• Breadcrumb navigation uses Javascript

We should legalise euthanasia

Some people suffer terrible deaths – riven by uncontrollable pain, denied the dignity of choice, willing but unable to end life without the aid of others.

Yet deliberately to end a human life is, for many, always wrong – an affront to nature, a crime against humanity, a sin against God.

When the terminally ill ask us to help them to die, then should a fatal act of compassion in every circumstance be proscribed by law?

Vote on this debate topic

Watch this debate:

Speakers

For:

• Dr Philip Nitschke is director and founder of Exit International, the world’s leading organisation for advocacy of voluntary euthanasia.
• Senator Bob Brown is well-known throughout Australia for his passion for the environment, his leading role in saving Tasmania’s Franklin River from damming, for founding The Wilderness Society and Bush Heritage Australia, and for speaking out on human rights issues. From his early political days as a state MP in Tasmania in the 1980s, through to his career as a Greens senator for Tasmania in the federal parliament, Bob Brown has also campaigned for the legalisation of voluntary euthanasia. During his twelve years in the Senate Bob has put forward motions and introduced private member’s bills to support voluntary euthanasia law reform.
• Professor Peter Baume is a former Federal Health Minister, a Liberal Senator and patron of the Voluntary Euthanasia Society of NSW.

Against:

• Hon Tony Abbott is a former Federal Health Minister and pro-life advocate.
• Father Frank Brennan SJ AO is a distinguished Jesuit scholar and author.
• Dr Maria Cigolini is a GP who has worked in the community, home, institutional settings and hopitals providing extended and palliative care for 20 years. She trained in Palliative Care at Melbourne University and is on the Medical Advisory Committee of Longueville Private Hospital in Sydney, which specialises in palliative and aged care. She receives referrals for patients in the treatment phase of advanced cancers and diseases, as well as in the end of life phase, and has contributed cases for papers used in ethical discussions on end of life decision making. She is a clinical teacher in General Practice at the University of Sydney.

Chair:

Dr Simon Longstaff is Executive Director of St James Ethics Centre. Simon spent five years studying and working as a member of Magdalene College, Cambridge. Having won scholarships to study at Cambridge, he read for the degrees of Master of Philosophy and Doctor of Philosophy. He was inaugural President of The Australian Association for Professional & Applied Ethics and is a Director of a number of companies. He is a Fellow of the World Economic Forum and a member of the International Advisory Committee of the Foreign Policy Association, based in New York. Simon has been Executive Director of St James Ethics Centre since shortly after it was founded.