Page 3192 - Week 11 - Wednesday, 21 September 1994
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MEDICAL TREATMENT BILL 1994
Debate resumed from 14 September 1994, on motion by Mr Moore:
That this Bill be agreed to in principle.
MR STEVENSON (10.33): As I mentioned last week, the Bill could be better called the no medical treatment Bill than the Medical Treatment Bill. There is no doubt that there are many people who feel that this Bill is the thin end of the needle for the introduction of far greater laws for euthanasia. There was a quote that I saw in one of the documents sent to me. It was a statement made in 1984 by a speaker at an international euthanasia convention. It said:
If we can get people to accept the removal of all treatment and care - especially the removal of food and fluids - they will see what a painful way this is to die, and then, in the patient's best interest, they will accept the lethal injection.
There are a number of concerns that I have with the Bill. I mentioned one briefly last week. It was to do with the definition of medical treatment. It talks about the carrying out of an operation, the administration of a drug or the carrying out of any other medical procedure. This term "any other medical procedure" is one we need to look at closely.
In an evaluation of the Bill, Rita Marker says that the Bill defines medical treatment to include the carrying out of any other medical procedure yet fails to define what is meant by "medical procedure". That, of course, is correct. She says:
It may be of interest to the Legislative Assembly that the meaning of "medical procedure", or "medical intervention", has been interpreted in the United States as meaning any procedure which a physician would provide, perform or authorise. So broad is this meaning that, in one court case related to the removal of food and water from a non-terminally ill patient, an expert witness explained that, since he authorises the menus for convalescent home patients, all food consumed by the patients - even that which they eat from their dinner trays - constitutes "medical treatment".
(Extension of time granted) That was from a transcript of testimony in McConnell v. Beverly Enterprises, No. 0293888-8, Superior Court of Connecticut, 15 June 1988. Rita Marker goes on to say, in section B:
The Bill further defines "palliative care" to include the "reasonable" provision of food and water. Nowhere does it clarify what constitutes (or who would determine) what is "reasonable". The ambiguous nature of such words could give rise to a situation where a care giver would consider spoonfeeding a troublesome 90-year-old patient to be an unreasonable use of time and effort.
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