I recently finished reading “Mercy” by Jodie Picoult. It is a great book, but it made me quite depressed because I chose the wrong time to read it. The book is about a man convicted of murder after the mercy killing of his wife who in in the last stages of cancer. It was on the top of my “book to read” pile which is why I read it. At the same time my father died of cancer, so it was all a bit close to home. I finished reading it and then looked at the next book on the pile. It was called “1001 Places to see before you die”. I have moved it down the pile.

“It’s no fun lying here starving to death, I just want to go to sleep and not wake up”. Those words were said by my father a few days ago. He is dieing of stomach cancer and the tumour is so large there is no room for food. He is slowly wasting away to nothing and some time in the next fews days his body will give up. If this was happening to a dog you would put it out of its misery and that would be acceptable. However if we were to end my father’s suffering and help him in his desire to go to sleep and not wake up we would be charged with a crime.

Our legal system is based on the Judeo-Christian moral code and since the bible says “Though shalt not kill” then we interpret all killing as a crime. Well almost. God likes a good bit of smiting and occassionally commands his followers to kill others and of course, if your government commands you to kill, that is acceptable as well. So if my father was a perfectly healthy innocent civilian, walking down the street in Bahgdad, the government would deem it acceptable to kill him  with a bomb dropped on him from 40,000 feet (as collatoral damage in the War on Terror).  However as an unhealthy citizen of Australia, suffering from a terminal disease, which is leading to a long and painful death, he gets no relief. Our laws say it is wrong to end his suffering even though he has requested it. After all, life is sacred.

The law sometimes has a very perverse view of right or wrong and it is always the innocent who suffer the most.