Dignity Matters

On the 9th of April we launched our constitutional challenge in the High Court in Pretoria, asking that the blanket prohibition on medical assistance in dying (MAiD) be declared unconstitutional for competent adults with a terminal or irremediable condition whose suffering cannot be relieved. As you will read in this issue's South African Update, the case is now moving. The Minister of Justice has indicated that she will abide by the court's decision, and we now await the answering affidavit of the Minister of Health. After more than four years of preparation, the argument we have built is finally being heard.

When I am asked to speak in the media there are a few topics that I am particularly passionate about. The first is that our call for MAiD is not a rejection of palliative care, in fact it is quite the opposite. At DignitySA we believe that good palliative care should be available to every South African from the moment of diagnosis, and far too few of us can access it. But, as our Advisory Trustee Rev. Mogomotsi Diutlwileng reflects so movingly in the Expert Input section of this newsletter (which was featured as an opinion piece in the Daily Maverick on the 26th of July), even excellent care cannot relieve all suffering in every case. To insist otherwise is to look away from how some people actually die.

The second is that MAiD is not a "slippery slope." I understand why people fear this, and the fear deserves to be taken seriously. But in jurisdictions that have carefully regulated assisted dying, with rigorous safeguards, independent assessment and protection against coercion, the catastrophes so often predicted have simply not materialised. We have meticulously gathered this evidence, from experts around the world, and placed it before the court.

When the legal and clinical arguments are set aside, what remains is something simpler and more human. We are convinced that a competent adult, of sound mind and facing an inevitable death, should not be forced to endure suffering they have clearly and repeatedly said they do not want. The real question is who gets to decide.

This issue of Dignity Matters holds that human thread throughout. You will find it in Herman Lategan's characteristically frank and funny Exit Interview, in my colleague Willem Landman's review of the tender movie The Sea Inside, in Linda Ravenhill's introduction to the helpful book With the End in Mind, and in the echoing wisdom of Maya Angelou's poem When Great Trees Fall. I hope you will read it in that spirit.

A court case of this kind is long, and it is costly, and I have personally put my own money towards it. If you believe, as I do, that it is a fight worth seeing through, there are three things you can do today. Please sign and share our petition, which we are aiming to grow to 5,000 signatures by the end of September. Please donate to DignitySA. And please consider joining us as a volunteer ambassador. You'll find details throughout this issue.

Thank you for standing with us.

Joseph Raimondo
Executive Director

Associate Professor Joseph Raimondo is Head of the Division of Cell Biology at the University of Cape Town. He holds a medical degree from UCT and a DPhil in Neuroscience from the University of Oxford, which he completed as a Rhodes Scholar, and brings the perspective of a medically trained neuroscientist to DignitySA's work. You can read his full bio here.

Dignity Matters poses some questions to:

Herman Lategan is a creative nonfiction journalist who has been published locally and internationally. He has worked in radio and TV and is the author of four books. As the obituarist for the Daily Maverick, one of his many favourite forms of writing is the obituary. It is a difficult art form.

If calories and indigestion were no object, what culinary indulgence would be your last?

It would be a humble dinner prepared by my partner, Graham, consisting of his signature spaghetti bolognaise, with a side salad served with good old kômmin Knorr French Vinaigrette Salad Dressing. We would share a bottle of Bellpost Chardonnay and listen to Miriam Makeba, Ella Fitzgerald, Etta James and Billie Holiday.

Ideally, how would you like to go?

Quickly. The long goodbye scenario fills me with dread. I've witnessed too many of the latter.

In what publication would your obituary appear, and what would its glorious and slightly exaggerated but still truthful headline be?

I don't know if I'm important enough for an obituary, but our local knock-and-drop in Green Point is called the Atlantic Sun. Headline: Kind, friendly, arrogant and rude. Loved and hated by many.

Imagine your memorial service. What music would be playing? What band or artist would be grateful for the opportunity to perform?

