The discursive positioning of people who are terminally i11 in terms of power: A parliamentary debate on voluntary euthanasia

Abstract

This article is derived from discourse analytic research on voluntary euthanasia in the context of a parliamentary debate. The site of the analysis was the debate in the South Australian House of Assembly on Voluntary Euthanasia that occurred in 1995. In contrast to traditional empiricist approaches to researching voluntary euthanasia, it raises some important issues regarding the positioning of the person who is terminally ill in terms of social structure and power. Whilst participants on both sides of the debate attempt to understand voluntary euthanasia in terms of common arguments such as the sanctity of life and liberal individualism, implicit in these arguments is a struggle over value systems, issues of power and dominance, and in particular institutional control over the life of the person who is terminally ill. We argue that the debate is as much influenced by a covert struggle over which institution should have the power to control the practice as by the rights and wrongs of euthanasia per se. The arguments offered have come to serve as a legitimating rhetoric in a battle over power, with euthanasia being used as a vehicle for a struggle in which concern for the interests of the person who is terminally ill becomes secondary. Whatever the outcome of the debate, the person who is terminally ill remains in a position of disempowered interdependence.