Australia: the last territory moves to legalize euthanasia

The Australian Northern Territory, whose capital is Darwin, is preparing to legalize euthanasia. A bill, introduced in July by the local authorities, is to be put to a vote in the coming weeks. If it passes, “voluntary assisted dying” will be legal in every state and territory of the country, the Northern Territory being the last where it remained banned.

The Archbishop of Sydney, Anthony Fisher, warns. He recalls that Australia has passed, in a few years, from a total ban to a situation in which more than 14,000 people have requested euthanasia and more than 7,000 have died of it. He points to pressure to extend it to patients with dementia or the unconscious, to children, and to anyone who asks for it. Another bill would lift the federal prohibitions so as to permit euthanasia consultations online and by telephone, a “telehealth” that would in reality be a “teledeath.” The governing party has left its members a conscience vote.

The Church’s judgment does not vary. The fifth commandment, “Thou shalt not kill,” forbids taking the life of an innocent; and the Catechism of the Council of Trent teaches that this prohibition reaches the murder of another as well as suicide, man having no more right over his own life than over his neighbour’s. No suffering, no consent, no procedure called “voluntary” makes lawful what God forbids: life belongs to God, who alone sets its term.

Against this logic, the call for better palliative care rejoins the path the Church has always held: to relieve the dying and accompany them, without ever hastening their end. Pius XII taught it to physicians: it is permitted to ease pain by remedies, even at the risk of shortening life, provided that death is neither willed nor sought as a means; it is never permitted to inflict it. There is the Christian answer, not in the act that kills.

Sources. Catechism of the Council of Trent (1566), on the fifth commandment; Exodus 20:13 (Douay-Rheims, Vulgate); Pius XII, address to anaesthesiologists on analgesia (24 February 1957).