GESTIÓN EN SALUD PÚBLICA: BioEdge: Dancing with the star: suicide enthusiasts celebrate Nitschke’s 70th birthday

BioEdge: Dancing with the star: suicide enthusiasts celebrate Nitschke’s 70th birthday

Dancing with the star: suicide enthusiasts celebrate Nitschke’s 70th birthday

by Michael Cook | 26 Aug 2017 | 1 comment

Australian euthanasia campaigner Philip Nitschke has a knack for public relations. To celebrate his 70^th birthday recently an elderly flash mob assembled on the beach in Surfer’s Paradise, in the state of Queensland.

In an impressive display of geriatric choreography, the purple-clad crowd danced to the Bon Jovi hit, “It’s my life”. The lyrics were treated as a kind of anthem for rational suicide: “It's my life / It's now or never / I ain't gonna live forever / I just want to live while I'm alive.”

“We don’t want to waste away like vegetables in a nursing home,” one participant told 9NEWS. “Ever since I've been in a wheelchair and this is my life now I just don't want to live like this,” another said.

Dr Nitschke was also in the news recently in connection with the triple suicide of three women, Margaret Cummins, 78, and her two daughters, Heather and Wynette, in the nearby Gold Coast in June. He did not know them personally but they had all joined his network for promoting assisted suicide, Exit International, about a year before. None of the three was suffering from a terminal illness. They gassed themselves using a system promoted by Dr Nitschke. Heather’s husband returned from shopping to find his wife, his mother-in-law, and his sister-in-law dead. Police said that he was rather shaken by the discovery.

“Rather than seeing this multiple family death as a tragedy, Exit prefers to see it as an example of rational suicide,” Mr Nitschke’s organisation commented. “Each woman took responsibility for the planning of her own death, at a time and place of her choosing. A peaceful death is everybody’s right.”

Saturday, August 26, 2017

One unfortunate consequence of the omphalocentric state of American politics is that cries for help from the rest of the world are a mosquito’s buzz in a theatre full of bellowing politicians. President Trump’s antics suck all the air out of media interest in overseas tragedies.

One of these, as reported below, is a cholera epidemic in Yemen which has affected half a million people and killed about 2,000. The medical system in this country of 27 million has all but collapsed. About 10,000 civilians have died. Seven million are close to famine.

The United Nations has described Yemen as “the world’s largest humanitarian crisis” and The Lancet has compared Western indifference to its slowness in responding to the Rwandan genocide.

Notwithstanding his “America first” policy, Donald Trump promised that his country would “continue and continue forever to play the role of peacemaker”. Of course, the war in Yemen is a complex conflict in which the two sides are proxies for the Shia state of Iran and the Sunni kingdom of Saudi Arabia. But surely the US could help engineer a solution – if its president was not so busy arguing over Civil War statues and sacking his closest aides.