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Esther Rantzen hailed Scotland's new leglislation as 'historic' (ViacomCBS)
What counts as a “dignified death”? On Monday, we got an intimation of what one looks like for Guardian readers, as journalist Renate van der Zee wrote about her elderly mother’s “completely calm, almost cheerful” legal demise at the hands of a visiting doctor in the Netherlands in 2022. After a speech to her three daughters about “how it was important to take care of the Earth wisely, to recycle as much as possible and to look after one another”, Jannèt drank the potion handed to her, and 15 minutes later reportedly met a peaceful and painless death.
In stark contrast to this beatific moment, the 90-year-old’s life before her exit had been “long and tormented”, according to her daughter. Factors that led to her decision to end things included “deafness, incontinence and many other conditions”, as well as a “lack of mental resilience” to cope with the suffering. One wonders what the deceased would have felt about such frank disclosures. While dignity in death supposedly now requires control over the precise timing of your demise, a discreet silence from relatives about the embarrassing details beforehand seems to have become optional.
Campaigners for assisted dying seek to eliminate messiness of various physical and emotional kinds, and their language is adjusted accordingly. At times, it can sound as if one is being offered a particularly relaxing spa treatment. With a pleasing ring of supportiveness, you are now being “assisted” in achieving something, rather than killed by a doctor or killing yourself. In van der Zee’s piece, the lethally toxic sedative given to “the patient” was merely a “drink”, and its administration a “procedure”, after which her mother “fell asleep”. Also in the past week, Scottish politicians sponsoring a new bill legalising voluntary euthanasia have stated that, once legalised, resulting deaths will be recorded as “natural” rather than as a result of suicide, with the suggestion that this will reduce the “stigma” around assisted dying. In other words, moral qualms will be framed as bigotry. (Then again, perhaps bureaucrats are just looking for a respectable cover story for Scotland’s ever-decreasing life expectancy rates.)
And alongside the sanitised language, there’s a tendency to place large amounts of trust in the future judgements of relevant unidentified authority figures, even in the face of blatant legal and medical failures of the recent past. Many activists seem convinced that any UK pro-assisted dying law will contain enough safeguards to avoid people being bumped off for the wrong reasons. And perhaps they are right, as far as the first iteration of any such law goes; but they are bound to be wrong about later extensions of it. Changes in social norms tend to roll down slopes rather than hurtle off cliffs; but either way we can all easily end up at the bottom.
Canadians, for instance, used to reject assisted dying, but now significant numbers would agree to expand the existing programme in order to include as respective qualifying reasons, “inability to receive medical treatment” (51% of respondents), and “homelessness” (28%). In the Netherlands, euthanasia is permitted on the basis of “hopeless and unbearable suffering” rather than fatal illness and is sometimes allowed for psychiatric illness alone. Given the degree of concept creep endemic to modern society, as we collectively grow yet more anxious and neurotic, who knows what mundane aspects of modern life will end up counting as “hopeless and unbearable” too?
I am using the future tense here deliberately, for it seems clear that such legislation will pass in the whole of the UK sooner or later. Its arrival has been heralded for a while now, not least by the safe, agent-approved involvement of TV personalities like Dame Esther Rantzen — herself now in the grip of Stage 4 lung cancer and apparently keener than ever on personal choice in this area. (Presumably she has forgotten saying that unvaccinated Covid sufferers should be left to expire on their own, wholly untreated by the NHS.) Other celebrities have been doing their bit by offering personal anecdotes of heart-rending suffering too, including some from beyond the grave.
The main tool their opponents tend to wield in response to such campaigning is a list of potential adverse consequences to society generally, should legalisation happen: for instance, that it might lead to martyr-ish types being guilt-tripped into taking up the option against their own best interests; or that its real appeal to economists is the cost-efficient dispatching of those who disproportionately drain health and social care resources. Indeed, the latter was actually positively embraced by Matthew Parris in his Times column last week. But really, either way, how can such abstractions compete, faced with the visceral power of a story about Dame Prue Leith’s brother’s agonising death from bone cancer? It is not that we care so much about what happens to celebrities and their families, but rather that, in a vacuum of personal experience where most of us have yet to see a dead body, their stories can act as psychic proxy for what we imagine or fear might happen to us.
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SubscribeAn interesting (as always) examination by Kathleen Stock of some of the key points concerning the issue of assisted dying. Others may disagree, but my impression is that she doesn’t come down on one side or the other, but seeks here to illuminate rather than fulminate.
I’ve no doubt that the discussion that ensues will be taken along familiar lines, and she outlines the broad positions: those with a religious (or specifically Christian) persuasion may be against assisted dying on principle, while those who don’t subscribe to a religious outlook may be more inclined to favour it. She seems to suggest that without the backstop of a specifically religious outlook, there’s nothing to stop encroachment on the ‘sanctity’ of human life.
Those who don’t have religious faith may find it very difficult to argue against assisted dying due to a lack of first principle; hence, it may be adopted into law. I’m in favour of very strictly controlled assisted dying – and yes, i understand the ‘slippery slope’ argument – but i just can’t countenance the continuation of intractable and unbearable pain for weeks on end. It’s just not humane. We wouldn’t allow it to happen to our treasured pets, so what is it that makes humans different in terms of their capacity to suffer?
This, for me, turns the entire argument on its head, thus: it’s up to those who oppose any form of assisted dying to set out by what principle they’re prepared to accept unbearable pain in their nearest and dearest – beyond the best that current palliative care can alleviate.
From what I have read of the discussion here the principle seems to be that they fear pressure from greedy relatives or a government trying to save money on national health services, especially for low income people. These suspicions are supposed to trump any legitimate concerns for “unbearable pain in their nearest and dearest – beyond the best that current palliative care can alleviate”.
What is unbearable? By what measure? According to whom?
And how far does palliative care extend?
There is massive difference between choices made to ease pain & thus make a human life possible…and choices made to end life and thus eliminate everything.
The Christians say God gave us life, it is not for us to throw it away. The Buddhists tell us suicide doesn’t end suffering, it simply leads to more & different suffering. The Muslims identify it as a cardinal sin and a barrier to Paradise.
The slope you describe as slippery is nothing but slide…and the end of the slide is death. Death on demand, by rule, at whim, according to those who always know best, what’s best for us. It begins, as all paths to Hell begin, with good intentions and we drape those intentions with great solemnity and speak of intractable pain. But then we redefine ‘pain’…and what is intractable….and we tell ourselves we KNOW when Life is no longer worth living (even if my demented father does not)…and we know when things are hopeless (even if the fool insists, where there’s life there’s hope).
“If they would rather die,” said Scrooge, “they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.”
We used to gasp when we heard that cold, hard phrase uttered by the sepulchral miser. Now it seems we applaud.
After all… that surplus, those homeless…the unwanted, lonely, diseased, aged, demented, depressed, anxiety-filled, mentally-ill, and lost populations which surround us, in total, create one hell of a carbon footprint. Add to the mix those who practice misinformation, who cling to the Four Olds (their guns & their religion), the deplorables, et al….and the well-managed ‘cleansing’ of the undesirables might work wonders!
This must be absolutely refused.
Mark Helprin, in a luminous essay entitled “Falling into Eternity” puts it this way: “Tests of faith great and small come like horizontal, wind-driven rain. They challenge individuals and whole societies, especially those like ours in sudden decline…. The greatest test of faith, success in which one can neither fake nor will, is death, which is not to say that death is the most difficult thing—the most difficult thing being to witness the suffering and death of innocents, especially those one truly loves, especially children. But, like a body drawn into the gravity of the sun, as one approaches one’s own death, the light and heat of great reckoning and absolute transformation of state burn away everything as if in a refiner’s fire, leaving only intense love, joy, and tranquility….
And in the most dire and dreadful situations…when all else fails, when nothing is left and you are powerless and done, the one shield and maker of justice beyond the realm of temporal powers and mortality is love. It is the conqueror of grief, and, somehow, the protector of those whom we care for even in their suffering.”
In 1910, life expectancy at birth in England was 51 for males and 55 for females. Anyone who reached their early fifties considered themselves lucky. Many who did suffered from chronic ill health, unable for physically demanding work, which accounted for most jobs in those days. So they were likely to be, or shortly to become, a financial burden. If euthanising people of advancing years had been normalised then, it seems unlikely that the medical advances which subsequently extended life expectancy and the quality of life for older people would ever have happened. In the short term killing is always cheaper and easier than caring or curing. But there is nothing dignified
about it. And when the financial stakes for the State and for family members are so high, the cheaper and easier option can quickly move from a choice to an unavoidable implied obligation.
Cue Monty Python’s “Bring out your dead” skit….
“can quickly move from a choice to an unavoidable implied obligation” and then to obligatory. Logan’s Run becomes a template not a sci-fi film. Logan’s Run without the Run and no Jennie Agutter! Hell indeed.
Jennie Agutter, indeed! 1976!
But the reason life expectancy was so low was, in large part, vastly higher infant mortality. Someone lucky enough to reach their fifties in the early 20th century could still reasonably expect a decade or two of healthy life.
This. It always irritates me when people get this wrong. When a country’s life expectancy is 30, as it was in imperial Rome or certain developing countries not long ago, the figures are massively skewed by the massive number of infant mortalities that tend to occur under the age of 5 in places without proper medical care and nutrition. If you survive infancy, you are more likely than not good until your 60s at least.
Life expectancy *at birth* was 51/55… I’m going to estimate the numbers to make a point about life expectancy: In the same year, 1910, anyone who in their early fifties had a life expectancy of probably 65/70 (later than life expectancy at birth due to “peaks” of death in early child hood, young adulthood, and finally end of life). Anyone who reached 25, life expectancy was probably 60/65. At 10, life expectancy was 55/60, etc. Many who survived lead normal healthy lives….
“resulting deaths will be recorded as “natural” rather than as a result of suicide, with the suggestion that this will reduce the “stigma” around assisted dying”
The Woke sure love to manipulate language almost as much as they hate “stigma” (unless of course, it is the correct type of stigma by their lights, then it’s virtue)…
They know that stigma generally works, which is why they are so keen to stamp it out, unless it is the right kind of stigma in service of the right causes.
We “smooth the language” around death all the time. We refer to grandma “passing away”, not “croaking”, or “dropping off the perch”, at least in polite conversation.
‘Croaking’ and ‘dropping off the perch’ are equally euphemistic, though admittedly less polite. I’ve yet to find anyone taking offence at saying so-and-so has died. I’ve noticed a tendency recently (on the telly and such) to insert a ‘sadly’ before ‘has died’. I think this started with the daily Covid death toll announcements. Shows you care, or something.
Regrettably ‘we’ have become much more mawkish in recent years.
Such feebleness does NOT bode well.
Actually, those are examples of dysphemism.
Granny was 90 and “sadly” she died!
yes, but we wont when someone arrives to give her two in the back of the head because she hits a certain age. we also dont use that language with our pets. it wont be long before we abandon ‘assisted’ and just say “we had granny put down. the old bag was costing us a fortune and whinging like billy-oh”.
Even “put down” is a euphemism, whether it refers to getting a “green needle” from the vet, or a round of .308 through the head in the back paddock.
Don’t be silly.
Or they have “transitioned” which these days has a whole different meaning.
With 71 up ticks for Sylvestre’s comment at the time of writing, any vaguely rational and/or moral human can only conclude that a very large number of Unherd readers are nasty, cruel human beings who want to cause as much human suffering as possible.
With enough effort and a few more medical ‘advances’ surely we’ll be able to increase ‘life’ expectancy dramatically – say to 200yrs. Now it’s a pity that 110 of those years you’ll be incontinent, have no movement of your limbs, have severe dementia and need 24/7 care by a team of 20 people ( allowing for annual leave etc).
Ronald Reagan famously remarked that the most terrifying sentence in the English language is: ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help you’.
Unherd readers seem to think the following sentence is OK:
‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help (actually demand!) that you stay alive no matter how much suffering you are enduring and without any regard for your repeated wishes to choose a time of your own peaceful ending’.
This for me smacks of the most totalitarian dystopia imaginable – a society that sets out to maximise human suffering out of a blind manic ideology.
How did you get all of that from my comment about Woke sophistry…. I have mixed feelings about right to die laws etc. but I am unequivocal about my disgust for the Woke’s Orwellian language games…
An impossible society that would prevent any human from experiencing pain would indeed make us human robots. Rather, avoiding pain, and having compassion on others who suffer it, is the moral reason why we are alive. We are all in this together. Life is not a dystopia unless we make it one.
In this country, as I understand it, we don’t keep people alive. Maybe I’ve got this wrong but palliative care is to relieve suffering (and we’re pretty successful at that, comparatively, I think) rather than prolong life.
My father in law had pneumonia; he asked the medics to throw ‘everything at it’ but he and we weren’t given a choice. When he didn’t show signs of recovery after five days they turned the machines off. They said it was kinder and it probably was, whatever he wanted. They didn’t keep him alive for years so don’t worry Mr Branagan, it won’t happen to you.
My mum had dementia and while her death was a release for us she fought until the end. To us her last months seemed horrible, but she presumably got something out of them.
That’s the thing really; I might say now I wouldn’t want to stay alive in that condition but what do I know? I’m not in that condition and haven’t been and I might be looking forward to a chicken pie or something tomorrow.
I look after someone who’s disabled and it looks a pretty limited existence to me but he thanks God every morning that he’s alive.
I’m glad it wasn’t an decision I was given with my mum.
Precisely. The VAD push is a bristling, narcissistic solution in search of a non-existent problem to attach itself to, I think largely as a method of contriving ‘meaning’ in the lives of those who think ‘meaning in life’ is something that, in a soon-to-be-perfected world, you’ll be able to order from Amazon, or pick up from an episode of That’s Life! or a Parris column.
But, y’know, the emptier the vessel, the more likely it is to resonate with the populist vibe of the days. Make the most of it, folks. It’s clearly what most of us think we need to salve what increasingly ails us. Huzzah, and two cheers for democracy.
Just so long as we don’t ever pretend we didn’t know what it was we were doing. Which is regressing, not progressing.
