Helping suffering people to end their lives remains a crime in South Africa – but now, backed by eight influential doctors, an ethicist has gone to the High Court aiming to decriminalise euthanasia.
Professor Willem Landman, of the Ethics Institute of SA and who sits on the executive committee of DignitySA, approached the Gauteng High Court (Pretoria) in June to seek clarity around current legislation.
The application hopes to have any form of euthanasia – including assisted suicide – decriminalised, and for the court to instruct Parliament to draft legislation to cover this, reports Daily Maverick.
Landman says DignitySA wants the court to halt criminal prosecutions for euthanasia and assisted suicide until such time as there is legal clarity on the matter
Supporting the case are eight doctors who published their professional opinion in the SA Medical Journal in February.
There, Professor JP van Niekerk, Dr Paul Cluver, Dr Edwin Hertzog, Professor Mariana Kruger, Professor Keymanthri Moodley, Professor Jonny Myers, Professor Dan Ncayiyana and Dr Johan Snyman, all offered full support for DignitySA’s planned court action.
Whose life is it anyway?
One of the first recorded deaths by suicide in South Africa was of a 24-year-old woman, known only as Zara, a servant who took her own life in Cape Town in December 1671.
She was found hanged in a sheep house – and for this, the colonial administrators at the time ordered she be punished post-mortem.
Her body was dragged by a donkey along the streets towards Green Point and Gallows Hill, named after the original gallows erected there. Her belongings were confiscated by the state, and her corpse strung up and hanged from a gibbet, a pole used to hang the already dead.
This was a punishment for all to see that her life was not hers to take.
Suicide was considered a “sin” by the Dutch occupiers.
The long road to dignity
Zara’s suicide and subsequent punishment happened more than 350 years ago and here we are, in 2024, still persecuting those who seek to end their lives.
In March, Carol de Swart, a 63-year-old George mother of two who lost a leg after botched treatment for skin cancer at Grey’s Hospital in Pietermaritzburg and whose body was being consumed by her illness, ended her life in Switzerland.
Her children could not accompany her to the Pegasos Clinic for fear that they could be criminally charged in South Africa for helping their mother to die.
That it was her wish, that she was sound of mind and had prepared herself spiritually, was of no consequence to the law as it stands.
Netwerk24 filmed a short documentary as she flew out of South Africa to Switzerland where Professor Sean Davidson, of DignitySA and who oversees the Exit Swiss Assistance Programme, accompanied her on her last journey.
Titled “Ek Wil Myself Nie Verloor Nie” (I don’t want to lose myself”), the 24-minute documentary is a hard but searing watch. Her courage is remarkable.
The irony of contemporary opposition to self-delivery in South Africa, mostly on religious grounds, is that the country practises passive euthanasia every day, as people who do not have the money for expensive treatments are left to die.
A depleted medical aid and the inability to access the most basic of health services is a long-term death sentence, and sometimes a slow one, for many citizens.
It is time for Parliament to listen to the doctors and the lawyers who seek to change laws in line with the Constitution. May it be sooner than later.
See more from MedicalBrief archives:
SA woman has assisted suicide after winning medical negligence claim
Euthanasia activist says SA doctors support legalising assisted dying
Assisted death must be decriminalised – SA mental health practitioners
Euthanasia advocate gets eight-year house arrest for three murders