Euthanasia: Seven Questions about Voluntary Assisted Dying

"The common good of the community will be harmed if killing by assisted suicide wins acceptance." "If individual freedom entitles a sick person in pain to assisted suicide, how can it be denied to someone wishing to die who is not sick and in pain?" Euthanasia and assisted suicide are sweeping across Australia as one State after another passes laws permitting doctors to kill patients who request it. But legalisation of euthanasia is a one-way ratchet asserting the primacy of individual choice. Euthanasia advocates insist nothing can ever outweigh that choice. But in this book, Peter Kurti argues these demands need to be resisted because of the impact individual choice about assisted suicide will have on wider society — on the family, on friends, on the local community. Legalising euthanasia and assisted suicide – ‘voluntary assisted dying’ – enshrines in law a rejection of the duties we owe to others and the claims others have upon us. It will destroy family relationships, damage the trust we place in the medical profession, and corrode the bonds of civil society forged between individuals within communities. In his answers to seven key questions about euthanasia and voluntary assisted dying, Kurti argues that when society permits some of its citizens to be killed, it tears the fabric of community and threatens to put the culture itself to death. Peter Kurti is a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Independent Studies and also Adjunct Associate Professor in the School of Law at the University of Notre Dame Australia. He has written extensively about issues of religion, liberty, and civil society in Australia, and is the author of The Tyranny of Tolerance: Threats to Religious Liberty in Australia and Sacred & Profane: Faith and Belief in a Secular Society.

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