This is untrue, sadly, and the reason assisted dying is so important. My experience is exactly the opposite.
My mother was kept alive through a cocktail of drugs long after she wanted to go at the age of 93. My ex wife’s aunt was kept alive as a vegetable for years after two strokes, despite the pleas of her children to let her go.
Go to any geriatric ward and you will see any number of husks of human beings being kept alive to no benefit to themselves and – yes, using expensive resources which should be spent on their grandchildren.
I love KS’s columns but I really disagree with this one. The issue is not the lack of religion, it is the new dogma of scientific determinism that decides if someone lives or dies, whatever their condition, and this is a fight back by those who see life as precious and don’t see mere existence as valuable.
It’s my experience, but I appreciate yours is different.
It’s hard for me to believe the hospital turned off machines keeping your father alive against your and his wishes.
No longer 71 upticks, down to 8 at the time of writing. Why does unherd remove the ‘scores’? I can see an argument for not having them, but having them and taking them away at random intervals seems odd
I’ve noticed that happens a lot, all upvotes and downvotes on comments suddenly resetting to zero long past the initial discussion. Maybe some sort of glitch whenever they update an article post-publication, or move it around in terms of post order, or something like that, would be my guess. If not, and it’s intentional – kind of an odd approach, I agree.
Yes, I also was going to raise this point myself. This has been happening regularly and, frankly, it is hugely disappointing.
I wrote to UnHerd’s support about this on March 22nd and received assurances that their IT team would be informed.
On March 26th I wrote again saying that the problem persisted.
So far, I have not received any reply.
And the problem persists…
How ’bout: ‘‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help (actually demand!) that you die no matter how much life you are enjoying and without any regard for your repeated wishes to maintain a peaceful continuing.’?
That somehow seems more horrific, more totalitarian, more dystopian than the other…but maybe it’s just me.
Seriously, though, I think the real question here truly becomes: why does the individual have to experience agonizing suffering before they qualify for ‘dignified & peaceful’ state-sponsored ending? That seems exceedingly arbitrary doesn’t it?
Bill wants to kill himself. He wants to do so painlessly, with dignity, and without causing his family a horrible mess…why would you deny him that option? Why would we trust that ‘I’m from the Government & I’m an Expert on whether or not YOUR particular life is worth living’ is somehow magically better than simply trusting Bill to make the right choice for him when he enters the Ethical Suicide Parlor and asks for a Death Smoothie?
I’m not sure what that says about a society that makes Death such an easy and attractive option…but I don’t think it’s good.
As usual great writing from Kathleen Stock.
There is an insidious thin wedge of morally ropey reasoning by those enforcing it to policy.
Euthanasia is now coyly called assisted dying and has started with terminally ill but morphed slowly towards helping dispose of those who are mentally ill, depressed, homeless etc. See Canada for examples.
More nihilistic policy to dispose of the inconvenient. I did 18 years in healthcare by the way.
Whats next? the prison population, the underclass? Who decides – an essay in itself I suspect.
The casualness adopted of taking a life and the normalisation of it is very scary.
Another excellent piece by Kathleen Stock.
It is well paired with one of Mary Harrington’s pieces from 2021 – ‘The Death of Britain’s Dignity’ that everyone would do well to revisit.
I find there is a real narcissism that comes with demands for assisted dying.
Nevermind all those who would not be strong enough to resist giving up their lives, or those who would die that would not need to if they had the right treatment, or those that might change their minds but cannot because they would be dead.
No, instead it’s ‘I demand society be changed, so that I can die peacefully and cleanly at a time of My choosing, and with the full backing of the state.’ All couched in professions of concern for others of course.
If you’re that worried about suffering when you’re ill or old don’t wait that long, do it now. If you really want to end it all there are plenty of ways to do it, jumping in front of a train’ll do it. But what people are really asking for is validation and convenience, without accepting, or perhaps even caring, that swapping the right to life for the right to death will come at the cost of countless lives taken wrongly, unnecessarily, even accidentally.
” I can die peacefully and cleanly at a time of My choosing,”
But why have they chosen it? Probably because life has become meaningless to them when there is no enjoyment left. When the end is in sight and their body, already failing, is going to render them helpless before they die.
Whatever happened to the nobility of self-sacrifice? I don’t think a healthy person would suicide simply in order to give their grandchild their house, but I think it’s admirable to weigh up your own lack of pleasure at being alive with the benefit of not costing the community resources that are needed elsewhere, and decide, after a life lived, to check out. Or are we all convinced, in our wealthy societies, that there’re always enough resources for everything?
I’m not persuaded by Kathleen’s slippery slope argument. Of course making one change doesn’t mean we won’t then go further, if we want to. We went step by step from legalising homosexuality to same-sex marriage. No one at the time of decriminalisation imagined they would be, down the track, voting for gay marriage (in Australia). Change keeps happening if we vote for it.
If you’re not persuaded about the slippery slope argument, Canada is an interesting (& worrying) example to look at, as is the Netherlands.
In both cases lots of reassurances were given when the law was changed that there would be no ‘creep’ within a few years that’s precisely what happened
Canada and The Netherlands are democracies; the people are presumably getting what they want and can vote to change it if they aren’t. I imagine polls in the U.K. show majority support for Australian-style voluntary assisted dying. Should the government refuse to do what the majority want?
Would you apply the same argument to capital punishment?
I wouldn’t want to, but I think I would have to. The alternative is what – something other than democracy? We have to persuade a majority to vote ‘the right way’, and by doing that we have made tremendous gains in so many areas without giving up our critically important democracy.
Governments can take a lead, for example by abolishing capital punishment, before a majority supported that, but then in subsequent elections the electorate gets a chance to change that position (if there’s a party that thinks it’s worth challenging the policy).
Switzerland is the best model. Assisted suicide legal since the 1940s, with very few conditions, except you must be rational, and do the deed yourself, having convinced a doctor to prescribe the drug. There has been no great rush to the door (only 1.5% of all Swiss deaths), no slippery slope as there are very few conditions anyway, and there is overwhelming support for the policy (85% voted in 2011 to not ban it). Let’s copy them!
There is always a slippery slope, so to deny being able to see it is to be particularly obtuse.
Slippery slope examples abound. Other countries for assisted dying give us good insight, but “life will mean life” when the death penalty was ended for murder, the ease with which abortion is administered these days, despite assurances, and the decriminalisation of homosexuality ending up with the Christian Church endorsing gay marriage, are just a few.
Fundamentally though, taking another human life is wrong. It’s the first commandment, and we used to know this as a society.
Does the slippery slope argument apply to changes you do like? We started off giving the vote to propertied men, then more men got the vote … and eventually women got the vote, and then 18 year-olds, and now 16 year-olds want it: the slippery slope in action.
I think the first commandment meant not killing others – and even then we have exceptions, such as war. Killing yourself is another thing, and you could look to the early Christian martyrs for examples of people who were ready to give up their lives for their beliefs.
I’m not sure we’d agree on what a “good” slippery slope is.
Regards killing, there is a distinction between doing it yourself and having someone do it to you. They may be a doctor, but the right doctor can be found to do all sorts of sick things. See the Tavistock Clinic for further details, where the State and “medicine” have collectively butchered and blighted lives.
War is an interesting one, but it could be argued that it is ultimately an act of self defence. Whilst the Bible outlawed killing, it didn’t do so as a punishment, because the taking of a human life was considered so heinous.
A slippery slope, Nick, is when you start having a drink after dinner, then decide to have another one after lunch, then perhaps another later in the evening ….
I don’t think a slippery slope is when a series of changes are made to laws with each stage being debated and passed in Parliament. That’s just considered change.
You missed the descriptor “good” in my reply.
What is unconvincing about a Slippery Moral Slope?
The West abounds with evidence of our continual slide on every moral issue imaginable.
Think pedophilia is beyond the pale? Or incest? Or or or or??? It’s all out there… and there are those arguing for it (whatever it may be), even as we speak.
It is human nature to slide…to sin….to err…and easiest to do in little, easy & slippery, incremental steps.
First of all, committing suicide is hardly as easy as as you claim and many people do in fact botch it. It is made difficult because society wishes to discourage it. Even assembling the requisite number of pills becomes an issue precisely because the state if you like it the law is trying to stop you doing so.
What is quite extraordinary to suggest why not commit suicide today when you can because you might be suffering and unbearable disease in 20 years time!
Lack of logic abounds on this thread.
“But what people are really asking for is validation and convenience, without accepting, or perhaps even caring, that swapping the right to life for the right to death will come at the cost of countless lives taken wrongly, unnecessarily, even accidentally.”
not really – there’s always going to be mistakes.
what i personally am doing, by asking for the right to choose my exit, is saying that i fear a messy, painful death from cancer or similar far more than i fear the possibility of being bumped off a bit too early.
it should be obvious that, while both are possibilities, the risk of the former considerably outweighs the latter, and it is on that basis i make my decision.
And subject oneself to perhaps not doing the job properly? Subjecting others to the trauma of seeing this unfold or finding a body with traumatic injuries? Typical ‘compassionate‘ response.
Don’t please conflate the principle of assisted dying with the process attached to it.
There is great truth in what you say. Stock up on pills now. That way the means are they when you want them. But legalizing something that threatens the disabled, elderly, and impoverished is just despicable.
I have read a few articles like this recently, and I confess to find the whole thing baffling. From a personal perspective, I think I have the right to end my life when I wish to do so, and if it stops being fun (based on my personal judgment alone), I will do just that. I am fortunate to own a firearm, but even if I didn’t, I could easily jump off something or in front of something. However, those things are “messy”, and will leave something that someone will have to “clean up”. I just don’t get the objections to a medical means of achieving the same result. I appreciate that this sort of thing is contrary to some people’s religious views, and that is fine, but why should their religious views impact on my rights?
Think like a bureaucrat and not an individual on this one and you will see the grave danger that lurks in loose legislation that is couched in the language of feelings and autonomy. When faced with a cost of living crisis, an aging population and a collapsing healthcare system, what lever does the bureaucrat pull? Why on earth would they ever aim to make things materially better for people if you can grind them into an early death. So much cheaper.
Worse than that… how easily we accept the assertion that THEY, whoever the ‘they’ might happen to be, know best what’s best for us. And given a collection of State-Certified-Experts…how easily and how quickly that expertise is translated into a well-managed, comfortable, warm & welcoming ‘Ministry of Love’ which designs and oversees the very best possible ‘Departure’ process for all those who qualify.
And guess who designs and administers the Qualification System?
The Red Guard, during Mao’s Cultural Revolution, campaigned homicically against the Four Olds (Old Ideas, Old Customs, Old Cultures, Old Habits). Millions were killed. How much simpler & more direct when the Fifth Old is “UnWanted Deplorabled”?
It is because it fundamentally and irreversibly changes the nature of medical care for all. Since it is always cheaper just to cut to the chase, that is what becomes the standard. Palliative and other expensive forms of care are gradually withdrawn, reducing patients’ choice. In that context, religious views are neither here nor there.
This is a risk to be managed – not an inevitability as you suggest.
“[The Ring] should have been kept, hidden, hidden dark and deep. Not used, I say, unless at the uttermost end of need, but set beyond his grasp, save by a victory so final that what befell would not trouble us, being dead.”
Do you feel confident this risk would be managed? Society is doing poorly when it comes to mitigating against unintended consequences. Take the whole trans phenomenon. It didn’t take long to go from let’s just accept these people to let’s give kids puberty blockers and mastectomies. I’m past putting trust in our ‘experts’. Until perverse incentives are expunged from our institutions we are in grave danger from progressive ideology.
The point of medical care is to alleviate suffering. Your position seems to require it to prolong suffering. You seek to impose something on humans that you would be prosecuted for if you imposed it on dogs.
And when we determine that one’s life balance has shifted and now contains more suffering than not, it’s our duty to ‘alleviate it’, as you say, by ending it?
The point of medical care, as stated quite explicitly by the Hippocratic Oath is quite simply: to “do no harm or injustice to them… I will keep pure and holy both my life and my art.”
Such a vow drives the physician to seek to end the pain, not the patient.
But suffering, my friend, is indeed a fundamental part of life. There is no such thing as a life free from it, nor would any of us truly wish it so. C.S. Lewis put it this way: ““Try to exclude the possibility of suffering which the order of nature and the existence of free-wills involve, and you find that you have excluded life itself.”
“….it’s our duty to ‘alleviate it’, as you say, by ending it?”
Not “duty”. “Choice”. I am acutely aware that some people seem to relish “suffering”. That too is their choice.
No one relishes suffering…save as a path towards a higher state.
But we do accept it when acceptance is all you have.
No one is denying free choice….and if anyone so chooses to end it all, that indeed is their choice.
But no, the State must not sanction it … must not enable it…. nor should we build or encourage some sort of perversely inverted ‘medical institution’, with our own white-jacketed Mengele’s, to destroy the very thing that Medicine (art & science) is pledged to protect.
No it doesn’t. We don’t know the future. It is merely a projection – your opinion – dare I say it scaremongering.
You might make the same argument about pregnancy terminations for Down’s Syndrome. According to your line of reasoning, the NHS would be actively pushing pregnant women to terminate any pregnancy likely to result in a Down’s Syndrome child, given the lifetime medical and social costs this puts on society at large. And yet they do not.
85.2% of pregnancies diagnosed with Down syndrome antenatally were terminated in 2018
https://www.dsmig.org.uk/information-resources/by-topic/demography/
So what ?
The point is not the % value, but who made the decision.
Those decisions were made by the prospective parents and not made or coerced by the NHS. And quite rightly so.
Not coerced by the NHS. Yet the NHS carried out the mothers’ decisions that they were carrying life not worthy of life.
And your point is what ?
The mothers’ made the decision. The NHS followed the law and ethical standards.
And they say opponents of euthanasia do so on the basis of a naive quasi-religious faith! About 95% of Irish parents whose babies are diagnosed with Down syndrome now have an abortion, effectively eliminating support services for Downs and making the decision not to abort much more difficult. And this from a position just a few years ago when abortion on those grounds in Ireland could not happen. So yes, exactly the same reasoning applies.
This is complete nonsense.
