Dear Editor,

Richard Trudgeon writes an excellent opinion piece in relation to Aboriginal people and hospital. My wife, Imelda, (Wadjigan women) was frightened to go to hospital after Marshal Perron ‘s Bill was passed. She had a urinary tract infection and had to stay overnight and was scared because she had heard about the Bill and thought she may not come back.

Richard mentioned old people being left to die. Under a law that was repealed by Labor that would not have been euthanasia, but come under the Natural Death Act which allowed people to die naturally without being given something to hasten death. The Act was a sensible alternative to euthanasia and should be reintroduced.

But it is not only Yolngu people that aren’t given information, but the debate in the media is rarely balanced, usually in favour of euthanasia, so how can people answer a survey without full knowledge and an understanding of the different views especially the possible expansion of the use voluntary assisted suicide into the future. A simple one-line question will give you a simple answer. That gets you a populist answer not an educated one.

READ: Opinion: Euthanasia – the unheard side of the story

It’s interesting to note Richard mentions the beliefs of Yolngu people. But if I am to mention my Catholic beliefs as a reason for supporting only palliative care not euthanasia, I am a god-botherer and euthanasia has nothing to do with me, “so, buzz off. It’s my choice”.

Instead, I use my human experience based on common sense, a bit of wisdom and my conscience. Whatever we do affects all of us because we are all part of the human family as remembered in the following John Donne passage of prose from Devotions upon Emergent Occasion.

“No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were; any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”

Donne wrote those words while recovering from a near-fatal illness in 1623. He was Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral at the time, and his reflections on illness, suffering and mortality were published in Devotions upon Emergent Occasions the following year.

Gerry Wood, Howard Springs

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