Tuesday’s  Close Up programme featured a compelling and moving interview with John Pollock MB, ChB, MRCP[UK], FRNZCGP. Sixty-one-year-old Dr Pollock is a general practitioner. He is in the business of saving lives. But Dr Pollock, who has never smoked, is suffering from terminal lung cancer and wants the right to seek help to end his own life before his suffering becomes unbearable to him and, more importantly, to his family. To offer him that help would, under current New Zealand law, be a crime.

Yesterday the New Zealand Herald reprinted a letter which Dr Pollock had written earlier to the magazine New Zealand Doctor. In it he presents his arguments for the legalisation of voluntary euthanasia in this country. It is well worth reading.

I support Dr Pollock in his bid to have assisted voluntary euthanasia made legal for terminally ill patients in New Zealand. My argument follows.  Read the rest of this entry »