How does reducing demand for support leave fewer resources for the smaller group of children needing the support ? Law of supply and demand applies. The support situation would be worse if there were fewer terminations – not more.
The crucial difference between you offing yourself with your shotgun and a clinic following a procedure to achieve the same aim – albeit less messily – is the fact that the former is an individual action and the latter a collective one.
It’s like the difference between the enraged father of a child rape victim killing the pedophile, and a court issuing a judgement for his execution by electric chair.
You’ve just demonstrated precisely why it should be possible for assisted dying to be made legal – with the right safeguards! Hoist by your own quasi-moral petard.
The case you make for society being the arbiter of what should be possible in the case of a death penalty can be brought in the very same way for assisted dying.
Goodness. You again. You have a knack for misunderstanding my comments. Where, pray tell, do I make a case for society being the arbiter of what should be possible in the case of the death penalty? I am simply pointing out, in response to an earlier comment, that there is no moral equivalence between suicide and assisted dying, any more than vigilantism – right or wrong – is morally equivalent to the death penalty.
I don’t see why the latter has to be a collective action. A doctor saying “There’s a hell of a lot of morphine in this machine, just keep pushing the button until the pain stops”, but letting the patient actually push the button is a decision of the patient. I recall that in Dignitas, the doctor actually says “If you drink this, you will die”, but it is the patient who drinks.
Pretty much the only thing both sides in this debate currently agree on is that an action like you just described on the part of a doctor must repose upon a set of societally agreed procedures, which in turn must rest of an agreed set of principles.
You are thinking well outside the parameters of the current debate – that’s not to say you’re wrong, it’s just not where the debate is now.
For example, what if the doctor-patient relationship were sufficiently devolved to the point where no common medical code existed? Then one’s choice of doctor becomes an extension of one’s own values and principles…an interesting thought exercise, but not one anyone in the debate would be prepared to consider seriously.
Everything impacts everything.
But in truth your ‘right’ to commit suicide doesn’t change even if we continue to deny State-Assisted Suicide. You simply can’t enlist the State (or your Doctor) to help you do it….or your community to pay for it.
In fact Society /The Law constrains your rights in ways too numerous to count. And the source for most of those laws is, indeed, the Judeo-Christian tradition.
Freedom of choice is never an infinite, unconstrained freedom absent all consequence. Rather we trade that freedom, continually, for protection from the consequences of Other’s exercising their own ‘unfettered freedom’.
“And the source for most of those laws is, indeed, the Judeo-Christian tradition“.
I suspect that this is my fundamental issue with them. The sooner that we can get this “Judeo-Christian” nonsense out of our lives, the better.
And what, in the absence of the Absolute, is left?
Your own Good Judgement? Mine? A consensus vote of those still standing? A spin of the Fortune Wheel or flip of the Crooked Coin?
No my friend, in the absence of God there is nothing.
We become hollow men; we become stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar
Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;
That..is what is left.
Want to see the future? Look at Canada’s descent into inhumanity where the poor are given the choice death in order to escape poverty. Pure godlessness.
Yes soon to be expanding to mental illness and including ‘mature minors’. what could possibly go wrong with the most anxious and neurotic young generation constantly plugged in and manipulated by social media?
Oh, seriously? I have read a bit on Canada’s laws (although I do not live there), and they don’t give the impression of giving rise to anything even remotely like that.
I agree. As a retired Canadian lawyer I have read the applicable laws. You need two independent physicians who don’t know each other to confirm that you meet the 5 statutory requirements to access medical assistance in dying. The criteria do not include poverty and no one is forced or pressured to die as that is a criminal offence. I have not heard of any physician who has been charged with that crime.
Some 63 percent of the people who have used this procedure were last stage cancer patients. Other reasons included terminal heart and lung collapse. The statistics are available on line. Mental illness alone is not a criterion in the law.
If you believe that only God can decide when you will die, so you should suffer with your cancer or ventilator or congestive heart failure until you eventually die, you will certainly be opposed to the exercise of personal autonomy in making that decision. That seems to be Kathleen Stock’ position.
Yes. Speaking as a (not yet retired) Australian lawyer, the Canadian laws seem sensibly drafted, and not all that far removed from the Australian position.
How do the physicians know for certain in all cases,that there are no hidden pressures from, say, a family member?
Of course there is no way to be sure, but in most cases that I have read the pressure is the other way. Children of aged parents or spouses often pressure them not to arrange for MAiD, or to exercise their right to cancel the procedure even at the last minute.
I don’t know what empirical basis there is for the often expressed and cynical view that greedy children will want to pressure their parents to die soon via MAiD, and that the parents, obeying their children, will lie to their physicians when routinely asked whether anyone has pressured them. I guess this view, versus the opposite, that family members will want the patient to stay alive until they die of natural causes, depends on one’s perception of human nature.
Perhaps you can’t be certain but that’s a risk that has to be taken to protect the majority for whom it is a choice.
And those who want to continue without quality of life are free to make that choice. Assisted suicide should be my choice, just as abortion should be my choice.
“…without prior commitment to some deeply felt theological or philosophical principle about the intrinsic value of human life, all that is left for most of us are vague intuitions and orphaned remnants of moral reasoning inherited from a formerly Christian outlook.”
Edited for concision, this would read: “without some Christian [ or philosophical ] outlook, all that is left are remnants from a Christian [ or philosophical ] outlook.”
Well, yes.
Still, Kathleen Stock may have a point there. For Christians, every life is precious, particularly in a world full of pagans. She may also be right that there is an unsavoury cost/benefit, individual v collective calculation involved here. It wouldn’t surprise me.
But mightn’t the simplest explanation for the unquiet aversion to assisted suicide be its complicity in giving up? To fight for life is an instinct that goes back a lot further than the theological. Being alive is all about living, right? Logically, it is counter-intuitive to want to embrace its opposite.
And yet, the story comes to mind of an Eskimo woman, old and not well, going off into the winter night …
Just as to the point, speaking of going off into the cold, there is Scott of the Antarctic….
Good point, although it was Oates rather than Scott himself who said “I am just going outside and may be some time”.
As to “embracing death”, the fact is we are all going to have to do that at some point. Far better (in my view) to make a rational decision on when it happens, rather than wait until the joy of living is long gone.
Yes, there are so many aspects to this. To not be a burden, and preferring not to live at any price, are just two of them. The state should stay as far away from such personal issues as possible.
All these years and I thought that was Scott. Never too late to be set straight.
Thanks.
I agree, it’s the involvement of the state that chills me. A nod and a wink between doctor and family, maybe. I suspect that fear of litigation might be driving this from the practitioners’ end.
Thank god for the nod and wink.
How are you absolutely sure that all families always want the best interests of the ill person? That, say inheritance or dislike/hate would never play a part?
What a strange bit of logic there.
Rather than wait until the joy of living is long gone….kill yourself while it’s still here? That makes no sense.
Certainly , yes, we all know — at some level or another — the inevitability of death….but do we ’embrace it’ or simply accept that inevitability? Or perhaps, instead, it’s more accurate to say we embrace life…and since death is a part of life, equally we embrace the truth of that mortal end.
But still do we not, should we not….rage, rage against the dying of the light….do not go gentle unto that good night?
Just to clarify, if I reach the point where I say “This is no longer fun, and it isn’t going to be again”, then I’m out. I don’t see a problem with embracing death. It is after all a part of life. As to that “raging” thing, if that is the way you want to see yourself out, go ahead, but I won’t be joining you.
Totally your choice; nor would I deny you your freedom to Quit.
But do not look to the State to enable it; the Doctors to bless it; or your Neighbors to fund it. It’s all on you…Embrace it all you like.
Still, I would urge you, as a friend, to Embrace Life, Embrace Love…but equally I recognize that though I may lead you to Water, I can’t make you drink.
I’ve read many arguments against assisted suicide and yet to find one that convinces me against the concept. Most of them ironically from folk who are vehemently individualistic except for this matter.
I suspect religious belief is the key driver of their position.
Yes, there is this awkward thing, the fifth commandment (sixth by some reckoning). Since ‘cultural Christians’ seem to be in the news, what is their position? I suspect this is an area where their morality becomes a bit more a la carte.
Okay, here’s one: What of an 18 year old who decides she no longer has any enjoyment in life? Can she get the death serum?
Of course you would say no, but the question is why is this different to a terminally ill 81 year old who asks for the same juice?
After all, both are on a path to death.
To distinguish between the two, you must make some (arbitrary) judgement on what is the value of residual life. And who makes this judgement and on what basis? That is not a trivial point, neither in law nor in moral reasoning.
Spot on. Once assisted dying is granted there are no principled reasons to prevent ‘mission creep’ only apparently ‘practical’ ones. And then those with the loudest voices win.
It isn’t a trivial point… so why trivialise it? if it’s beyond our abilities to distinguish between the two and provide for safeguards that actually work, we might as well all just give up. For the record, i never, ever give up.
We are but seconds into this experiment in Canada and currently a court case where a father is facing the planned death of his 27 year old because she has autism and ADHD. He’s lost the appeal btw. Is that a failure of his parenting or the wider society? What does that say about Canada?
Stop conflating principle with process. A trend amongst the ‘compassionate’.
I’m not conflating principle with process. The process must stem from the principle, and this is the principle iin question here:
How do we, as a society, decide which deaths it is permissible to assist? There must be some criterion, as the example above illustrates. And these go to the core values of what we as a society believe is the purpose of life.
Is it to ‘be happy’? In this case, one can well imagine that a line, however, messy, can be drawn between a physically healthy 18 year old girl who wants to die, and a terminally ill 85 year old woman suffering chronic pain: We can simply decide that if you have >x number of QALYs left, you cannot ‘want’ to die (i.e. if you are ‘suicidal’ if you do, hence mentally unhealthy, and we will treat you and put you in a protected cell with padding etc.). If you have <x QALYs to go, your desire for death is socially acceptable and we will give you the death juice.
But what if our purpose in life is not to ‘be happy’, but to gain wisdom and mature along a path to some higher consciousness? This, after all, was the collective wisdom of our ancestors for millennia.
And even in the former, hedonistic case, where does one draw that line? What about me, a 48 year old guy with some lower back pain and a bum knee? Can I get the death serum or would my desire for an end to it all be mental ill-health that needs to be medicated away with the happy drugs? What about when I’m 58? 68? Two bum knees? Arthritis? Sleep apnea?
As Stock and others have said, there is a worrying tendency for this line to drift down and find its place, not based on any higher principles, but at a point where profits are maximised and the interests of the powerful are served.
I’m no lawyer or law maker so the specifics of how this plays out in written legislation I do not know. I do, however, know there is a distinct difference between those scenarios, as I am sure you do too, and anyone reading it. It is not beyond the realms of possibility that it can be written into law.
Oh but is there really a ‘distinct’ difference? What about this 28-year-old Dutch woman, currently on Assisted Death Row in the Netherlands:
https://x.com/TheFP/status/1775278989566955649?s=20
It is very unpleasant to see the speed with which society is degrading to the level of a crowd.
However, this, alas, happens and the comments to this article perfectly illustrate this process. You are no longer humans. Humans care about each other, and you are just a collection of individuals.
I care sufficiently about my fellow humans to allow them a dignified death if they want one.
First they say that women should be independent. Women devote themselves to their careers and do not give birth to children. Then the population declines.
They then replace the population with invaders. The indigenous population is declining even faster, but not fast enough. Then they offer euthanasia to the old and sick, and then to everyone who wants it.
In the end, you are not a person, you are just an economic unit that needs to be removed when it is not profitable.
If you’re okay with being a nobody, I have no problem. Goodbye Britain.
Coming back to Britain I’m struck by the use of “they” all the time in conversation. Surely in a democracy, or among people capable of a democracy, the word should be “we”? Obviously this is not particular to Britain.
Throwing the occasional “I” among the ‘they’s has ironically the exact opposite effect of distinguishing the individual from the ‘they’ he condemns?
But of course one can’t call just talking conversation?
Not sure of the relevance, and in any event, I left Britain in ’67.
Then why should any physician or bureaucrat get involved at all? I’m fine with your premise as long as you remove the middle men of death.
The average age of Canadians seeking MAiD is 77, and many die before it is administered. Yet it has become popular for writers to attack the procedure. Most of these writers are far younger than that, and find it difficult to empathize with people close to a reasonably foreseeable death who don’t wish to prolong their agony. So they mock the people who are exercising their autonomy in making this choice. It is not merely a trendy fashion, as Stock suggests. It is not promoted by the government to save money or eliminate the poor. The Canadian government has opposed legalizing the procedure from the beginning, but was forced by the courts to allow it.
I would rather see an emotive argument that makes sense in respecting individual autonomy than an emotive argument that denies its emotive nature but doesn’t make sense.
Amazing to me that so many people support leaving people to live in horrific pain which has no chance of resolution. This ‘living’ can last for many years. It seems skewed that these smug people will refer to themselves as moral and compassionate.
I can explain their position. They are Christians, which in their view entitles them to be smug, and dress it up as morality and compassion.
What a bigoted statement. My opposition to assisted dying is entirely grounded in the kind of autonomy that you seem to think you are holding up. You believe bureaucrats from failing Western democracies are incentivized to be benevolent actors here? When the piggy bank is finally proved to be empty, the levers that will be pulled will all be couched in empathetic and quasi-moralistic tones but it will be dystopian to the core.
Who are these people who actually support, not merely tolerate, people living in horrific pain? I’ve yet to meet one, but I suppose there are some sadists out there who would. A caricature of the moral and compassionate case against euthanasia.
“Support”, “tolerate”. In practice, it amounts to the same thing.
Behind all this opposition, there is all too frequently (though I’ll accept not in all cases) a desire to restrict the right of others to freely take decisions about their own future. As a matter of principle, I’m opposed to one person telling another what they may or may not do when it doesn’t directly affect them.
I would say that support and tolerate are not the same thing, but even if they were, neither applies in the sense that Lesley was suggesting.
As to your matter of principle, don’t all laws restrict what you may or may not do? It’s not a question of whether or not it directly affects you, more to do with what’s conducive to the common good.
