By Jill Stark
RESEARCH reveals that one in three Australian doctors would use painkillers or sedatives to hasten the death of severely disabled babies.
A survey of neonatologists by researchers at Sydney's Westmead Children's Hospital found that 32 per cent would consider using medication to cause death in order to alleviate pain and suffering in newborns.
The survey found that doctors who fear a slow and painful death are more likely to hasten the death of sick infants in their care.
In the survey of 78 neonatologists from Australia and New Zealand, 94 per cent said they would administer medication in cases where further treatment was hopeless, and knowing it might inadvertently cause death.
The euthanasia debate was fuelled last month when The Age revealed that the Swiss organisation Dignitas had legally helped terminally ill Sydney man John Elliott end his life.
While Australian law allows life-sustaining treatment to be withdrawn or withheld from terminally ill patients, hastening death is illegal unless as an unintentional result of providing pain relief. Most doctors surveyed deemed it more humane to use painkillers to hasten death rather than to inflict undue suffering by withholding feeding tubes or oxygen.
The anonymous questionnaire, compiled by Peter Barr, is the first of its kind to examine how doctors' attitudes to their own mortality can affect ethical practices.
Dr Barr, a neonatologist for 30 years, said the survey was hypothetical and doctors were asked to put aside legal ramifications when responding.
But specialists working with terminally ill babies were regularly faced with complex ethical dilemmas, he said.
"If you're a neonatologist and you see a baby dying and suffering, then you can understand the impulse to hasten death, and that impulse may be further mediated by one's own personal fear of death, which you then see in the dying baby. It seems to me an entirely understandable human response," he said.
In a paper published yesterday in theArchives of Disease in Childhood, Dr Barr found that doctors afraid of dying may unconsciously hasten the death of an infant to "appease their own personal death anxiety".
Conversely, those who were scared of cremation or having their body donated to medical science were less likely to hasten death for babies in their care.
Margaret Tighe, president of Right to Life Victoria, said the findings were of "grave concern".
"Nobody has the right to kill another person on the basis of what they perceive to be their future quality of life," she said.
"These days sick children are not kept in pain. There have been tremendous advances made in caring for people with severe disabilities and I think that doctors have a duty to do the best they can."
Dr Rosanna Capolingua, chairwoman of the Australian Medical Association's ethics committee said: "We do not believe that doctors should be involved in any way with the intention of causing death or assisted suicide.
"But, indeed, doctors will be involved in the relief of pain and suffering in a terminally ill patient when it may be that providing that relief may hasten death," she said.