The Victorian government this week appointed a ministerial advisory panel that will help guide the government as it drafts legislation in coming months. The group will be chaired by former Australian Medical Association president Brian Owler, a trained neurosurgeon who is seen as a strong...
Governor John Hickenlooper on Friday signed into law a voter-passed initiative to allow terminally ill adults, with fewer than six months to live, to end their lives with prescribed medication. Proposition 106, known as “End of Life Options,” took effect the moment Hickenlooper penned his...
By Jan Caro Usually the increase in pain relief is agreed to, in a coded fashion, by both the relatives and medical practitioners tending to the dying person.The group we never consider are those who grieve. And those are the people who – in desperate circumstances...
By Andrew McGee, Lindy Willmot and Ben White of QUT What is interesting from a law reform perspective is the decision to include an implementation review step in the process. The premier revealed that an expert Ministerial Advisory Panel of clinical, legal, consumer, health administrator and...
By Professor Ross Fitzgerald There is probably no other issue in Australian public life that can claim such increasing levels of support over the past decade. What we are talking about is dying with dignity, or voluntary euthanasia. With such overwhelming levels of support, how come...
A ministerial advisory panel will be established to help draft a "safe and compassionate" legislative framework for assisted dying in Victoria. The Victorian Government will introduce this bill to the Parliament in the second half of 2017 and Labor MPs will be granted a conscience...
The Age embraces the news, and urges parliamentarians to support a voluntary assisted dying bill in Victoria. They believe there is a compelling case for the change, which polls have shown has long been supported by as many as four in five Australians, and which...
Voluntary euthanasia has been knocked back in South Australian Parliament for the 15th time after a marathon late session in the House of Assembly overnight. The bill initially passed a second reading stage leading to a debate that continued up until about 4:00am. But the...
Speaking to your MP is the single most effective step people can take in the push for voluntary euthanasia laws, campaigner Andrew Denton says. He said family stories, in particular, were powerful, and MPs couldn’t ignore that....
The Australian Medical Association is trying clumsily to bridge the gap between doctors’ professional obligations and their responsibility to their patients. But in continuing to oppose doctor-assisted suicide, yet somehow claim a right to help develop any such laws, the AMA risks irrelevance....
A majority of doctors support the profession being involved in assisted suicide and voluntary euthanasia if laws are changed to allow it, a survey by the Australian Medical Association of 4000 members has found...
The District of Columbia is poised to become the seventh jurisdiction in the U.S. where medical aid in dying is authorised for terminally ill residents after the D.C. Council passed the D.C. Death with Dignity Act by an 11-2 margin...