However, I still think there’s something to be said for ‘thou shalt not kill but need not strive officiously to keep alive’.
Except that they don’t. The use of emotive suffering etc by the pro euthanasia lobby doesn’t reflect the reality of modern palliative care.
I’ve seen it with both my parents & when the time came they were treated with dignity & the sensitive use of drugs meant they were pain free at the end.
A thoughtful piece by KS. I totally agree Hugh, my experience of modern palliative care and its drug regime was the same. It was as pain free and dignified as we could have hoped for.
Laugh out loud. If you think that palliative care completely removes pain and suffering then you live in a delusion.
Nevertheless if assisted death is to be a genuine uncoerced choice then there has to be the most viable alternative possible for the greatest number.
Parris’s article caused some discussion in my household. My 89 year old father, a former NHS trust chair, was firmly in favour of Parris’s position.
I disagreed. My own position is somewhat ambivalent. Just over two years ago my partner died of cancer. A year ago the government held its ‘consultation’ on assisted dying. I wrote this short piece at the time, and I think I still mostly agree with it: ‘An Easy Way Out?‘
I have little doubt that, assuming I live another 15 years, the option to end my own life will be offered to me by beancounter-driven healthcare professionals, and, more likely than not, I deem, pressure will be brought on me to take that option.
Fantastic piece. Thanks KS.
It’s no coincidence that celebrities are well represented in the worldwide campaigns to legalise the State killing of vulnerable human beings. Really, the desire to control your own death is just another expression of the Default Narcissism that was incubated in the toxic sociopathic laboratories of TV, film and popular music over the last half century; which has (inevitably) been transmitted to wider society by the Typhoid Marys of the internet, smart phones and social media; and which is now infecting the entire public realm. It’s less a desire to control your own death than it is an existential terror of not being able to control your own life as completely as you’d like. More plainly, of ever having to ‘depend’ on other human beings. If there’s one thing that defines the contrived, relentlessly ‘self-curated’ world of Celebrity, it’s the lifelong attempt to barricade yourself from any need of help of other people – especially the great unwashed beyond the red velvet VIP rope. To wipe your bum, say. Or feed you, or help you walk. To concede that one day you just might need another person’s help to maintain ‘a dignified life’ is…of course, to remind yourself that, since at the moment you are doing just fine, maybe you really should be doing a lot less to look after yourself and your interests, and a whoile lot more to help another person, who needs it – as you might one day – to live a dignified life today.
Oh dear me, no narcissist – especially a celebrity one – wants to contemplate that awkward reality. When advocates of ‘dying with dignity’ talk about wanting to avoid the ‘undignified’ fate of a terminal, deteriorative condition, what they are really betraying is how narrowly (and, usually, squeamishly) they define a ‘dignified’ life, and b) their strong aversion to helping others live a dignified life. It’s a profoundly anti-John Donne stance: I am – at least I want to be – an island. Because if I live on an island…well, at least I won’t have to clean up mum’s vomit and wipe dad’s bum as they lose their marbles.
Alas, narcissists all. Donne’s poem wasn’t a cherry-pickable one. His line about none of us being an island, separate from society, isn’t just about the succour we can get from the fellowship of Man, ‘spesh when we are vulnerable. It’s also equally about the obligations we have to society, so that society can be in a fit state to provide that succour (to the vulnerable) when needed. One of the key obligations we have as individuals to Society, to pitch in on the job of keeping it in a good fit state to look after the vulnerable…is to not explicitly sanction society’s killing of human beings. That’s an existential default that we have no right and no choice, collectively, to surrender. Not so long as there remains one single human being who opposes VAD. Lest we cut that person off the continent.
Not doing that demands each of us understand that, collectively and pluralistically, life in our society is not all about what you happen to want. Not even if all you want to do is die. The common argument for VAD – (in Australia, where it’s triumphed in most jurisdictions, it’s formally Voluntary Assisted Dying) – is that the decision to kill yourself must be allowed, medically, civically and legally, to become a purely ‘personal’ matter (within medical safeguard constraints). The exercise of a transactional individual ‘freedom to choose’. Thus, one that can’t have any impact on anyone else’s moral or practical being. It’s ‘no-one else’s business’. But this argument is 100% a*se-about. In fact as things stand killing yourself is the ‘personal choice’; very much ‘no-one else’s business’. Top yourself, go right ahead. Yay, it is indeed all on you. Good for you, you societally-unencumbered Clint Eastwood lone rider hero, you.
What is ‘sticking your nose into others’ moral business’ is the VAD advocates’ demand that that choice be made ‘legal’, a great big needy plea for Big Mummy State to step in and spread the moral peril around us all; to hold your poor anxious little handy-wandy while you engage in your Bwave Act of Self-Negation. If big tough-talkin’ island-dweller Matthew Parris is so keen on ending his miserably undignified existence the second he can’t butter his own marmalade crumpets, why on earth does he need my permision, my civic stamp of approval to do it? Or anyone else’s? Or indeed the State’s? Talk about a wuss. Go and kill yourself like a man, mate: wander off into the arctic snows stoically and freeze to death quietly. You big sooky attention-seeker.
Why does it matter? Why must we oppose VAD? It’s not primarily for the usually cited reasons, which are mostly secondary, incidental, and of wildly varying validity, including occasionally hysterical. No, not because I think life is ‘sacred’, or Divine; no, not because ‘there is nobility and truth’ in suffering; no, not because I fear a dystopian future of production-line slaughterhouses for the poor/feeble old/Trump supporters, or some Solulent Green $$ conspiracies, etc.
I oppose VAD because I’ve been an aged, disability and to a lesser extent palliative carer for the best part of two decades, and the casual, contemporary advent of VAD has been one of the most damaging, sinister and cruel regressions of my lifetime in the hitherto inclusive aspiration we as a progressive society – Donne’s continent of Humanity – decided post-Enlightenment to adopt towards those whose lives are no less dignified than ours, but just…in a different physical way. It’s all very well to proclaim, as a ventilated C3 quadriplegic or a late-stage MS or MND et al sufferer, that ‘My life is not worth living any more, I want to die.’ Understandable enough. As Christopher Reeves discovered, living with that kind of physical afflcition can be a living nightmare. But it is absolutely another thing for us, as a Society – the State – to effectively respond to such individual expressions of anguish by, effectively, universalizing and civically ratifying them. By saying say: Good god, you poor undignifed chap, you’re dead right. Your miserable life IS not worth living. Why, somebody has to physically push the poo out of your bowels every day, Chris! Icky icky poo! Yes, we as a Society totally agree that you should be allowed to die.
The message that sends – don’t pretend that’s not the one we are sending with VAD, please – in a million subtle and not so subtle ways, to those living with the same awful afflictions as those who demand VAD…but who do not want to die, but to live…is something I have seen in those I work with quite often. It’s a message our disabled get bombarded with by able society every day, anyway; in waving VAD about, we as a society can come close to breaking the last remnants of the steely, bloody-minded act of pure Human will it can take, every day, to keep believing that…no, you’re wrong, my life IS dignified. My life IS worth living.
I won’t go to the barricades over VAD. Of course our transactionalist, narcissistic age will adopt it pretty much everywhere. And I won’t ever stop anyone who’s had enough of the struggle and wants to die, either. In fact I helped both my mum and my dad die, effectively via VAD…the very standard morphine pack and ‘nil fluids’. (We don’t seem to be mature enough anymore to juggle the tried and true moral and ethical duality of the last few thousands years – publicly oppose VAD as a necessary Hippocratic ideal but, in quiet practice, deploy compassion and tender guile in Hippocratic practise. I guess everyone needs a ’cause’ now; everyone is a ‘literalist’.
For those of you who support VAD, let me prpose this: instead of spending whatever spare you time and energy you have helping someone who does not live a dignified life to end it..why not try helping them live a dignified life?
Sorry for the length and less-than-stellar style. Am – honestly – late for a shift!
So, to sum up your position, if your dog is ancient and decrepit, you can take it to the vet for a “green needle”, but if you yourself should be in that position, you have to find your own way of ending your life, because the State is too precious to actually allow its citizens a dignified death?
The State isn’t your mummy, mate. Or your personal valet, alert to your every bratty want and wish. You don’t need its ‘permission’ to kill yourself, and unless you’re totally thick, it’s actually not terribly hard to do it with dignity. Get to a certain point and your GP will stick a morphine pack in you, and you can stop drinking.
‘Precious’ State? Martin, the State is an abstract idea. Humans are the only things that get ‘precious’. In my experience, one of the fastest ways to provoke it is to suggest to a VAD advocate they might consider becoming a disability carer, as the most practical and immediate way of helping folks ‘die with dignity’.
As I said I wont’t mount the barricade on this. We VAD opponents have already lost this battle, as Stock notes. The sky won’t fall in. But / just like ‘trans rights’ trumping women’s rights, its a deeply anti-Enlightenment regression, not a ‘progressive’ advance. So long as we understand that.
Best regards.
It isn’t in fact easy to kill yourself painlessly. Get to the GP? That’s an unlikely possibility in itself!
Fair point re: GP!
I disagree though about the ease of suicide. In fact I think the shrillest VAD advocates often betray a deep anxiety about suicide/assisted dying. For a gang that insists on framing death as a controllable biological transaction from a state of bodily being, to a state of bodily null, there does usually seem to be an awful lot of squeamish fussing and fiddling over a bodily death that appears to need to be ‘pretty’ and ‘unmessy’ and…well, that elastic word ‘dignified’ again. There’s an extra awful lot of anxiety about loved ones. Narcissism, again. I’d argue that the actual decision that you’d prefer to be dead than enjoy the salving company of your loved ones is a pretty thorough FU that your mere magnanimous generosity in getting the State to ensure you left them a palatable corpse isn’t going to outweigh easily. Perhaps an unusual number of VAD advocates are a-holes who will be doing the world a favour by leaving it!
Do forgive the cheap shot, Andrew: we’ve lost this debate. Allow us our consoling…we’ll, dignities!
I guess the point of Humanity, to me anyway, and especially the point of human interaction, is that we (should aspire to) make – by force of Human love and will and majesty – everything that is human, by definition, dignified. Every Human thing. No matter how traumatic, physically repulsive, shocking, painful or terrifying.
Best regards.
Helium gas.,you’ll go out like a light instantly.
Hey, I don’t have a problem. I own guns, and if I don’t qualify for VAD, when the day comes, one of them will go “bang” while pointed in the right direction. I just feel sorry for whoever has to find me, and scrub my brains off the ceiling. I live in Australia, and here, it is true to say that VAD opponents have already lost. However, I am aware that this publication has international readership.
Yours is the truly autonomous, independent approach to VsAD*. Its main and great advantage is that it truly is none of my, or Society’s, moral business. It selflessly protects the abstract principle of our collective obligation and mutual need to preserve life and thus the practical vulnerability of those who do not wish to die, which is most of us, most of our lives.
In wishing you well – and hoping it never comes to that for you, obviously – may I simply exhort, in the spirit of our compatriot: ‘Shoot straight – don’t make a mess of it, you b*****d.’
Voluntary self-assisted dying.
I thought you were late for work?
Um…I don’t do care shifts 24-7 Clare.
Would you like to check my credentials? Is that what you were insinuating? That maybe I’m making things up for expedient discursive purposes?
Here you go. This is me.
https://app.mable.com.au/profile/worker/463527
You might have to set up a ‘seeking support worker’ profile to get access to read my ‘support worker’ profile.
edited redundant
How many times in this thread do you think you’ll need to cast that tacky insinuation, requiring me to direct you to my Support Worker Hub profile page, Clare?
Just so I can get an idea of how many times I’ll need to return to this dormant thread.
https://app.mable.com.au/profile/worker/463527
Your argument is flawed, simply because humans aren’t dogs.
More’s the pity.:-
“I am Diogenes the Dog. I nuzzle the kind, bark at the greedy and bite scoundrels.” *
(*Diogenes of Sinope. 412/404- 323BC, or 341/349 – 430 AUC.)
I think his point is that, in some cases, we treat our dogs with more dignity at the end than we do our parents.
Indeed. The law proscribes us from being cruel to dogs.
Perfectly captured.
People are quite happy to “put to sleep” their dogs and see racehorses despatched when injured (without any apparent attempt to treat them). Or even kill animals for “fun”.
All this should be nothing to do with the State. It should be left to individual choice. Non-criminal acts should not be criminalised by the State – hasn’t the current “hate crime” fiasco in Scotland taught us anything ?
I’m fairly certain that there’s a practical way to allow people in terminal pain to die at a time of their choosing without all the dire consequences being predicted or any sort of coercion. But only if we leave the State out of it (since it currently breaks everything it touches). And Matthew Parris.
The strapline to this article implies that emotive arguments have won. I find most of the emotive arguments coming from those who oppose any change and seek to wish to force their personal beliefs on others and make their decisions for them.
Lest we forget, odious as the Sc*tch Hate Crime Act is, its origins can very regrettably be traced back to the 1986 Public Order Act, enacted by the late Lady Thatcher.
Although primarily directed against recalcitrant miners they were plenty of other grotesque provisions‘ ‘hidden’ within the Act, as we have recently seen.
Doesn’t life in a civilized society ‘force’ a countless number of personal beliefs upon us daily? Do we not call that Law?
The notion that this particular law is too confining is just silly. The killing of another is murder, even if both parties consent to the murder. Nothing emotive about that. Would we find it equally restrictive when the law tells us that Incest continues to be a crime, EVEN IF, both father and daughter have embraced it?
As for suicide…I may be unaware, but as far as I know no one has ever been prosecuted, convicted, and jailed because they tried…and failed…to off themselves. Morally, certainly, we would discourage it. We call suicide a cardinal sin…an offense against God, or Buddha, or Allah, et al. But our social and cultural concern and focus is to prevent it and save people from their attempt at it. We try to help them understand that in fact their life has worth & dignity…that they are loved and valued far more alive than dead.
Sometimes that works; sometimes it doesn’t. And if the individual is determined enough, the best society can achieve is delay. But if are are truly concerned with ‘peoples’ beliefs being forced upon us’ then asking society to accept, enable, and fund the ‘requested’ killing of the aged, the decrepit, the diseased, and the depressed (at their request) would seem to an extreme example of same, wouldn’t it?
