Right to die groups meet

City euthanasia advocate takes debate to Paris.

Paris and Palmerston North are the places to be to debate the rights of the dying on the eve of Halloween.

While Hospice New Zealand hosts a national palliative care conference next week, Palmerston North voluntary euthanasia advocate Lesley Martin will be in France promoting an international approach to making it legal to help someone to die.

A guest speaker at the World Federation of Right to Die Societies, the woman convicted in 2004 of attempting to kill her terminally ill mother in Wanganui in 1999 will talk about Dignity New Zealand's plans for Dignity Havens, and the need for law changes to make mercy killing legitimate.

It's a trip she hopes will be free of the immigration hurdles she had to leap to get to the last conference in Toronto two years ago, when Dignity New Zealand was accepted as a member of the group representing 14 organisations from 23 countries.

But she expects the conference to be contentious and challenging as the divide between those who want to make euthanasia lawful go head-to-head with those like Philip Nitschke's Exit International who promote ways to die without legal sanction.

She is proposing the world body set up a working group to help define the ethics of assisting someone who wishes to die, and how to make that action safe and accountable within the law. And she believes Dignity New Zealand will be able to take a lead in the debate.

Currently talking with a rest home she won't name, Ms Martin is working towards the concept of setting up dedicated Dignity Haven beds, which would be resourced and ready if and when enabling legislation is passed.

"That would be a world first."

Dignity is also setting up working groups among clergy and nurses and other professionals to talk about legitimate voluntary euthanasia, and has taken the first steps to set up dialogue with Maori groups.

"Probably the majority of groups around the world are working towards legislation. I'm not analysing the professional conduct of those helping people out on the edge of the law, or outside it, but their activities are changing nothing."

Ms Martin believes if a majority of right-to-die groups work towards law reform, and the social debate matures, there will be a middle ground for discussion with members of the hospice movement who currently oppose voluntary euthanasia in favour of a policy to "neither hasten nor postpone" death. She sees quality palliative care, as championed by the hospice movement, as a vital ingredient of the Dignity Haven philosophy, the difference being Dignity patients could have a plan in place to hasten their death.

- © Fairfax NZ News