I love the local, now defunct, band Bright Blue, they could sing Weeping. Jennifer Ferguson's Suburban Hum, and Etta James must sing (on CD) I'd Rather Go Blind. I love Brenda Fassie's Weekend Special, Amanda Strydom's Ek Sal Staan, and Anton Goosen's Boy van die Suburbs. Oh, and Pretty Yende, who can sing Il dolce suono (the "Mad Scene" from Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor), a highly demanding, virtuosic sequence that cemented her global operatic fame. It must be held at the Vasco da Gama Taverna in Green Point, also known as the Portuguese Embassy.

Burial or cremation? If transport, permissions and expense were no problem, where would you like to be buried, or have your ashes scattered?

I have donated my body to UCT's Division of Clinical Anatomy and Biological Anthropology. After a year, they cremate you. My ashes must be scattered at Three Anchor Bay, where I have some of my best memories as a little boy playing in the sand and catching sand sharks. I always threw them back into the water. I must return to them.

If you could choose one object to be buried or cremated with, what would it be and why?

I came into this world with nothing. I shall leave it with nothing. But if I should, it would be a poetry collection by Sheila Cussons, a poet who was like a mother to me in my stormy teens. It should be her first volume of poems Plektrum, published in 1970.

If you were to haunt someone after your demise, where would it be and why?

I wouldn't want to haunt someone once I'm gone. I have haunted enough people while alive. Bigots, editors, people who have deceived me, poseurs, materialistic grandees. They can rest easy now, I'm done with them. But if I'm allowed one exception, it would be Graham, just to sit quietly in the room while he makes his spaghetti bolognaise, the way I always did.

Who is in your will? And is there anything that you are leaving that may cause a fight?

Ha, I'm a journalist and writer, I hardly have money. But anything I might have left goes to my life partner of forty years, Graham Sonnenberg. If by chance there is enough, I'd also donate to DignitySA and the Durbanville Children's Home, where I spent a year of my childhood.

What do you still need to do before you kick the bucket?

I would like to visit South America. I have been to all continents of the world, including Antarctica, just not South America. Buenos Aires, mostly, for the melancholy of it, the tango bars, the faded duende. The latter is the presence of death, raw emotion, and dark vitality that makes art, places feel truly alive. Lorca distinguished it from the angel (grace) and the muse (inspiration): duende wounds, and that wound is its gift. It would also be great to visit Palestine when it emerges from this genocide, to walk through Gaza and see people rebuilding, living, laughing again.

Finally, is there anything you've secretly wondered about death, but been too polite to ask?

I often wonder about death. I have seen many people die in my life, and I have written hundreds of obituaries. I suspect it's lights out. It's the big secret, isn't it. Made to keep us humble, as humankind can fly people into space, transplant hearts, and be full of hubris, yet that one question remains unanswered for evermore. Only once you shut your eyes would you know. And that is part of the universe's plan to keep us humble and inquisitive.

Why I Have Chosen to Stand with Dignity SA

Reverend Mogomotsi Diutlwileng is an ordained Minister of the Methodist Church of Southern Africa. In this pastoral and theological reflection, he shares why he has chosen to join DignitySA as an Advisory Trustee. This opinion piece appeared in The Daily Maverick on 26 July 2026.

Every human being is created in the image of God and therefore possesses inherent worth, dignity, and sacred value. This conviction has shaped my ministry for more than two decades. It is also the reason I have chosen to publicly align myself with Dignity SA and its advocacy for Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD).

Dignity SA is committed to advancing human dignity, compassionate end-of-life care, informed personal choice, and the development of an ethical and carefully regulated legal framework for MAiD in South Africa. At its heart, the organisation seeks neither to diminish the value of life nor to hasten death indiscriminately. Rather, it seeks to affirm that every person deserves to live and to die with dignity, compassion, autonomy, and respect.

My support for this cause is not merely theoretical. It is deeply personal.

My wife, Baagi, and I had the profound privilege and heartbreak of caring for both our mothers during the final stages of their lives. My mother lived with dementia until her passing. My mother-in-law endured relentless pain as multiple organs gradually failed before she eventually died.

Those experiences changed me forever.