It’s almost like humans are not just dogs…
The ‘suicide is illegal’ stance provided a diplomatic way out of a sticky situation for the State. After all, it could only punish your failure, an embarrassment for the both of you. Then it would have liked perhaps to look as severly upon your crime as the Church and condemned you to death for it. Now it’s in another bind but must feel bullied into being kind. It won’t like that and will respond as mercifully as you wish by not giving a ….
Exactly Martin, and you put the family members who assist you into danger of being accused of murder. I wonder how many of the people here who are so rabidly against voluntary euthanasia have actually watched a loved one die of a painful, terminal disease.
How many of us who oppose the State enabled, taxpayer funded socially blessed murder of the diseased, ancient, and decrepit have actually watched a love one die of a terminal condition?
Eventually most of us will….at least until we’re the ones dying of that terminal condition and someone else is watching us, holding our hands, we hope, and telling us they love us.
Death is part of life. And being with a loved one who is dying is a painfully fundamental part of that life
God save us from its safe and easily palatable sanitization as yet one more appointment on my iPhone’s calendar (perhaps with appropriate sad face emoticon?).
Exactly.
This is a diatribe, albeit a well argued one. But in fact you actually practised taking another’s life entirely against the dominant Christian ethic of the past 1500 years. By the not notably humane method of their dying of thirst. What moral difference at all does the precise method of the killing make? Surely there is a contradiction there.
Most mothers and fathers don’t actually want their children to clean up their vomit or wipe their bums!
No, most mums and dads will SAY they don’t want that…right up to the point where they do actually need ‘someone’ to wipe their bums. And in my experience – of my own parents deaths and others’ – is that most do prefer to be cared for by loved ones. That’s where the ‘unbearable’ and ‘undignified’ can most commonly be made ‘bearable and ‘dignified’. Even beautiful. Not exclusively but very commonly.
Re: both my mum and dad. What bollocks. They both asked for sustained pain relief. They both declined to take fluids. Mum’s decline and death was as beautiful as any I’ve attended. Was it assisted dying? Sure. Was it State-approved assisted suicide? Nope.
What is often notable about VAD advocates is your inability to live with ambiguity and ‘unspoken’ pragmatic solutions to moral dilemmas. The medical and care communities have been ‘helping people to die’ for ten thousand years. Why do you suddenly insist it be codified, literalised, transactionalised? It is, again, eerily similar to the contrived insistence by the trans lobby that it’s not enough anymore for us as a society to ‘quietly accept’ people who prefer to live their lives unfussily as an opposite gender type, as we Humans have done for eons; nope, we must have a great big contrived public policy absolutist fight about gender nomenclature, gender ‘rights’ as ‘an oppressed cohort’, there must be a moral absolute right and wrong and an umpire’s decision if a winner made by the State.
It’s just narcissism. Eight billion self-absorbed self-important ‘Me’s, all of us equally determined to be king, cabinet, captain and celebrity of our own little hero narrative.
Go and become a disability carer. Best cure for the premier ill of our age, ever. Again, warm regards. i appreciate your intelligent engagement a lot.
You’re late for work.
So you keep saying, Ms Mefinx-You-Protest-Too-Much-‘Progressive’.
There you go, go and ratify my creds to your satisfaction, you self-righteously petty lady.
https://app.mable.com.au/profile/worker/463527
edit redundant
I always told my mother, when she would express that sentiment, that she once cleaned up my vomit and dirty diapers. And I ended up doing that (sans vomit) for her. Many parents say that they don’t want to be a burden to their children, which is commendable. But I think it helps to remind folks that their children were once a burden for them. And to be thankful that they had them! (I chose to have none…)
This was a great comment, really!
Thank you
Thanks VZ. See, this is what I like about UnHerd: plurality!
What a load of rubbish.
Thanks CK. See, this is what I like about UnHerd: plurality!
And that’s what I respect in people: consistency.
—-
🙂 and 😉 from me
In Germany the holocaust was first sold as mercy. Soon it became the involuntary disposal of the unwonted and them mass execution of Jews. Soon the suicide movement will replace old folks homes and become mandatory for the useless mouths of the poor.
Having worked in aged and palliative care for many years, physical pain and decline doesn’t worry me. There’s usually enough of an informed and intelligent dialogue between sufferer, family, medical staff and carers to ease things. Dementia is a whole other ball game, though. I don’t think many people have seen the reality of angst ridden, confused, incontinent, sometimes aggressive and violent, elderly residents wandering around and around a locked ward all day, often for years. With statins, antihypertensives, and antidiabetic medications these people can be preserved in relative physical health for a long time. Visitors to these places are rare, family members make a few token visits a year then don’t bother because they aren’t recognised. [Although they are quick to blame the institution when their “loved ones” catch Covid]. It often seems it would be a living hell. I usually leave my ward rounds to aged care wondering how to word my Advanced Health Directive so that my own family would put me on the Morphine pump the day after the diagnosis.
Losing my dad to dementia while his body is still here, struggling in much the way you described, has absolutely convinced me that denying people the option to end their lives before they deteriorate in this way is really quite cruel. It is putting your belief in what is kind before the reality of what people will have to suffer, in order for you to feel like you are a good person who values human life (wilfully blind to the reality of the kind of lives you would like to force people to endure, for the sake of telling yourself that story).
Sorry to hear about your Dad. It must be ghastly watching a loved one become a completely different, unrecognisable person with little capacity for meaningful interaction. It really is a living death. The problem comes with informed consent. Neurologically, the first cognitive processes to deteriorate are the higher functions- insight, judgement, memory etc. Most dementia patients deny that they have a problem and blame others around them for their own lapses. They are not capable of the complex decisions needed to consent to ending their own lives. Even with prior consent I can see huge problems. Often the best we can do is withdraw all medical treatment and hope that nature takes its course via strokes, heart attacks etc. The irony is that medicine has advanced to treat many of these what we call “macro-vascular” conditions, so more people are living into old age with its risk of “micro-vascular” conditions such as Dementia.
Thank you, and I understand that all too well. My dad quite often made a point to say, having seen his own mother deteriorate in much the same way, that he would rather die than end up like that. But, much as you said – the ability to decide to do so kind of just gradually slipped away. I just hope for myself, if ever in that situation – I admit what’s happening early enough that a more dignified end remains an option for me. Other than brutal, tortuous murder, I really can’t imagine a worse way to go. And I do wonder if even such a murder might, in a way, still be less tortuous. At least it wouldn’t go on for years.
If it’s any consolation, its not always horrific. My grandmother died of dementia and for years she was like a child. Wore a diaper, finger painted, watched cartoons, loved to pet the dog for hours, etc. Pretty happy actually, although occationally she would cry for no apparent reason, or for any reason she could convey at least. So she had some bad days like all of us, but most of the time she was quite happy. When things took a turn for the worse, we put her in hospice and all life extending care and medications were removed and she was given opiates. She died quietly surrounded by family within weeks.
Not the ideal end of life scenario, but hardly a nightmare. I’m not denying it can be quite bad as the heartbreaking accounts here make that clear, just wanted to clarify it’s not a certain thing.
I am aware, having an uncle with something more akin to this less horrific version of dementia. It’s still not great. And in any case, whether it’s this form of dementia, a more severe one, cancer, or another serious ailment, I believe in having the option available to myself and anyone else who wants it, to choose a more humane and less painful exit before the situation deteriorates.
We are kinder to our pets.
The truth is, all situations deteriorate. It is a human inevitability.
So are you truly arguing that having the option to take advantage of State-Assisted-Suicide should be available to any one…at any time…for any reason, if they want it?
And if you’re only arguing for making that option available if one is, like, really, really sick…why should that be a hurdle we have to clear? Isn’t the imposition of that ‘qualification’ putting your beliefs ahead of those who, at the age of 23, in perfect health, want to end it all?
The point being, of course, that the slope is not just slippery, it’s a very rapid plummet from euthanasia when you’re terminally ill….to euthanasia when you painfully ill (but not terminal)…to euthanasia when you’re really clinically depressed….to euthanasia when you want it. After all, who are we to think that our understanding of what your life is like is superior to your own.
Is that truly the world you wish to inhabit?
Murder?!
I half jokingly have instructed my loved ones to put a pillow over my face if I go doolally. Actually I’m not joking but of course I don’t want them prosecuted.
You look for reasons to ignore the opportunities to do this while of sound mind and don’t look for a process to obviate this.
There are detailed living wills which state what intervention a person would like. I have one but u fortunately in South Africa (backward country), there is no assisted dying as such – though morphine is sometimes used by some still caring people. You just have to luck it to find one of these medics.
My mother in her 90s had slid into mid-level dementia. I took care of her in her home the last 8 months of her life. Except for high blood pressure she was quite healthy. However she was VERY reisistent to taking meds (didn’t like being messed with by visiting medical people all the time) so we decided to take her off the BP meds. Three months later she had a major stroke (that’s when we “lost” her); though she was on a wait list for nursing home, she died at home a couple months after the stroke. It was all very hard, we took care of her like taking care of a baby. However, all in all things went exactly as I’d hoped and prayed. We were so thankful that she never had to go to a home and to give up her doggy, who I now have.
You took her off BP meds, how strange.
Is it your compassion for the person changed by dementia that you dislike, or your own fear of being like that yourself? If it’s the latter, you are putting your own needs first, and not adjusting compassionately to change. You can’t live, or die for someone else.
Are they suffering or are we the onlookers the suffering?
Just as, are the family selfish for wanting their loved one to pass with assistance so they don’t have to visit or care? Or are the selfish ones, those who want to keep them alive regardless of the quality of life.
There is no right or wrong and no moral high ground to be held by either side of this argument. Both sides are equally emotive as the subject revolves around people’s loved ones.
They may be family but not necessarily “loved ones”. What if your parents were abusive and you end up having to care for them, which I suspect is often the case?
A great deal end up in residential care being cared for by people who rarely do. Their Family are too busy, too heartbroken or (in some occasions as you suggest) too apathetic to look after them themselves. they are sat in front of a window or tv and their days become a routine of tea and toilet. I suppose if they don’t know any different it doesn’t really matter though. If the carer is abusive, well that’s ok too because they’re unlikely to remember. I wish more families would care for their loved ones because maybe if you knew your kids would be looking after you in your twilight years, you might actually be a better parent.
Exactly.
But isn’t euthanasia exactly that….putting your belief that an assisted suicide is better before the reality that even though Mom may no longer recognize us, she still enjoys life, even if she is not what she once was?
Simply because we are personally horrified at the thought that we may lose ourselves in the fog of dementia….that does not mean that those living within that fog are equally horrified.
We too easily assume that our pain and sadness at the loss of the individual the Other used to be is equally shared by them. In many cases, it’s not.
But even beyond that, given the suicidal wish… what truly is sufficient for a society to embrace the act of state-enabled murder for those who desire it?
Currently, in the Netherlands, Zoraya ter Beek, who is perfectly healthy but ‘terminally’ depressed, has been approved for state-assisted euthanasia. Is that not the logical end-point for the pro-death-on-demand argument?
If I so wish it, why are my wishes to end my own life (with dignity and without pain and without undue hardship for my family) subject to any sort of arbitrary physician/psychologist review & approval?
Should we not be equally convinced by people’s struggles (and doesn’t everyone struggle?), that denying those struggling people the option to end their lives (nicely!) is, as you say, ‘really quite cruel’?
The silver lining, in my eyes, when I lost my mother to cancer, was that at least she never suffered the indignity of dementia. Her father succumbed to dementia and it was heartbreaking.
When my favourite grandmother was dying of cancer, I joked to her that at least she knew for sure that she wouldn’t get dementia now, as I knew she had been quite worried about it (having seen what happened to my other grandmother). She laughed, and we both knew it was absolutely better that at least she was still able to joke and laugh and be herself like that, right up until the end.
My mom had mid level dementia for quite some time, and we had some very good times, as well as hard ones. We did joke and laugh a lot. Her stroke took her into I supposed very advanced dementia, and she passed 2 months later.
Excuse my ignorance on this subject, but I thought the point of hospice or pallitive care was not to do anything to artificially extend life. My grandmother died of dementia, and once she had deteriorated to the point she had no quality of life, we put her in hospice and all medications other than opiates were removed. She had a rather pleasant death surrounded by family mere weeks later, not years. Why would you keep a terminally ill person with poor quality of life on statins, insulin, hypertention medications and such? Doesn’t that go against the point of hospice, which is to preseve comfort and dignity but not to attempt to exend life any longer?
Certainly, from OUR perspective, an existence in which we’ve lost the most of ourselves to Dementia would be terrible. Who would deny that?
But simply because, we, in our current condition can see and appreciate the severity of the decline when it impacts another, that is not what we would understand or appreciate if we were the one’s in the midst of that decline.
I’ve heard the occasional, cruelly-indifferent & blindly unaware adolescent make the same specious argument about a crippling illness or accident: ‘Oh Man, how horrible that would be; I’d rather be dead than spend my days in a wheelchair….or blind…or deaf…or fill-in-the-blank.” But they don’t know any better.
It’s estimated that approximately 1B people in the world today are suffering some form of disability. And yet, remarkably, they all still go on.
Our own, personal, distaste for the disabled condition (especially those which rob us of our selves) is completely understandable. If given a choice who would choose any of those world-altering challenges. Life is hard enough as it is.
But we’re not given that choice.
And though we may see and suffer, vicariously, the inabilities which bind those 1B victims… and though we may mourn the life they no longer have….still, they have life. And that life can be happy (albeit a happiness which is defined differently within a different world and set of circumstances).
My mother did not know me, in the last years of her life, but she loved dogs and she loved ice cream, and awoke with a smile from her warm afternoon naps.
Let us not be so quick to embrace Death…when we still have an opportunity (albeit a significantly reshaped opportunity) to embrace Life.
Yes, my friend’s mum is exactly like that and sometimes violent. My friend has moved to another country and never sees her mum who doesn’t recognise her anyway.
