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By Marily Kerjean
Wesley Smith (pictured), anti euthanasia activist, lawyer and hospice volunteer has an urgent message for Catholics.
“The Church has a very special role,” he says. “I think every Church leader should
make a commitment to say we’re not going to let anyone in our parish die alone.
“That was Mother Teresa’s incredible gift – she didn’t care what you looked like or what religion you were, if you needed help
you were helped.”
The Californian has just visited Australia for a Right to Life conference and capital city speaking tour.
He urged Australians to learn from the recent success in America where
people from across the political spectrum put other differences aside and worked together to halt the progress of euthanasia.
Smith says that the ugly side of the euthanasia movement is too often glossed over
by the news media and in popular television shows, but that it reveals itself in recent statements to reporters and on the National Online Review website by Australia’s Dr Philip Nitschke.
Dr Nitschke has
secured funding from the pro-euthanasia Hemlock Society to develop a do-it-yourself suicide pill that he says should be available to anyone over the age of 18 ‘including the troubled teen’.
Dr Nitschke later denied the controversial comments.
“That is the real movement,” says Wesley Smith. “He is a death-obsessed crackpot, yet he carried the torch in the Olympics, there have been newspaper
articles about this ‘caring man’ and he’s pushing suicide. It’s surreal. It’s like I’ve fallen into a Salvador Dali painting!”
Wesley worked as a department store salesman to put himself through law school at
San Fernando College. He practised until 1985, then left law to pursue a career in public advocacy and writing. He coauthored four books with Ralph Nader, the American icon for consumer rights who ran for the
presidency last year.
He entered the fight against euthanasia when a friend committed suicide after reading Hemlock Society literature.
“That basically changed my life,” he says.
“I saw in the
euthanasia movement a threat that was so profound and pernicious to people and to the very concept of the sanctity of human life that I felt compelled to break away from the work I’d been doing with Ralph Nader, who
had been my hero since I was a teenager, and begin to really work hard on this issue.”
He became an attorney for the International Anti-Euthanasia Taskforce (now the International Taskforce on Euthanasia and
Assisted Suicide) which led to him
writing a court brief in the United States Supreme Court against assisted suicide.
Soon he was in demand to appear on television and talkback radio, to write articles
and to give lectures around the country.
His attention expanded from assisted suicide to the bio ethics related issues of stem cell research, cloning and attempts to revise the definition of death.
The first book he wrote about these issues was Forced Exit: the Slippery Slope from Assisted Suicide to Legalised Murder.
His most recent book, Culture of Death: the Assault on Medical Ethics in America, won
best self-help book of the year for 2001 by the Independent Publishers Association in the United States.
“We need to be willing to stand up against euthanasia and these other agendas at all times. I’m not
saying get on your soapbox and lose all your friends … but have enough information to be able to make a decent argument,” he says.
“We’re in danger of creating what I call a disposable caste … if you’re an
elderly, disabled, sick or dying person, we won’t protect you from suicide, we won’t necessarily give you the medical help you require and, in fact, look upon you as a person who should not be around because you
remind us of our mortality.
“This whole idea of euthanasia is a really pathetic attempt to control death as if death can be controlled.”
Wesley fears that people are sympathetic to euthanasia because
of a distorted view of dying as something painful and horrible, rather than a natural process of life, where modern medicine can control most of the associated pain.
Society had taken dying and “turned it
into some shameful thing. We put people into wards and they come to believe that they’re no longer part of the community.
“The answer to that, to all the despair these issues seem to raise, is love.
“We have to gently assure people that they are wanted, they’re not going to be a burden … they might need treatment for depression. And we have to make sure that a person with cancer does not have pain. But it is
not our job to let doctors become killers.
“Dying people change their minds, they go through stages of grief like everyone else. When someone’s in the depths of grief and they say something, you don’t hold
them to it.”
Smith says that better use and awareness of hospice care is the main answer to euthanasia. But it gets little attention because euthanasia is a much ‘sexier issue’ for the media.
“Media’s
basic obligation to the public is to give the facts,” he says. “Nitschke says: ‘I’m going to make a peaceful pill’ and the media seems so uncurious as to how he’s going to do that, no one asked ‘how is he going to
test it’?
“The pro-euthanasia side preys on
people’s feelings, fears of mortality, worries about dying, fear of pain and that’s very powerful.
“But if we’re going to have public policies those
can’t be based on feelings because those are so changeable. They have to be based at least in part on substance.
Smith believes in the sanctity of life ‘as a human being’ and doesn’t bring religious beliefs
into his advocacy.
“You have to be able to make secular arguments in a secular society … to advocate for proper policies in the lexicon of the society in which we live.”
He recently obtained a mail order
suicide kit from Canada to show how easy it was to buy with no questions asked. The clear plastic ‘exit bag’ with sedatives is marketed but not sold through Australia’s
voluntary euthanasia societies.
The US state of Oregon and the Netherlands are the only two places in the world whose laws permit euthanasia or assisted suicide, although a euthanasia bill has been submitted
to parliament in South Australia.
It’s a surprise to learn that Wesley Smith is 52. It’s late in the day, he’s just come from the airport and he’s done back-to-back interviews, speeches, meetings and flights
crossing the country for eight days since arriving in Australia.
How does he manage to be so indefatigable?
“I have a theory of history that the side with the most energy usually wins. The price of
freedom is eternal vigilance – I also say the price of having a moral and decent society is eternal vigilance.”
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