Content area
Full text
On 22 May 2002, Nancy Crick, a 69 year old grandmother living on Australia's Gold Coast committed suicide by drinking a lethal cocktail of barbiturates. 1 For months previously, Nancy had advertised her intention to do so on her website, <nancycrick.com>. With 21 family members and friends present to witness the death, Crick's suicide all but guaranteed the police investigation that followed. According to her doctor, Philip Nitschke, the manner of Crick's dying was evidence of a new radicalism within the voluntary euthanasia movement, and was intended to force a precedent for the right not to die alone. 2, 3 Putting the short, sharp media feast to one side, however, Crick's death appears to have achieved little in political terms. Queensland Premier Peter Beattie immediately ruled out legal change, 4 while days later, the Australian Medical Association voted 79 to 34 against a motion to move towards a neutral position on voluntary euthanasia. 5 In retrospect, Crick's death was seen as a public relations disaster when a postmortem revealed that Crick had an inoperable twisted bowel, rather than bowel cancer, when she died. 6, 7 On 6 August 2002, detectives swooped on Nitschke's home outside Darwin, confiscating computers, files, and disks. 8 Recently, the investigations concluded, with no changes laid. 9
Two years on, who remembers Nancy Crick? And in another year from now, what will mark her death out from the slow parade of personal tragedies and suicides that seem to fuel public debate about euthanasia in the pages of newspapers and even academic journals? Significantly, each new case is seen as a defining moment in the debate: the case that could tip the balance in favour of legalisation. The usual participants weigh in to do battle over the same old questions, but nothing ever seems to change.
If the euthanasia debate has reached something of a stalemate, these questions may be part of the problem. We have assumed for too long that it is Nancy Crick, or Dianne Pretty, celebrity dissidents like Jack Kevorkian and Philip Nitschke, or prosecuted doctors like Nigel Cox and Timothy Quill who illustrate what is at stake in the euthanasia debate. We need a change of focus. For every death, and every dissident doctor who makes it into...