MEDIA RELEASE
Melbourne suicide pact Call for legislative change
Two prominent Melbourne women have ended their lives in a suicide pact. Before they died, they asked Exit director Dr Philip Nitschke to distribute a letter they wrote explaining the reasons for their decision.
Titled “I have a friend”, the letter is available from the following link: http://www.exitinternational.net/media/Heidelberg.pdf
They both ended their lives using Max Dog nitrogen.
Claire Parsons (67) and Val Seeger (76) died together in their Viewbank home. Val was experiencing the early stages of Alzhiemers disease.
Val had spent her professional life as a Director of Nursing at a major Melbourne hospital, Claire had a PhD in Biomedical science, a post-doctorate qualification from Harvard, and was a noted author. They had been friends for 25 years.
In their suicide note Claire lamented the laws that make it a crime to provide humane and compassionate assistance to another to suicide. These laws are cruel and need revision, she said. Claire who was not ill, realised that she could risk prosecution for helping Val to die. She felt that she was forced to end her own life.
Dr Nitschke said that pacts were uncommon, but when they occurred were often driven by the fear of prosecution of the person left behind.
The mutual suicide death of Warragul couple Don and Iris Flounders who died in each other’s arms at their home in 2011 was a case in point. Don was dying on mesothelioma, but Iris was not sick.
“Traditional euthanasia legislation has never been able to deal with situations where couples and friends want to die together” said Dr Nitschke. Only a de-criminalisation of assisted suicide can help in this regard. For this reason, he said Victoria should follow the UK’s lead’.
"I call on the Director of Public Prosecutions in Victoria, John Champion, to issue guidelines to clarify who is and is not likely to be prosecuted in the event of an assisted suicide. Such guidelines may have meant that Claire Parsons would be alive today” he said.
Dr Nitschke said that he had been contacted separately twice in the past week by Victorian police seeking information on the Max Dog nitrogen system used by Val and Claire and another unrelated Exit member.
END. 6th June 2014 Exit Contact: Dr Philip Nitschke 0407 189 339 mailto:[email protected]