The poor women is being kept alive but has no life. I don’t want that.
The fundamental point in the AD debate must be around our most core social values of what is the purpose of life.
Do we live solely as hedonists? In this case, it is conceivable that a society that would block a young healthy person from suicide (padded asylum…) would at the same time administer a death serum to an older person with late stage cancer. Why? Because society makes a valuation of the residual life and decides that in the former case, the life remaining is ‘valuable’, while in the latter case, it is not.
And to do so, society must have some idea of what constitutes ‘life value’. Formally, in religious societies, the purpose of life was to live a ‘good’ life, to prepare oneself for the afterlife. Now, in a hedonistic society, the purpose is to live a ‘happy’ life, to have ‘fun’ or seek ‘pleasure’.
So the core question around AD is whether we see life’s purpose as hedonistic or ascetic. The comments section of this excellent UnHerd article appears well divided on this point, and I that reflects society at large.
Life has no purpose. You make of it what you will.
I can only speak on this matter from personal experience.
Over the last decade I have watched dementia destroy my mother. Complete physical and mental deterioration to the point where she cannot communicate except in occasional unintelligible outbursts. She cannot move herself, feed herself, nor does she exhibit control over any bodily function except breathing and swallowing.
No-one can say for sure what mental anguish and physical pain she is in. But her last intelligible communication was years ago and by that point was about nothing but distress at what was happening to her.
So she lies gradually dying in a bed in a care home, kept clean and alive by efficient staff. So thin now that her BMI is below what the textbooks say is normally required for a human body to be viable.
She can no longer make a choice and it would not be right to make that choice for her. But having witnessed how this terrible illness has destroyed her, if it ever comes for me I will not wait until its too late. Whether here in the UK or elsewhere, I will end matters on my own terms while I still have wits enough to choose.
I’m so sorry you have had to experience that, it is truly awful. In the interest of clarifying the language used to better understand subject matter, however, I would like to question what it is you hope to, if in that situation, “choose”. To put it bluntly, in your estimation a life in such a state is not worth living. In most cases, we recognise that someone’s life is precious and if they express the wish to commit suicide we tell them that it is worth living and they have value by virtue of their existence, not on some instrumental basis. Here though, what you are saying is that isn’t always the case. On this view, if someone has dementia, their value as a human becomes a function of their perception – if they want to cherish their life of course we must act as though it has the same dignity as that of healthy people, but if they don’t we shouldn’t stop them. Yet their perception might soon come to be seen as mistaken, especially if the cost of being taken care of begins to mount. Now that the value of a human life is a prudential judgement, why not factor in the monetary costs.
And yet if morality is to mean anything at all, one’s moral worth can’t possibly be determined by a temporary subjective state of mind. Nobody wants to lose total control and deteriorate in the awful way you describe, but even at our most healthy we are often dependent on others, and only one accident or disease away from losing the autonomy we do have. Trying to free oneself from the strictures of reality is a project doomed to failure, and I hope that instead you will see that, just as that of a depressed teenager with suicidal thoughts, your life is and will always be, by virtue of its existence, infinitely precious in and of itself, and should be treated as such.
“Yet their perception might soon come to be seen as mistaken…”
So on the one hand, you wish society to respect the value of human life and agency, then on the other wish to deny agency to those at the end of their lives. We’re not talking here about depressed teenagers, and trying to obfuscate the issue with ‘slippery slope’ arguments denies those in awful terminal agony the right to a dignified end of life. I’m absolutely certain you’d be begging for someone to assist you to die in such circumstances, and your sophistication would disappear along with control of your bodily functions.
Not exactly, I do want society to respect the inherent value of every human life, and for most of us an important and good part of that life is exercising our agency, but our value doesn’t depend on it. Perhaps a disabled person who needs help to perform everyday functions isn’t as much of an autonomous free agent as most, but that doesn’t make their life any less valuable. I’m not making a slippery slope argument, but rather saying that if you take your ideas to their logical conclusions you will end in a particular state – that you yourself seem to find that end state unpalatable ought to be indicative.
The depressed teenager was not brought up to say that they too would soon have access to euthanasia, but rather that the grounds to which we appeal to stop them making a terrible decision also apply in other situations.
Though I hope this isn’t the case, perhaps you are right that were I faced with such a situation I would, out of desperation, fail to live up to the ideals and morals I outlined, but I also hope that those around me and society at large would, with a clearer head, not make the same mistake. There is nothing dignified about suicide – assisted or not.
That’s your opinion and again you can only speak for yourself.
Exactly.
❝Palliative sedation constitutes administering drugs to render the patient unconscious at the end of life. It is considered part of a normal medical procedure: it does not constitute termination of life because the drugs administered are not the cause of death. The aim is to alleviate suffering at the end of life, specifically unbearable pain, that can no longer be relieved in any other way.❞ To relieve pain there is no need to resort to euthanasia.
Heck, for that matter, why deny them ‘agency’ in the middle of their life or even in the teenaged beginning of same, if at any particular point, they — with fully agency — believe that endling life is preferable to continuing it?
Why should I have to have a terminal condition (as judged by someone who knows nothing of me) in order to qualify for assisted suicide?
Why would you argue that agony must be a qualifier for euthanasia? That sounds excessively cruel doesn’t it?
With respect, this comes up against the hard reality of a death from dementia. We are not saying that someone else’s life is not worth living, that’s not for me to say, we’re saying that we don’t want to endure such a life ourselves and should be able to have the choice not to have to
Exactly.
I’m not entirely sure I follow your reasoning, but I will try to respond to your question.
The choice I want is to avoid the pain, suffering, and indignity of a long drawn out death, especially one where I am rendered mentally incapable. I would also want to avoid the horrible price which such illnesses can take on those around them. I don’t want my wife and children to have the years of stress and worry which my father and, particularly, my sister who feels more guilt and helplessness than I do (as is so often still the way), have endured.
Having seen what advanced dementia does, I can honestly say that I do not put any value on the life I would have in those circumstances. Much better to say goodbye to my family, friends and dogs while I still recognise their faces and have the agency to chose. That would be of more value to me.
I understand that for a variety of reasons other people feel differently and that’s fine. I’m not expecting to make the choice for them, just for me.
Sorry about my lack of clarity, and thank you for the thoughtful response. I suppose the point I was trying to make was that our society until now has had a different conception of the value of human life than that you outline. Namely, the idea of human rights is that by virtue of our existence as humans we possess a certain dignity that warrants legal protection. This protection is not contingent on our mental or physical capacities, which is why though some people are disabled, even severely so, they are still entitled to the same legal protections we all enjoy, and their life is still infinitely valuable.
On the other hand, you propose that a life with dementia is no longer valuable (for you), because of the things you are not able to do, so that the value of a human life becomes dependent on that human’s capacities and not intrinsic to their humanity.
You say this is just about having a choice in that situation, not forcing others to do anything, but what you are advocating for is a legal change that would indeed be an imposition. If a teenager tragically attempted to commit suicide, the state would be able to forcibly section them so that they did not pose a danger to themselves and that they might be able to get the psychological help they need. So no matter how much they as a free agent might want it, we say that they have no right to end their life or to have it ended. Yet in the case of dementia you ask for just such a right, so that because of their difference in capacity, the law would then be offering a legal protection to young people it would not offer to the elderly, infirm, and disabled (is this not discrimination?), and so officially recognising their lives as being worth less. Whether or not anyone then chooses to exercise this supposed right to be killed, it necessarily devalues the lives of those most vulnerable, and so makes a significant imposition on those who think, despite their suffering and diminished capacities, that their lives are worthwhile.
If the law ought to officially recognise the lives of those with dementia as having less value, why stop there? Why not extend this to those with disabilities? Why ought society take on a disproportionate burden to provide them with assistance?
Is anyone here saying the law should officially recognize that the lives of those with dementia have less value?
If you want to legalise the killing of those with dementia at their request, but not that of a suicidal but otherwise healthy 30 year old, then that is necessarily wanting the law to officially recognise the lives of those with dementia as having less value, since the state steps in to stop the killing of one (despite their wishes) and not the other.
You must only speak for yourself. Others don’t feel that way.
my father died like that. so fine, you make your choices, but thats very different from changing a fundamental structure of society. there’s a reason why they didnt do it over the last 2 million years or so. and if people think we die harder than say the ancient celts did, think again.
The ancients died much more quickly, without the medical interventions that keep people alive and suffering for months and years.
You can refuse medical care without committing suicide.
Not if they declare you incapable of deciding for yourself and your family/friends/designated proxy don’t have the stones for it.
I can only make my choice if society accepts that I have the right to choose. That requires a change in the law.
I am not suggesting that this should be without safeguards, but I believe that it is valid to want to chose a quick painless death over slow gradual physical and mental collapse.
Societies without advanced medicine and sufficient workforce to care for the very infirm never had the choice. People mostly died very quickly once they got ill. In some cases – e.g. the Inuit – senecide was practiced because the very elderly were not productive and scarce resources had to be prioritised for those who were.
You are free to commit suicide-it’s no longer a crime. What is a crime is getting someone to help you to do so.
Suicide is very inexact and often messy. I don’t know what dose of whatever will kill me or what I’ll suffer while it does. There is a high incidence of failure.
I would also never want to inflict the trauma on others of more comprehensive methods, such as throwing myself under a train.
Additionally while suicide may not be illegal, it can create complications in respect of things like insurance.
It certainly isn’t that easy to kill oneself, and as one of those southern states is finding out, not so easy to execute someone with lethal injection, either.
In theory there were plenty of ‘safeguards’ included in the 1967 Abortion Act. 50-odd years later we are killing off nearly 250,000 babies a year in England and Wales alone. At least Matthew Parris is honest enough to simply declare that killing off our old will become a ‘normal road’ and a ‘healthy development’. And, he ends, if everybody understands the unspoken hints and joins the club then that’s ‘a good thing’. I for one can’t say I agree with him; but I’m just a simpleton Christian!
There’s a couple of obvious differences between abortion and assisted dying.
Firstly, no aborted foetus gets a choice. Assisted dying should only be available to adults who freely choose it. Morally speaking the two things start from different places.
The second big difference is that abortions happen at the start of lives which would in most cases go on to an average lifespan. Assisted dying, as I favour it anyway, happens at the end of life when what is left is pain and bewilderment. So the numbers don’t mean the same in both cases.
If for the sake of argument there are 250,000 people with terminal cancer, dementia etc who choose assisted dying, then what they are trading it for is a few years filled with agony that they don’t want.
Indeed you are just a “Simpleton Christian”. An ignorant simpleton as well. A fetus isn’t a baby, silly boy, it’s a fetus, you can’t even see it with the naked eye.
Do we know that the ancient celts didn’t commit suicide?
My mother also died of dementia. She spent the last year of her life bed bound, doubly incontinent, unable to speak or eat, knowing no one. The care was wonderful and kind but the reality is that this disease is cruel and has no cure.
I am not willing to die like that.
Me too.
As is usual from Kathleen, a very well written piece.
I’m more than a little concerned about the recent intervention of celebrities into this important debate.
When it comes to complex moral issues, they have no more right to comment than the rest of us, but unfortunately the media gives them loads of air time because of their profile.
In any case this isn’t about the right to ‘die with dignity’. That’s a euphemism.
It’s about the right to be killed.
If we’re going to debate it, then let’s call it what it is.
In recent years I’ve lost both my parents, one to cancer & one to Alzheimers.
I watched them both deteriorate & fade away.
Difficult as it was to go through this, at no time did I or my sisters ever think that killing them was an answer.
We are in very dangerous territory here, especially for the poor & vulnerable
At last a thoughtful reply. I too have a watched a parent die with Alzheimer’s and never, ever, did any of us suggest that killing them was the right solution. Because you’re right, “assisted dying”, is in effect killing someone. How many people on here approve of capital punishment? Or, in other circumstances, rail at doctors, politicians, and the judiciary for their supposed shortcomings, and yet they’re quite willing to entrust their deaths to these three professions? Are willing to allow the state to sanction the killing of its own citizens in other than a time of war? This is a deeply complex subject and too many people have not thought this through with all its implications for the future of our society.
Assisted suicide is not akin to capital punishment which is killing someone who usually doesn’t want to be killed. Assisted suicide is a choice.
For now. Given the swiftness with which Canadian public opinion has slid down the slope already, more aggressive incentives to check out may be coming soon, to a clinic near you.
I’ve crossed swords with you over many issues in the past. But on this I wholly concur with your views. The option for legally sanctioned euthanasia in clearly defined cases has to be a good thing for anyone who wishes it.
“In clearly defined cases”??
But isn’t that the question?
Who sets the ‘clear definition’ for what is and is not a condition which might be dire enough to warrant a comfortable suicide? Is the definitional constraint disease centric and/or diagnosis specific? Does it depend upon how the patient perceives the problem (in which case a ‘terminal’ perception might trump a non-terminal diagnosis)? Is it aged-related, etc? And what about pain mitigation and how effectively such anti-pain-therapies may or may not potentially remove the impetus to end it all?
And then, given the definitional high bar which has now been set by someone…according to some collection of what would most probably be ‘expert-endorsed’ constraints — who actually determines whether any particular case qualifies?
Certainly we might say that if the various definitional hurdles have been cleared the case MIGHT BE eligible for enabled suicide, but who is responsible for evaluating any particular case? Who is responsible for evaluating the patient’s state of mind to determine whether they are even fully capable of such a life & death decision? Are they of sound mind? Are they depressed (and who wouldn’t be depressed)? Does the depression or anxiety have to be somehow cured, or mitigated such that a calmly rational decision might be made? What about family input? Do we require it? Do we forbid it?
Consider the horribly banal inefficiency of — pick any government bureau you like — and try to imagine that same kind of Kafkaesque / Catch 22 logic being applied to your Mother’s life, your life, your child’s life?
Does it really seem a ‘good thing’, everything considered?
Strictly speaking, yes, assisted suicide IS still a choice.
But consider the various redefinitions of sexual assault/rape (which hinge, in many cases, on whether or not consent was truly given)…in which an evident female choice of consent is not considered to be real if either the male used persuasion and/or psychological pressure to elicit the actual “Yes”.
