Mary English has worked as a general practitioner for 28 years.

She has a practice in the inner Wellington suburb of Kelburn.

They are both Catholics, but Bill English said euthanasia should not be seen as a battleground between believers and atheists, "just an issue of different belief systems".

He said the argument was more about advocating for the collective good than a specific religious view.

Sir Bill English'submission

Bill English said the legislation was flawed in principle and beyond salvaging in practice.

"What starts out as permitted will become desirable, and then for some will become an unconsented necessity - that's the slippery slope and there's actually no way around it."

He said:

• The criteria for who would be eligible to request assisted dying was too broad
• The test for whether a person had consented to die was too low
• There were too few consequences in place for anyone who broke the safeguards of the legislation.

The current bill was being supported by a small group of predominantly highly-educated pakeha, who placed high importance on personal autonomy Bill English said.

Dr Mary English's Submission

She said she was opposed to "state-sanctioned killing".

There was nothing in Seymour's bill sufficient to contain the incredible power over life which doctors would have.

"If you ask [doctors], ‘What is your bottom line?'...most importantly, we don't want to be responsible for the death of a patient that didn't need to happen."

Mary English expressed concern that elderly people would feel under pressure to kill themselves as if they were a burden, with not all families willing to provide necessary support and in some cases taking advantage of them.

Both Bill and Mary English drew a comparison with youth suicide.

"If assisted suicide is a triumph for autonomy and choice, how can youth suicide be a tragedy?" Mary English said.

Listen to submission

Source

• news.com.au
• pro.newsroom.co.nz
• stuff.co.nz
• Image: screenshot

Of course, he hasn't done it all on his own.

His wife, Mary, who is also a doctor, shares his values and has also defended them publicly - most recently in an oral submission to a government committee studying end-of-life issues as a result of the latest campaign for euthanasia in this country.

It's no secret that the couple are practising Catholics, and they both come from large families.

Mary is the eldest of 13 children of a Samoan father and an Italian mother, while Bill is the third youngest of 12, brought up on a farm in the south of New Zealand, helping with both farm work and domestic chores from a young age.

(He famously at one stage made school lunches for most of his siblings.)

In a recent profile of the couple in the New Zealand Women's Weekly, billed as the couple's "private love story", Mary said a large family was part of the plan when they married in their mid-20s:

"Bill was quite keen for a big family and I said I was up for that - as long as they were all girls!" laughs Mary. "It tempted the fates because I ended up with five sons!"

Politics being a rather brutal thing at times, Bill's generally second-fiddle role in politics (he was deputy prime minister and finance minister under John Key, who resigned from the top job in December) has probably protected the English children while they were growing up.

With five now in their twenties and the youngest 17 (the only one at home), the risks are not so great, but their opinion on dad taking on the PM's role was sought anyway - and they were supportive. Continue reading

Sources

• MercatorNet, article by Carolyn Moynihan, who is deputy editor of MercatorNet.
• Image: Stuff