Australia Split on Helping Healthy to Die

Australia's bitter debate on euthanasia has been reignited following the suicide of a healthy 79-year-old former academic who decided that she had enjoyed "a happy life, but enough of it".

Lisette Nigot had attended workshops organised by the Exit Australia group, at which painless methods of euthanasia are explained.

Dr Philip Nitschke, the group's director, became the country's best-known advocate of assisted suicide when he helped four people to take their lives under a 1995 law - unique to Australia's Northern Territory - legalising euthanasia.

The legislation was subsequently overturned by the federal senate.

Ms Nigot's suicide last week, a month short of her 80th birthday, was, according to a typed final statement which she left behind, carried out simply because she wanted to have control over her own death.

"I do not intend to wait until it is too late to die with dignity," a separate final statement said.

"Why is there such pressure against helping, or allowing, people who have had enough of living... to fulfil their longing for final peace?"

"The reason?" a note pinned above her bed said. "Because, after 80 years of a good life, I have enough [sic] of it. I want to stop it before it gets bad."

The Australian prime minister, John Howard, said he was appalled by the case.

"We should encourage the preservation of life and the respect for life," he said. "I condemn and depreciate in the strongest possible terms anything that allows or encourages anybody to take their life, especially if they're healthy."

But Dr Nitschke said that, while rare, cases of healthy people choosing to die were on the increase.

The point was illustrated by the deaths, a week before Ms Nigot's, of Sydney and Marjorie Croft, a couple in their 80s from Queensland. Like her, they had attended Exit Australia workshops.

Both had lost former partners, and wrote a final statement - now posted on the Exit Australia website - before their suicide explaining that they did not want to suffer the trauma of grief again.

"We have left instructions that we be cremated and that our ashes be mixed together," it read. "We feel that way, we will be together for ever."

Ms Nigot had spent more than 25 years as a respected lecturer, travelling extensively and earning France's highest academic award.

In the 1950s and 1960s she had been a publicist for the Waldorf hotel in New York, meeting the Kennedys, Salvador Dali, Marilyn Monroe and Charles de Gaulle.

Maureen Mackay, the secretary of the Western Australia Right To Life group, said that Ms Nigot was wrong to think that life held no more for her.

"A lot of people who are getting on in years lose confidence and think they are not going to be looked after. But life is what you make of it, and you shouldn't be frightened of going forward. Once you accept that ageing is OK, there's a lot of joy still to be had in life," she said.

Dr Nitschke had first met Ms Nigot two years ago, and said he last saw her three weeks ago at her Perth home.

He said she had no fears for the future. "She had a good sense of humour. She wasn't morbid. She saw this as the next stage," he said.

He stressed that he would oppose such a decision in someone much younger than Ms Nigot.

"It's a philosophical point," he said. "I spent a long time trying to discourage her. If it was a younger person I would have spent longer. I would be a lot more sceptical if a younger person said they had lived their life."