WHY is euthanasia campaigner Dr Philip Nitschke helping so many women to die?

Nancy Crick's death on the Gold Coast last week inevitably will lead to more suicides by other elderly women. Last year, cancer victim Norma Hall of Sydney also was assisted by Nitschke to die. A volunteer named Georgia says that she wants to be next in line.

In America, the doctor with a death machine, Jack Kevorkian, who is now doing time in a Michigan jail for murder, helped 93 people to die between 1990 and 1997. Among them, women outnumbered men by two to one. The death of Crick is further evidence that the big losers from legalised euthanasia will be ailing elderly women.

Last year, psychologist Dr Silvia Sara Canetto, of Colorado State University, surveyed more than three decades of mercy killing in the records of the Hemlock Society, a voluntary euthanasia group in the US. She found that most of the time it was women who ended up as victims.

"Many women do not have the resources, the sense of entitlement or the power and freedom to make the choice they desire, especially when they are sick or disabled," she says.

An American hospice nurse, Nancy Valko, backs up Canetto's research with her own experience.

"When a man was dying, it was not unusual to see the wife and even ex-wives, as well as other family, at the bedside," Valko says.

"In contrast, it was just about as common to see a dying woman who was divorced and alone."

Neither is it surprising that Crick did not have the bowel cancer that was supposedly the cause of her unbearable pain. This, too, fits into a pattern of euthanasia deaths.

Professor Kalman Kaplan, of the University of Illinois Medical School, surveyed mercy killings in the US and the Netherlands in a recent issue of the journal Ethics and Medicine. In most cases autopsies found no evident physical cause for their pain. Psychological or emotional pain was the real trigger for their death.

Kaplan's study also confirmed Canetto's view that women were more likely to be on the receiving end of a glass of poison or an injection. "For example, a typical man choosing physician-assisted suicide may be suffering from terminal lung cancer and be in a great deal of physical pain," he writes. "A typical woman choosing physician-assisted suicide may be somewhat disabled from chronic multiple sclerosis and, as a result, see her marriage break up and her economic situation deteriorate.

"Her pain may be just as intense as that of the man described above, but emerging from a partially psychosocial source."

Sick and disabled women, it seems, feel more of a burden than sick and disabled men. For the first time in their lives, they have to depend on care-givers rather than providing the care-giving themselves. Their diminished sense of self-worth may lead them to ask for death.

In Oregon, one of the few places where doctors like Nitschke can operate, 63 per cent of the people who died in cases of doctor-assisted suicide feared being a burden on family, friends or care-givers. More than pain, it appears to be loneliness, isolation and lack of support in an increasingly individualistic society that are pushing many of these women over the line.

The more publicity euthanasia receives through stunts like Crick's death, the more we foster negative attitudes about old age and disability. Instead of a campaign for mercy killing, we need a campaign for merciful care in the twilight years.

Michael Cook is editor of e-mail newsletter Australasian Bioethics Information (michael.cook@australasianbioethics.org)
The Courier-Mail has invited Dr Nitschke to write an article for Perspectives. He has so far declined, but the invitation stands