Women and the final solution
The argument that women are so culturally conditioned to be victims and to sacrifice themselves for their families against their own interests that they cannot know their own minds when they face terminal illness, is one of the peculiar arguments put forward as a supposedly feminist argument against voluntary euthanasia.
Former Kevin Andrews staffer Helen Verlander wrote:
Women are attracted to euthanasia for reasons altogether different from those of men, writes Helen Verlander - Canberra Times, Saturday Forum 15 Feb 1997, p.16
One of the oddities of legalised euthanasia in an odd place, Australia's Top End, is that three of the first four candidates for the lethal jab put forward by euthanasia's chief advocate and practitioner, Dr Philip Nitschke, have been men.
The first, Max Bell, missed out by dying first. The latest is an as yet unidentified 68 year old Darwin man with stomach cancer. But there is reason to believe that what we are seeing in Darwin is really a consummate piece of stagecraft which distorts our perceptions of who is most likely to be seeking euthanasia.
Wherever the campaign for euthanasia has been promoted it has been the clear-cut cases of painful terminal illnesses of elderly people which have been paraded to a naturally sympathetic public, which shudders "there but for the grace of God".
While some feminists are privately equating euthanasia with abortion as simple issues of personal choice, there is a strong case for seeing the fight against euthanasia as a potentially burning feminist issue.
Indeed, the former Chief Minister of the Territory who introduced the Private Member's Bill to make physician-assisted suicide legal, Marshall Perron, actually compares the Territory's radical legislation with South Australia giving the vote to women in the 1890's.
Women are attracted to euthanasia as a solution for reasons altogether different from those of men and they are much more likely than men to seek the final solution.
Sixty five percent of those who have contacted Dr Nitschke about using his machine are women. They are middle-aged or elderly with terminal cancer, living in rural areas, he says. "They're people who are used to being in control of their lives and not being patronised by the medical system."
What Dr Nitschke failed to point out was that the provision of palliative care in rural areas is either little or none and that women, particularly traditional women, tend to fit the profile of the seeker after euthanasia - selfless, undemanding and terrified of "being a burden" to others.
Janet Mills, the 52 year old cancer victim who was the second person to be helped to die legally in the Northern Territory, was one of the hard cases used by the euthanasia propaganda machine to give the impression that men and women are seeking euthanasia on equal terms.
Jan Culhane, the nurse from NSW who moved to Darwin shortly after the passing of the legislation with the fervent hope that she would not see her 52nd birthday last August, typifies trends already evident in the United States and the Netherlands.
In the only interview she has given, to The Guardian, it is reported that she has had a sad and difficult life and that her fear of losing her independence is what is driving her towards early death.
She divorced an alcoholic husband and raised three children by herself, including one with Down's Syndrome. A fourth child drowned at the age of six.
For the past six years she has had breast cancer and has had both breatsts removed. She keeps her painkillers to a minimum so she does not have to rely too much on other people.
She says that her reason for wanting to die is "that I will not live in fear ... I think the fear that I suffer is just as severe as the physical pain.
"I'm by no means in more pain than I've seen people survive under, but it's pain that I'm not willing to accept.
"I raised my three children to be as independent as possible. That was my aim as a mother. I felt that I had got to the stage where I had instigated all the help that my Down's Syndrome son needed to survive in the world.
"It was my time. When I came to Darwin it was a relief. I didn't continually have to be on the halb(?) and worry about them, and I know that's selfish ..."
So death became for one woman the only "time out" from the onerous responsibility for others.
The analogy with euthanasia is not abortion, but suicide. Women are three times more likely to try to commit suicide than men.
There is a recurring leitmotif in female euthanasia cases. Women are mostly younger than men seeking euthanasia and often have no terminal illness, unlike the men who are gravely terminally ill.
In the US, questions have begun to be asked about why the unemployed pathologist who took to hawking a death machine he named the Thanatron six years ago, Jack Kevorkian, has helped as many women as men to die. As at November last year, the count was 30 women and 15 men. But for the doctor who has been described as flirting and playing coy with his clients so that by the time he got to "setting the date", the men had already taken their own lives, even this involved a conscious correction. The first eight people he helped die from the back of his rusty old van were women and only 11 out of the first 23 were men.
Kevorkian told a National Press Club luncheon on July 29 last year "I find women stronger here too. They know the strength. Of course I knew that from my mother. She was a very strong woman. But women are, first of all, more practical than men. Men are ... you know, their mind is boggled with a bunch of hair-splitting philosophy and idealism, and women wonder why they die for a principle. But women are very practical. And that's why I think they can face it better than men. And they are more in tune with nature than men are."
Janet Adkins, 54, was the first person helped to by Jack Kevorkian. The archetypal Superwoman, she was the strong one in the family, and a year after being diagnosed with Alzheimer's Disease, which she was told could take 15 years to develop, decided she did not want to be a burden to her husband and family. She set the date for November 30, 1989, so she "wouldn't spoil Christmans for the kids".
Her only symptoms were that, according to her husband, he had to remind her of the time of her tennis lessons and she "kept leaving her purse in the house". The night before she died she celebrated with friends in a restaurant until after midnight and enthused about Bach with Kevorkian. Everyone surrounding her assumed she was making the right decision.
