Media Release 28 April 2024
We are in a spiritual battle with a continuing war between Satan and a culture of death who seeks to destroy God and the culture of life. Right to Life has chosen life and seeks to alert our community to the imminent threat of euthanasia and assisted suicide confronting and infiltrating hospices in New Zealand.
On 23 Aril 2024, Wayne Naylor, Chief Executive Officer of Hospice New Zealand, revealed in an interview on Radio NZ, that the majority of the 32 hospices in New Zealand were now allowing hospice patients who had requested euthanasia, to be assessed in the hospice in order to receive a lethal injection or assisted in their own suicide; Right to Life believes that this is an appalling situation, and that it must be stopped.
There is no legal requirement for hospices to allow this assessment to take place. Doctors who co-operate in assessing patients eligibility for a lethal injection offend our Creator, violate human rights, betray their patients and breach the ethics of their medical profession. The prohibition against killing the innocent is the foundation of the law and medicine. We violate this prohibition at our peril.
Assessing patients for a lethal injection or assisted suicide in a hospice is the first catastrophic step on the slippery slope for hospices to provide "euthanasia as health care” for their vulnerable patients. The Registrar for Assisted dying has revealed that 8 patients have been killed in a New Zealand hospice.
Right to Life calls upon the community to protect our most vulnerable citizens, to ensure that when we entrust our loved ones to the care of a hospice, they will receive ethical palliative care and will not be killed, under the guise that this is "health care”.
Right to Life believes that David Seymour, the architect of the anti-life End of Life Choice Act, will seek to have the legislation amended to make it compulsory for hospices to both allow the assessment of their patients for a lethal injection and for their killing by euthanasia in the same hospice.
Right to Life warns that we do not want to follow the example of Canada where many hospices allow their patients to be killed under the provisions of Medical Aid In Dying (MAID). The Canadian Hospice Palliative Care Association does not promote or oppose any practices that seek to hasten or postpone death. In 2022, a total of 13,241 vulnerable Canadians were killed with a lethal injection or assisted in suicide.
Ken Orr,
Spokesperson,
Right to Life