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As in Canada, about 3 out of 4 people in Australia are in favour of medically assisted dying and the politicians in Oz seem to be like ours....they are avoiding the issue.

 Professor Bob Douglas,  a former director of the National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health at the Australian National University is suggesting that the Australian politicians are hiding under their desks to avoid dealing with a sensitive question that most people want answered. Here is an article by Lisa Cox that appeared in  the Canberra Times yesterday. It sounds much like the situation in Canada where the Royal Society and the Province of Quebec have both recommended medically assisted dying but our "leaders" are ignoring both the recommendations of experts and the public opinion polls.

Dr John Sentamu, the Archbishop of York in England believes that we should all talk about and acknowledge that death is part of life. He says that people in the UK are being denied the right to die the way that they want to. This is a pretty refreshing look at the problem by a cleric of his stature.

Here is the article from The Telegraph of 14th May.

On 15th April we posted on this blog that two doctors in New Mexico were going to court to change the law concerning medically assisted dying. Now, a lady with cancer is joining the case because she wants the choice of how and when to end her own life.

As the following article from the Associated Press reports, the battle for choice is warming up in New Mexico, Hawaii and Massachusets. Why is it that politicians both in Canada and in the USA will not listen to the majority of their constituents and implement laws that give individuals control over their own bodies?

Dying With Dignity has always believed that it is vitaly important for every Canadian to have a "living will" i.e a documement that provides instructions to your family and medical staff about what type of medical care you want or don't want in the event that you are unable to tell them yourself.

In a recent court case in London, England, the judge was able to accept a patient's instructions because those instructions left no doubt about what the man wanted. Please review your own advance care directive or personal directive, or whatever your province calls it, to make sure that your own instructions are crystal clear.

Here is the article from the Telegraph:

The law against assisted suicide forces some desparate people who want a peaceful death to leave their own country and travel overseas to accomplish their goal. This sort of thing needs to change so that people can die in ther own homes on their own terms.

When Rosemary asked her son-in-law James Ross to look at the logistics of an assisted suicide at the Dignitas clinic in Switzerland he wasn't sure if he could do it. Here he tells how he joined her daughters on their mother's final journey from the U.K. to Switzerland.

The Independent, 24th April.

Dudley Clendinen is a former national correspondent and editorial writer for The New York Times, and author of “A Place Called Canterbury.”  He wrote this personal account of his Life With Lou in the New York Times on 9 July 2011. This was sent to DWD by one of our members, Jack Jefferson. It's a wonderfully written story!

"This is not about one particular disease or even about Death. It’s about Life, when you know there’s not much left. That is the weird blessing of Lou. There is no escape, and nothing much to do. It’s liberating".

On the 30th anniversary of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms a poll by the Globe and Mail of its readers shows that 82% of them disagree with the Supreme Court's ruling in the Sue Rodriguez case.

Dying With Dignity is very active across Canada and we have 70% to 80% of Canadians supporting our cause of medically assisted dying. However, the right-to-die movement is also gathering momentum throughout North America, Europe, Australia and New Zealand.

Recently, in New Mexico, a lawsuit was filed requesting clarification of a state law. Two cancer specialists state that a licensed physician who provides medical help to die to a dying person who is mentally competent should not be subject to a law that prohibits assisting someone to commit suicide. The doctor would simply be providing a medical service. Click here to read the article in alibi or click on read more below.       

While Wanda Morris, DWD's Executive Director, is making headlines debating the right to have medically assisted dying in Canada, the New York Times cariied a similar debate in its pages on 10th April.

Here are four of the eight short essays:

Dying With Dignity has about 1,700 members but the association in the Netherlands, Right To Die-NL has 124,000. Why are Canadians so apathetic when it comes to demanding a choice of when and how they die?

A recent article in the New York Times describes some of the attitudes towards medically assisted dying in the Netherlands......

The Quebec Commission's report on Dying With Dignity was written up in the Montreal Gazette recently.

Last week, Jeffrey Brooks, from Montreal, wrote a letter to the editor of the Gazette which, we think, contains a very compassionate, experienced and reasoned approach to this discussion.

The right-to-die movement in the U.K. is alive and well and the government has just made a change to its procedures that effectively allows for medically assisted dying.

    The Quebec Commission on Dying With Dignity was very thorough in their examination of the questions of palliative care and medically assisted dying and heard from expert witnesses, held public hearings and received over 16,000 comments by way of mail, fax and email. The commission also set up a website that 6,558 Quebec residents visited and answered the questionnaire.

    As the Commissioners said in their report “Although the online consultation is not a scientific poll, the number of respondents certainly gives an undeniable value to the answers received and indicates some trends in our society.” This is a summary of the results of that questionnaire.