We watched two remarkable women, once the strong matriarchs of our families, women of courage, discipline, wisdom, hard work, and independence, gradually lose the ability to care for themselves. The women who had once cared for everyone else eventually required assistance with every basic task of daily living.

The emotional and psychological burden of witnessing this slow decline is difficult to describe. Perhaps even more painful were the conversations with doctors who gently told us that medicine had reached its limits, that nothing more could be done except manage the inevitable journey toward death. The most telling thing of the entire experience was to see how my mother was taken to the hospital in an ambulance. After a month she was brought back in an ambulance, then feeding through a tube or G-tube.

As family members, we felt helpless. As a minister, I prayed. As a son, I grieved long before death finally arrived.

Those moments forced me to wrestle deeply with questions that every pastor eventually faces: What does it mean to preserve human dignity? What is the purpose of suffering? And what does genuine compassion require of us?

The Christian faith teaches that life is a precious gift from God. I hold that conviction wholeheartedly. Yet I also believe that human dignity involves more than merely biological existence. It encompasses our capacity to relate, to love, to contribute, to make choices, and to exercise responsible stewardship over our lives.

When terminal illness irreversibly strips away these capacities and leaves a person enduring unbearable suffering with no hope of recovery, we must have the courage to ask difficult ethical questions.

Throughout Scripture, suffering is never romanticised.

Job cried out in anguish. Jeremiah lamented his very birth. David poured out his pain in the Psalms. Even our Lord Jesus Christ prayed in Gethsemane that the cup of suffering might pass from Him before crying from the cross, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"

These faithful witnesses did not celebrate suffering as a virtue in itself. Rather, they brought their suffering honestly before God.

Certainly, suffering can deepen faith, strengthen character, and cultivate compassion. Many believers, myself included, have discovered profound spiritual growth through seasons of hardship. Yet I struggle to see what divine purpose is served when a person who is irreversibly dying endures prolonged, excruciating suffering that medicine can neither cure nor meaningfully relieve.

Does God require such suffering?

I do not believe so.

Instead, I believe God calls us to embody mercy, compassion, and love. These are not abstract theological ideals but practical expressions of our discipleship.

For this reason, I believe society should seriously consider a carefully regulated framework for Medical Assistance in Dying.

Such a framework is not about abandoning vulnerable people. Quite the opposite. It should include rigorous legal safeguards, comprehensive medical evaluation, psychological assessment to ensure that the individual has full decision-making capacity, thorough counselling, informed consent, and independent professional oversight. Most importantly, any request for MAiD must originate solely from the patient, free from coercion or external pressure.

This is not a licence for abuse; it is a commitment to protecting both human dignity and human life while respecting informed personal choice in exceptional circumstances.

My support for Dignity SA therefore rests on several deeply held convictions.

First, I have personally witnessed the profound suffering of terminal illness and the heartbreaking loss of dignity experienced by those we love.

Second, I do not believe that unavoidable suffering at the end of life is inherently virtuous or that it somehow glorifies God simply because it is endured.

Third, I believe that personal moral agency—the God-given capacity to make thoughtful, responsible choices—is itself part of the dignity bestowed upon every human being.

Fourth, I believe that allowing a mentally competent adult, acting freely and with full medical understanding, to decide how they wish to face an inevitable death is ultimately a profound question of human dignity.

Finally, death is the one certainty we all share. Every one of us will eventually stand at that threshold. If, at that moment, a person of sound mind, guided by faith, supported by family, counselled by medical professionals, and protected by robust legal safeguards prayerfully concludes that they wish to receive medical assistance in dying, I believe their carefully considered decision deserves thoughtful respect.

As a minister of the Methodist Church, I recognise that faithful Christians will disagree on this issue. I respect those differences. Yet I also believe the Church has a sacred responsibility to accompany people compassionately through life's most difficult ethical questions rather than avoid them.

For me, supporting Dignity SA is ultimately about affirming the sacred worth of every person until their final breath. It is about compassion over judgement, dignity over despair, thoughtful discernment over fear, and love that honours both life and the freedom with which God has entrusted us.

That is why I have chosen to stand with Dignity SA.