If we have come to deny volition even in the face of a definitive choice (‘Yes, I want to have sex’), how long before we equally deny it, if the choice in question is suicide?
“….at no time did I or my sisters ever think that killing them was an answer“.
Just as a matter of interest, what did they think about it? To me, that is what is relevant.
Exactly!
It’s assisted suicide, a choice.
“Changes in social norms tend to roll down slopes rather than hurtle off cliffs”.
I wonder if that’s a slippery slippery because that is what matters in this issue. Undoubtedly, it may be kinder to end someone’s life early when they are enduring terrible and unrelenting pain and there is no hope of recovery. However, it is a short step to relenting unhappiness, unrelenting dependency on others, unrelenting feeling useless and a burden.
Without assisted dying, some will suffer unduly but the risk of society putting down those who are inconvenient is to great for us to spare their pain.
No it’s not.
Unfortunately the God you are referring to believes that suffering is good.
CS Lewis, a devout Christian, was once asked why, if God loves us, does He allow so much suffering. His answer: “Because it is only through suffering that we learn empathy.”
Do you believe that suffering is bad? always? in every case?
Do you believe that an ideal life is absent all suffering? all pain? all embarrassment? all discomfort?
Do you think we as human beings can grow & mature & achieve any kind of physical capacity …let alone wisdom or enlightenment without suffering?
You can make perfectly good arguments for assisted dying (and capital punishment) if the action is justified.
But who will oversee that justification? That’s a perfectly good counter-argument.
In the meantime there are some people in constant pain and distress who are denied release, and criminals who go on to kill again.
The same arguments in support of assisted suicide are trotted out every time this issue is debated.
They all amount to the same thing. ‘My bad experience or fear of having one is more important than the safety of vulnerable people.’
No matter how carefully a law is crafted, what safeguards are put in place, what promises are made, there is nothing to stop the net being widened and more and more people being killed.
If the way things have went in Canada doesn’t make you reject such a law here then I wonder what would…
Brilliant. Utterly shattering. How dark this is. This latest expression of blank immoral Emo hyped new secularism is terrifying. First the Big State deploys the legal sword of individual human rights to hack off the head of longstanding collective wisdom and tradition – in this case, the very idea that human life is sacred. Then having used its control of popular culture and debate via the State, its crony uni sector and the ultra progressive evangelist BBC to muddle and neuter popular resistance, in they charge to further destroy individual liberties and unleash dark top down uncontrollable forces. Welcome back T4! Welcome to NHS Doctors with a licence to Kill! We have been here before. Only in the 1930s the Judeo Christian culture snd the idea of the sacred was still strong. Beware lonely property rich granny homeowners with greedy eyed in laws. Beware too the stinky useless homeless at the bottom of the heap. If you care for all the armies of mentally sick (climate terrorized) young you all see around you, fight this Orwellian nightmare, for they too are in peril and already being killed in Belgium. I fear this will mark the gravest high water mark of the 30 year hyper secular progressive New Order. A new deadly strain of ‘Big Fist’ lockdown, another way to control and ‘cancel’. A genuine Hate Crime.
A sensible discussion for the most part, but I am a bit dismayed at the polarisation of religion vs woke. That seems to be purported by the religious, desperate for their beliefs to retain influence and privilege.
I cannot produce a data-driven Venn diagram, but it is fair to say that an increasing percentage of the population have decided they do not need religion in their lives (the Census declarations show this). Wokeness derives from an academic elite that have gained media power, most people think their ideas are nonsense.
If someone has had enough of life, that is None Of My Damn Business. Just the same as if a couple choose not to have children, or to practice contraception.
As might be expected from a people who ‘invented’* the word suicide, the Ancient Romans had a far more civilised outlook on this vexed subject than ‘we’ appear to have.
I’m afraid the Nazarene and his cronies have much to answer for.
(*Suicidium.)
I believe the Romans also left their unwanted children out on the hills to die. One of the many practices of the Nazareens that puzzled the high-minded Roman aristocrats was their habit of rescuing such cast offs and bringing them up as their own.
Under Roman Law such ‘finds’ could be sold into slavery, which would have provided the motive.
Unfortunately we have very little ‘source material’ on the subject, although obviously the Romans did NOT believe “every sperm is sacred “.
“the real reason why the activists’ rhetoric eventually will prevail is that, without prior commitment to some deeply felt theological or philosophical principle about the intrinsic value of human life, all that is left for most of us are vague intuitions and orphaned remnants of moral reasoning inherited from a formerly Christian outlook. ”
Bravo Kathleen Stock! You hit the nail squarely on the head.
Please reflect on what happened during Covid, the Chief Medical Officer and the Chief Pharmacist decreed that any patient with covid was not to be given antibiotics. A bacterial infection regularly follows a Viral infection.
There was then the mass issuing of DNR documents within care homes. The over use Midazolam.
Assisted dying was enabled during Covid.
While wishing Esther Rantzen well, lung cancer is most closely linked to smoking.
A death from smoking causing lung cancer is just a very long suicide path, it should not be used to justify assisted suicide in the elderly or anyone else
Kathleen, you obviously haven’t had to nurse someone you love through a long and painful death with almost no useful help from our decaying UK health service or from so-called ‘palliative care’ (which doesn’t really exist in this country, or didn’t for us, no matter what they promise). If we had a decent health service, an effective system for proper palliative care for all, and all the social services for the poor and dispossessed that a progressive country should provide, then (perhaps) we wouldn’t need assisted dying. But in the absence of that perfect world – in fact, in the face of a world that gets less perfect by the day – then we do need to allow people to call time on their own suffering. And it’s not for you or I to say in what another’s unbearable suffering consists. Or to tell people to grin and bear it like our ancestors did.
If assisted dying is to be justified as an alternative to the lack of palliative care does it not follow that it can also be used instead of old age care itself, which is in deep crisis, or even disability care?
No indeed, that is not what I meant. It is not a justification, of course not – just a recognition that we are where we are. Recently, while we waited for a promised hospice bed to materialise, my mother died in enormous pain and distress. She asked repeatedly to be helped to die, though she knew it wasn’t an option. A miserable end to an otherwise good life. I now feel we have to prioritise compassion and realism over ideological and other objections, is all. And I would have helped her, if I could. I still live in hope that one day we might have services that make it unnecessary. But we could be waiting a long. long time…..
I’ll take issue based on these two quotes from the article: “the value of individual human life can become negotiable in a post-God world, as we move instead to prioritise the good of the collective in utilitarian fashion.”
“But to make this case convincingly [i.e. arguments based on consequences of the law in practice] would require a positive belief in something; and for many of us, real ardour for the principle of utility is just as hard to conjure up as a sincere belief in a Christian God.”
Bear in mind, religion lets us kill too, if the circumstances match certain moral criteria. In those cases, (to draw from the first quote, but reversing it’s argumentative intent) it’s a collective decision, that the value of human life is negotiable. So it’s difficult to see an unequivocal transcendent foundation in religion for unqualified sanctity of life.
Whatever religion may say, there’s always an argument for the right of the person to their own life; and by extension their right to end it. That’s something to believe in positively, to use Stock’s phrasing.
But the reason to oppose this law is not that people should have no right to end their life, or even that someone trusted should not be allowed to assist them.
The problem is that in the age of mass social welfare, the doctor who assists is, for many people, not actually their own doctor. They aren’t paying that doctor. The doctor is a state agent. And the risk is, that relationship of state and doctor can change in time, until eventually it may become acceptable for that doctor to meet the needs of the state in expediting care by triaging euthanasia, to save money and use state resources more efficiently.
I suppose it’s a compliment to the masculine readership their favourite writer is a lesbian? I mean, of course, who cares not because she is. Remarkable how many comments, though, seem to prove the article’s point as if ‘they’ hadn’t read it? So perhaps it is?
Que?
I’m all for legislation that permits assisted dieing. But before that legislation is enacted, I’d like some other legislation that makes free, first-class palliative care available for all terminally ill people.
That’s the most practical approach I’ve come across to give long term protection to those who chose to live.
Does one have to pay for palliative care in Britain (I am in Australia, so just asking)?
It’s a postcode lottery as to whether you get what you need.
Australia has the best care available.
Well said.
Orphaned remnants of moral reasoning…wonderful.
I loathe her now she’s cast off her blonde smiley disguise and revealed her inner Lizard. Yet another International Financier our to metaphorically bomb the shit out of us. I hate her. You’ve got shed loads of BBC money go to Switzerland top yourself and leave us alone
Hear hear!
I recall seeing her about 50 years ago in the BP Service Station in Wellington Rd, NW1, just north of Lords after she had just had a ‘nose job’.
She looked like an albino Parrot, I was not impressed I must say.
Assisted dying is about choice and dinosaurs like Stock will have to suck it up and understand that its none of their business when it comes about and is extended. This is a major reason why I will be voting Labour as SKS will make parliamentary time for it andcI expect the hundreds of new Labour MPs will be in favour.
when it is extended to the point that you, for instance, or someone you know is seen as a useless eater, will it be anyone else’s business then, or are we to happily go along with this new attempt at eugenics because it has a prettier name?
Yes. I find the easy resort that many, although very far from all, proponents of assisted suicide, make to ad hominem attacks worrying. Clearly the wider threat to the future generations of disabled, old, emotionally and mentally damaged, and other dependent or even unfashionable groups from this state killing is of no importance to these particular individuals. All that matters to them is that they should not have to suffer, even potentially. Very shallow indeed, but as I say, not everyone is like that, just, mainly, the angry ones.
“ Emotive arguments rule our secular age”
This is so true! The mildly terrifying issue is that the social and educational elite in general, including even hard scientists, have hailed this victory of emotional over rational arguments. I’m not convinced that secularism is the true villain so much as identity/victimhood philosophy, which has been around in various forms from the dawn of history. Our 21st century version is merely a particularly vicious form of tribal/religious separatism on a global scale.
The argument comes down to the preciousness of life, a moral conception that means little to the many people who simply don’t believe in God the Creator.
On the other hand is the terrible immorality, never mentioned, that so many of us allow to happen on our watch. Our loved ones are swept up by the doctors and administrators and imprisoned (against their will) in nursing homes until they die. The administrator will explain that “they can’t just stay in the hospital”, so they have to be moved, “to free up the bed for someone else”. By the time this happens they’re usually too helpless or demented to take care of themselves. But we all know what torment this often is for them; sometimes drugged or restrained, sometimes intubated for long periods of time, unable to communicate. We all know this.
So which side does morality stand on?
I don’t think it does if you consider all life precious. And you don’t need a religion to appreciate that. You can’t discount the difficulties caused by someone urinating and defecating, shouting at hallucinations, or trying to cook in the middle of the night in their own home and the strain that puts on those that are trying to care for them. Yes I have been there and it made their partner, my mother, very ill. But I accept that some people will be placed in a home for convenience. Also I don’t think this article acknowledges that there could at one extreme be clear cases where a life is unbearably unpleasant for someone who is ill and the case for death is clearer. The point that there will be mission creep and abuses is very fair though but the article doesn’t seem to bridge the gap, just takes one of the polarised views.
If faced with the ‘burden’ of a friend or family member facing severe ‘subjective’ pain and suffering, are we called to make this an opportunity to put aside our selfish pleasures and pursuits and open ourselves for the opportunity for deepening our capacity to love and to re-evaluate meaning and purpose in our lives, and find the wisdom that comes with the reality of suffering and death?
If the discussion was confined to cases of terminal illness and severe pain, it would not really be a discussion. But as Canada has demonstrated, there is mission creep within this policy that extends far beyond that scope.
Belgium and the Netherlands also. I get the impression though that Switzerland and kept the ‘terminal diagnosis’ cordon in place.
Perhaps the solution is to allow high intensity pain killers to be both morally and legally acceptable?
See the article on Dawkins Kathleen, or Ben Shapiro’s musings this week. Cultural christianity is not sufficient. This is simply the end game of a liberal individualism that is materialist and almost Gnostic….rather than tied to natural law and God. You have to choose. The spot on the fence is becoming sharper, more painful and less tenable by the day
You have to choose. I chose the “liberal individualism” one.
No-one needs assistance to die.
The government gets in the way of being able to do it safely and painlessly, i.e. without risking non-lethal injury. By what right do they try to foreclose that choice?
I’m Canadian and have suffered from debilitating mental and physical illness my entire life. I can’t work a regular job and am considered disabled. I get a cheque from the government once a month, hardly enough to live on without the help of my family, but it’s something. But despite the physical pain and mental distress, I’m perfectly lucid and strive to be as independent as possible. My suffering is, in many ways, ‘hopeless and unbearable’, but I endure regardless. Because who is to say my life has no meaning?
Well, the government, apparently, because I cost too much money. Money that could be better spent on painting crosswalks rainbow colours, pledging millions to study ‘democratic decline’, or buying expensive air defense systems for Ukraine that we ourselves don’t even have. I’ve come to expect such banal and incompetent evil from my government, but what truly shocks me is how many of my fellow citizens are ok with this purely out of some vague comfort they get out of the notion that they’d want their own or their loved ones ‘exits’ to be less ‘messy’. Maybe the Nazis would have had better luck with their campaign of exterminating the mentally feeble if they had framed it as ‘palliative care’ instead.
Forgive me for being so hostile, but I’ve endured over 30 years of callous indifference to my pain, and this truly takes the cake. Your ‘right’ to be comforted by the idea of a ‘dignified death’ in some future potentiality should not come at the cost of MY right to not be euthanized by the state simply for being inconvenient.
Because who is to say my life has no meaning?
Only you and you alone can make that call.
Solidarity, strength, goodwill and endless Human love to you, Thomas K. Don’t ever believe for a second that your life is worth one speck less than every other Human life that ever was. Civilised society may have lost the VAD battle but that doesn’t compel us to surrender that defining post-Enlightenment Human principle. All power and good karma to you & yours, from across the Pacific.
FWIW I will do my best to never let the Continent break you off, and strand you as an island.
