Media Release 24 June 2023
Ministry of Health officials at a recent Funeral Directors Annual General Meeting made a presentation encouraging funeral homes to provide facilities at its funeral homes to enable doctors to kill their patients with a lethal injection or assist in their suicide.
The Minister of Health, Hon Ayesha Verrall [pictured] must accept responsibility for this appalling proposal.
Right to Life calls on the community to boycott any funeral home that provides facilities for the killing of vulnerable patients. Funeral directors are members of a noble profession. There is no place for the killing of the vulnerable in funeral homes.
The Ministry officials said that, ”it was their mission to oversee the provision of high quality assisted dying services that are “person centred, equitable and accessible to all in line with provision of the Act."
Right to Life is opposed to this proposal which seeks to normalise the killing of vulnerable patients and give the killing respectability , it is deeply offensive. It would be very convenient to have the patient killed at the funeral home. The patient could be killed and buried or cremated on the same day.
Funeral homes provide an important service to our community by :-
Fulfilling the corporal works of mercy, to bury the dead.
Fulfilling the spiritual works of mercy, comforting the afflicted and by praying for the living and the dead.
Funeral homes are sacred places which provide sanctuary for our precious dead, they must not be desecrated with the blood of those who are murdered in the funeral home with a lethal injection by a doctor.
The government’s proposal is part of the ever advancing culture of death that this government continues to promote. Right to Life believes that they have, with euthanasia and abortion, corrupted the medical profession, the nursing profession, the midwifery profession, the pharmacy profession and now they seek to corrupt the funeral directors profession.
Right to Life believes that the vast majority of the community would be appalled if a funeral home complied with this request to allow their facilities to be used for euthanasia killing.
Right to Life makes no apology in speaking up in defence of funeral homes and requests that in the interest of our community the funeral director profession reject the Ministry of Health's gruesome proposal and refuse to allow their facilities to be used to kill vulnerable patients with a lethal injection or to be assisted in suicide.
Ken Orr,
Spokesperson,
Right to Life New Zealand Inc.