Kevorkian's next clients, Sherry Miller, 43, and Maryanne Wentz, 58, were equally questionable candidates for euthanasia. Miller, who had multiple sclerosis, had been recently divorced by her husband and was worried about how her elderly parents would cope with her worsening condition.
Wentz, 58, had post-surgical pelvic pain and had been dignosed as having "major depression". She rejected anti-depressants and hospitalisation. An autopsy found nothing wrong with her.
Kevorkian's 33rd victim, Rebecca Badger, 39, was a depressed single mother with multiple sclerosis and no health insurance. She feared becoming a burden to her daughter and wanted to die with dignity.
She spoke of Kevorkian as if he were a Mills and Boon hero. "I know there is a man out there with a heart of gold who will help me and I will go to him at the right time." By the following week she was dead but the coroner who performed the autopsy found no evidence of MS. L. J. Dragovic told The Washington Post "I can show you every slice from her brain and spinal cord and she doesn't have a bit of MS. She looked robust, fairly healthy. Everything else is in order. Except she's dead."
But when Kevorkian assisted his 35th client, Judith Curren, 42, who had chronic fatigue and immune dysfunction (?) syndrome, even a tolerant public protested. A poll taken last year of 500 voters in Kevorkian's home state, Michigan, found 35 percent thought that Curren's death showed that Kevorkian was getting reckless in his methods and should be controlled.
Curren was obese and depressed, and given drugs by her psychiatrist husband which only increased her obesity and depression. Her husband applauded her decision to die, seven weeks before he was due to reappear in court on domestic violence charges. She left two young children.
Of the 23 mostly American euthanasia cases documented in Rita Marker's Deadly Compassion, it is noteworthy that only four concern men as victims. In the case of Jean Humphrey who became the subject of her husband's tribute to euthanasia Joan's Way, subtitled "A Love Story", Derek Humphry provided the deadly drug cocktail at his wife's request. But it was him, not her, who decided the time of her death. When she asked him pathetically "Is this the day" he said unhesitatingly "Yes". She had urged him to take a lover when she could no longer oblige, but had been stunned to find he had taken her at her word. Marker asks "Could she, as well, have been hoping against hope that when she asked "Is this the day?" her husband would say "No""?
Women whose identities are wrapped up in their husband's make very biddable victims. Hence the phenomenon of wives committing suicide with their husband even though they are not ill or even ready to die. So Cynthia Koestler, 55, died to keep company with her husband, Arthur, 77, who had terminal leukemia in 1963. She was in good health.
Likewise, when Ruth and Arthur Koonan became increasingly frail, Arthur Koonan rejected all other possibilities such as going into a nursing or retirement home or getting home help despite having the money to do so and opted for euthanasia.
According to her daughter, Ann Humphry, Ruth was not ready to die but had passively acquiesced in all her husband's decisions throughout their life together and was unable to break the habit of a lifetime.
There are other cases in which a wife's illness seems more like a happy excuse. Patricia Posier, 43, had been told by her husband, a doctor, that she would die a horrible death from lung cancer.
After a farewell dinner and a spot of lovemaking, she took the barbiturates he had given her. When these did not work, he injected her with what he thought was a deadly dose of morphine. Her stepfather couldn't wait any longer because he had a plane to catch and suffocated her with his bare hands.
The husband subsequently sought to have his book about his wife's death published and wanted it made into a movie, boasting to a friend he could become rich because of it.
He was found not guilty of murder. Juries are reluctant to convict wherever "mercy-killing" is advanced as a motive.
Margaret Pabst Battin, a suicide advocate who speaks at ethics conferences around the world, acknowledged at a Hemlock Society conference in 1985 that dying "relatively early, relatively easily, in a way in which you won't impose a burden on others" was a real possibility if euthanasia was legalised.
She suggested that those least capable of withstanding pressure to request euthanasia or commit suicide would be people who have been the least self-determining throughout their lives.
Battin noted that a woman who has lived for her family and been concerned about the needs and comfort of others would be particularly vulnerable to this pressure.
"There will be an interest in avoiding the burden of care and large bills." she said.
"We may wish to comply with this interest."
In the Netherlands, while there are more men helped to die than women, at least on very rubbery official figures, it is women who are pushing out the boundaries of rationalisation of assisted suicide.
A 25 year old anorexic woman Maria S. announced after her brother committed suicide that she would do the same. Her doctor provided a lethal dose of pentobarbital.
The court agreed that Maria S. was competent to make the decision to die and that psychological suffering was as valid as physical pain in qualifying someone to seek euthanasia.
Hilly Boscher, the 50 year old social worker who had lost two sons (one to suicide) and had been recently divorced, refused anti-depressants and bereavement counselling and requested euthanasia.
The Dutch Supreme Court again decided that mental suffering was enough to justify assisted suicide.
For women who feel hopeless about their lives, euthansia is the easy option.
For those for whom self-sacrifice is a way of life, it is the ultimate logical step, and for the well-orgainsed housewife it is a tidy solution.
But turning death into a clinical procedure, euthanasia (like lobotomy before it) has particular application to non-autonomous vulnerable women looking for a way out.
