are merely some of the book’s themes and critical touch-points.  A scholarly book of 550 pages contains much more.  Much more depth, detail, research.  It is a book of back-stories, of “how we got here” and what is really at stake.  Knowing these back-stories is essential to getting past the propaganda and the con-trick that is at the heart of the pro-euthanasia push.

I mention polling.  Questions such as the following, from Gallup in 2017, suggest that the framing of questions and the appeal to emotions are critical to the strategies and methods of euthanasia champions, who, early on, realised that terms like “killing” were wildly unpopular with those whom they wished to persuade:

When a person has a disease that cannot be cured and is living in severe pain, do you think doctors should or should not be allowed by law to assist the patient to commit suicide if the patient requests it?

The terms “incurable”, “severe pain” and the appeal to “consent” blur controversial areas, and the person questioned in the survey is led unconsciously to a conclusion.  These methods are rampant in this debate, as Fr Fleming’s book points out.  Making abortion “legal, safe and rare” is another example of the same subterfuge.

What of the arguments that can usefully be deployed to persuade people at least to look more closely at the issues in the euthanasia debate?  A critical part of engaging in the debate, whether as a parliamentarian or as a layperson, is to understand the arguments that are typically used by proponents of euthanasia.  Here are a few of them:

  • The use of wordplay to soften the truth and to modify messaging;
  • The creation of false dilemmas, for example shaping euthanasia as a binary choice between painless death by poison now versus painful suicide later, with any reference to the third choice of palliative care, something almost never spoken of in these conversations;
  • Glossing over inconvenient truths, for example the non-reporting of euthanasia; the existing rights of patients to receive substantial pain relief; examples of non-consented euthanasia; ignoring the frequent examples of mis-diagnoses;
  • Insistent that there are safeguards when there are not;
  • The depiction of opponents as religious zealots when it is often the proponents who are non-religious zealots with religious fervour;
  • Getting people to suspend belief, such as encouraging cognitive dissonance/doublethink about suicide;
  • Dwelling on hard examples;
  • Claiming they have universal support when they do not;
  • Avoiding the real debate – the quality of palliative care (currently being explored by a Parliamentary Committee chaired by Greg Donnelly);
  • Blaming poor palliative care – where it exists – for people wishing to end their lives;
  • Criticising slippery slope arguments as if simply using the term renders the argument off-limits.

Countering these strategies is as critical to the effective prosecution of the anti-euthanasia case as is the quality of our own arguments.

Many of the themes noted here are raised in a book review I have written for the forthcoming (September 2021) issue of Quadrant magazine.  I commend the review to everyone as one way into Fr Fleming’s monumental work.

I have great pleasure in formally launching To Kill or Not to Kill: Euthanasia in a Society with a Cultural Death Wish (Austin Macauley Publishers, 2021) by John Fleming

 

 

Paul Collits

25 August 2021

Dr Paul Collits is a freelance writer whose articles appear most regularly at The Freedoms Project, an online journal dedicated to defending freedom in all its forms.  He is currently Senior Political Commentator at Politicom.  His work on politics and culture has also been published in Quadrant, The Spectator Australia, News Weekly, The Conservative Woman (UK), On Line Opinion, and A Sense of Place Magazine.

In past lives, Paul has taught in three academic disciplines – political science, urban planning and business – across several Australasian tertiary education institutions.  He has been an internationally recognised researcher and author in economic development for over 30 years, with his work published in peer reviewed journals both in Australia and overseas.  He has been an Adjunct Professor in Regional Development at the University of the Sunshine Coast and an Associate Professor at the University of Southern Queensland.  He has also worked as a policy adviser in two Australian parliaments and for local, State and Commonwealth governments.

He has BA (Hons) and MA degrees in Political Science (from the Australian National University) and a PhD in Geography and Planning from the University of New England.

 

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