Agreed. There was a risk in the story above of undue influence by ‘caretakers’ trying to convince others to ‘save the world’ from nasty humans. There may be undue influence in other situations by children who can’t wait to buy a new sports car with their inheritance. Or undue influence by slimy politicians who don’t want to honor the promised obligations to older generations. Makes me think twice about giving power-of-attorney to anyone should I become incapacitated for a time.
Sadly, life imitates art…hat-tip to Monte Python:
[clang] Bring out…
[rewr!] …your dead!
[rewr!]
[clang]
Bring out your dead!
CUSTOMER: Here’s one.
CART MASTER: Nine pence.
DEAD PERSON: I’m not dead!
CART MASTER: What?
CUSTOMER: Nothing. Here’s your nine pence.
DEAD PERSON: I’m not dead!
CART MASTER: ‘Ere. He says he’s not dead!
CUSTOMER: Yes, he is.
DEAD PERSON: I’m not!
CART MASTER: He isn’t?
CUSTOMER: Well, he will be soon. He’s very ill.
DEAD PERSON: I’m getting better!
CUSTOMER: No, you’re not. You’ll be stone dead in a moment.
CART MASTER: Oh, I can’t take him like that. It’s against regulations.
DEAD PERSON: I don’t want to go on the cart!
CUSTOMER: Oh, don’t be such a baby.
CART MASTER: I can’t take him.
DEAD PERSON: I feel fine!
CUSTOMER: Well, do us a favor.
CART MASTER: I can’t.
CUSTOMER: Well, can you hang around a couple of minutes? He won’t be long.
CART MASTER: No, I’ve got to go to the Robinsons’. They’ve lost nine today.
CUSTOMER: Well, when’s your next round?
CART MASTER: Thursday.
DEAD PERSON: I think I’ll go for a walk.
CUSTOMER: You’re not fooling anyone, you know. Look. Isn’t there something you can do?
DEAD PERSON: [singing] I feel happy. I feel happy.
[Cart Master deals Dead Person a massive whop on the head]
CUSTOMER: Ah, thanks very much.
CART MASTER: Not at all. See you on Thursday.
CUSTOMER: Right. All right.
[howl]
[clop clop clop]
Who’s that, then?
CART MASTER: I dunno. Must be a king.
CUSTOMER: Why?
CART MASTER: He hasn’t got shit all over him.
Dude the Canadian government isn’t going to force you onto MAID. If you’re happy to be alive, go ahead and live. MAID is for people who don’t want to be alive. Nobody is being forced despite the clickbaity media pretending they are.
It is strange indeed that we accept terminating the life of a beloved pet as an act of mercy, an act of love, and yet it is argued that we should legally force another human being to suffer prolonged agony so as to have a “natural” death. An individual may be granted many rights and liberties in a Western democratic society but this individual cannot be allowed to have the right and the choice to die without immense suffering. The underpinning of opposition to both abortion and suicide arises from religious dogma…. only God has the right to choose in matters of life or death. Therefore banning end-of-life assisted suicide is actually an imposition of religious practice on a secular individual… he/she may be an unbeliever, but must die a prescribed religious death. Shame on Kathleen Stock for being another voice in choosing a religiously motivated agony on a most fundamental choice for unreligious people.
I wouldn’t be so harsh on Kathleen Stock who is a great thinker and writer, but you make excellent points. It is indeed ironic that we appear to feel more humane towards our pets than towards our fellow humans.
Our pets don’t get to say ‘no thanks I’d rather live on’. It would certainly be better if we could do as we once did and quietly send the dying relative off with a helpful dose of morphine from the trusted family doctor. Nothing said. No precedent set. But that’s impossible nowadays. Now we must have a procedure and a law which might one day save both you and I and Ms Stock from a long ‘unnecessary’ agony. But what neither I nor Ms Stock want is for our freedom to chose to lead to a future in which people are taken off against their will to suit some utilitarian agenda, like for example the euthanasia of an old spaniel, still basically healthy enough but just a tad too much trouble these days…
I believe it’s not about the rights and wrongs of giving individuals the ability to choose assisted suicide, because it’s clear that individuals/sufferers deserve agency, but about whether the harms across the population outweigh the individual ‘benefits’. Mission creep will happen, and there will be cases of granny being cajoled into an early end for a variety of reasons (financial, everyone’s fed up, etc.) Bound to happen. The question is – will we be a more compassionate society at the end of it all, or less?
I don’t agree with Kathleen on assisted dying, and probably not many commenters here. I don’t think anyone has the right to insist that others must suffer terribly due to an agonising death when they could be offered the option of cutting short the inevitable. Not all cancers respond to pain relief medications, and some illnesses such as MND and MS can cause people to die a terrifying death by suffocation or choking. That’s by no means the total number of horrible and long drawn out ways to die.
I don’t wish to have choices denied to me purely because of the assumption of moral superiority demonstrated by those who openly express a belief in some religion or other. I’ll decide whether or not my life has value thanks, without the interference of the god botherers.
Those who believe there is some intrinsic value to be had in prolonged suffering will still be free to decline the offer of assisted dying so they should butt out of other people’s business.
Would you therefore accept another poster’s suggestion that a law giving free palliative care to all terminal patients be passed at the same time as assisted suicide?
Yes of course. But in the UK, palliative care is provided free by the NHS.
I believe in choice, not in denying anyone the right to choose to continue living until such time as they die naturally from their illness.
Excellent comment! Sums things up perfectly!
I would never go to the vastly overrated Matthew Parris for any kind of wisdom, certainly not in matters of life and death. And while I have every sympathy for Esther Rantzen’s suffering, her being a ‘caring celebrity’ gives her no more moral wisdom in this matter than anyone else.
She certainly should have the right to apply the “moral wisdom” of her own point of view, rather than having the supposed moral wisdom that you claim to have, imposed on her, to produce some agonizing death,
I make no such claim. Kindly read my comment properly.
At the other end of the life spectrum, we already have assisted dying for any reason up to 24 weeks which has it’s own variants of blood washing. ‘Pro-choice’ rather than ‘fetus’ or ‘baby’ killing’. So new news here.
It’s also a great example of how valid the ‘slippery slope’ argument is and of how quick we are forget the all the “sensible, compassionate, concerned” arguments put forward by the advocates of these new freedoms with a view to constraining thier worst excesses.
Fetal killing is legally still supposed to be for harm to mum or baby but the reality is that it has become for “any reason” or simply for convenience which from official records, now accounts for over 200,000 or 25% of all conceptions annually and much more than than this if you account for the morning after pill.
This, in a country where fertility rates are well below replacement already and which, if reversed, might provide important parts of a solution to the euthanasia problem. No chance of that though and given that we seem to be super keen for societal immolation under the umbrella of more compassion and choice, then why not euthanasia?
I believe you can always have too much of good thing and the deification of freedom and compassion on this issue are just two of the latest faces of these super active demons straining to be released from Pandora’s box. Sadly Pandora has been very busy recently.
“….in a country where fertility rates are well below replacement already….”
So, your solution to this is to force people to have children they don’t want?
Not sure I said nor implied it.
These are complex societal issues with equally complex and probably inadequate solutions.
For example, is your solution to this to give everyone what they want all of the time?
I suspect not.
If I want to commit suicide then the state nor those believing in any of the recognised superstitions should be allowed to stop me.
If you really want to kill yourself, nothing will stop you.
I can only offer that suicide is a temporary solution to a permanent problem.
To be clear this issue is not about committing suicide.
Anyone can do this anytime they like as you say. If this is what you want go right ahead.
“Assisted” dying as it says on the tin, is about getting someone else to help you do the dying. When you are dead there is no point prosecuting you, but that does not stop the state from prosecuting the person who helped you. Legalised euthanasia is about not prosecuting the people who help you to die.
This gets very tricky. For example How does the state know you consented to this without pressure?
What about if it is the state who wants to kill you off because they don’t have the budget to support you?
Also what about the pressure you put on your relative/friend to help you do the deed as they will have to live with it after the event and you by definition don’t.
How about this as a solution?
If you want to do it, do it while you are competent to do it to yourself. (Currently legal I think but who cares if not, as you are not going to suffer).
To de-risk the issue for others … If you fail to do the deed before this time then you lose the opportunity for failing to take responsibility while you still could.(Also currently legal)
Once assisted suicide is legal, activists will use equality legislation and further emotional blackmail highlighting hard cases to extend the definition of those ‘eligible’. Over time we will get eugenics in some form. Just think how much money the NHS will save; think how the problem of old age care and disability care will be solved. But of course speaking just from self interest and my individual rights, if I was diagnosed with senile dementia for example I might well like to chose a painless quick death, but I would be under no illusion that the right I would have under such circumstance would not one day lead by some legal route to the unwilling or maybe even obligatory death of a person or persons who might well have preferred to live on. There’s no comfy virtuous middle ground here.
Saying the lobby has won already is a counsel of despair. The problem is that changing the law will inevitably open the door to murder. The 1967 law on abortion serves as an example: it was seen as very moderate. But the militants didn’t worry: they have gone in all guns firing -60 million babies killed in the US since 1973; 10 million in the UK. Now they lobby for killing a child on birth.
The cuddly bearers of nice are allowed to make the case, but the militants are a quite different case. Don’t be deluded.
“Lobby for killing a child on birth”?
I don’t think many would argue against assisted dying as a last resort when someone is at the end of life and suffering great pain. What I would argue against is assisted dying when it is offered as a first resort instead of (expensive) treatment.
Canada’s Medical Assisted In Dying (MAID – how nice) is the prime example. It’s already being extended down to teenagers with parental consent. It also includes entirely treatable conditions such as mental illnesses, including depression. It has already been offered to Canadian soldiers who returned from Afghanistan with PTSD. Again that’s treatable and the morality of sending people to fight your wars then offering to euthanise them on their return beggars belief.
It needs codifying and putting to the electorate. Surely people should have a vote on whether they agree with euthanising kids or ex-soldiers with treatable illnesses. Otherwise it looks like a state inflicted murder program in order to save money on looking after people with long term conditions.
Worryingly, they’ve had to suspend MAID because there aren’t enough Doctors to sign off the deaths of thousands of people who are applying. That in itself should be screaming out that their program is broken.
Why you would get any down votes on this comment is baffling. I simply cannot understand anyone thinking the rapid slippery slope in Canada is anything but instructive as to why assisted dying is a bad idea.
I disagree that it means the program is broken, it means that most people live lives of quiet desperation.
Whenever progressive legislation has been introduced we are always promised that stringent safeguards would be in place.
when capital punishment was abolished assurances were given that murderers would serve lengthy sentences. They rarely do. Some killers are released after relatively short sentences and go on to kill again.
when abortion was legalised it would only be allowed in strictly controlled circumstances. Now it is used as an almost routine form of alternative contraception. When contraception is freely available and reasonably reliable abortion should be declining, not increasing.
Two years ago my wife suffered a major stroke. It left her immobile down one side and unable to speak. The first any I visited her a doctor took me to one side and told me she was going to die. Get used to it. They fed her by mouth although it was obvious she had difficulty swallowing and was in danger of her lungs being damaged. I insisted she was tube fed. After a fortnight I was told she lacked mental capacity, and all future decisions about her future would be taken by social services. I said that she understood evert thing I said and was capable of communicating with me.
A social worker, on the basis of a ten minute assessment said that my wife did not know who I was, did not remember being married, and had express a wish to go into a care home. All this from someone who could not speak.
It took me nine months, three best interest meetings, where I was always outnumbered 12 to 1, and the threat of fighting all the way to Strasbourg under Article 8 of the ECHR to finally get her home. Part of my argument was that Covid was still rife n care homes and her life expectancy would be weeks not years.
She is now home, happy and still enjoys life. She requires four visits a day from two carers for personal care, which social services has to pay a major part of. They have tried to establish she would be better in a care home, largely because they could then take all of her state and private pension.
I have no doubt that had social services been in a position to say she wanted an assisted death it would have happened before I knew about it. I would never trust the medical profession or social workers again. I was lied to, bullied and intimidated. My wife’s previously expressed view were totally ignored because they implied I was lying. Assisted death will be a slippery slope that too many people will be allowed to slide down.
That’s a shocking story. Tremendous achievement to get her home and safe.
Decisions about things like this are inherently personal ones. All I can conclusively say about your story is that if I personally were in the position that your wife is in, I would want an assisted death.
And you entirely miss the point of the comment. Thick as a brick!
I think I got the point perfectly, thank you.
Based on your other comments, it really doesn’t seem like you do. The point Timothy Baker, myself, and others are trying to make is that this is no longer a ‘dying with dignity/assisted death’ issue, it’s about giving institutions who are demonstrably guaranteed to fall to mission creep and who already have an inherent incentive to remove the inconvenient from the picture an ever expanding degree of control over what qualifies a life to be worth living.
A society that is willing to sacrifice the poor and the vulnerable simply for the comfort of those who aren’t is neither compassionate nor caring, but callous, brutal, and utilitarian. It could still be considered ‘progressive’, maybe, but in the same way that a person ‘progresses’ from stage 3 to stage 4 Cancer.
The oft-used rebuttal of ‘oh that’ll never happen’ no longer has a leg to stand on.
Actually, no, you really can’t say that….if only because there’s no way any of us could possibly know what that position would be, or how we’d feel about it if tomorrow we somehow found ourselves captive within in.
The most you could say is that given your imaginary grasp of that post-stroke disabled condition….and an imaginary grasp of what your hypothetically disabled self had lost, given that condition…that you imagine you would want someone to kill you at that point….given, of course, an imaginary vision of what your life would become if you weren’t killed.
In the end such speculation tells us nothing…not even what, in fact, you would actually do given such a tragedy.
Well argued.
is the key phrase. We are all on our own. I can speculate about myself, he may about himself, you about yourself. Nothing much more can be said.
No one, least of all myself, would deny anyone the right to speculate themselves into a tizzy about whatever it is they choose to speculatively chase.
But more than a little humility might be a good thing when we so cavalierly announce our own imagined, suicidal reaction, to someone else’s tragic reality about which we know nothing.
‘Gosh, if I were in your wife’s horrible condition ( a condition which, I in my wisdom would find unbearable) I’d just kill myself.’ Implicit in such a declaration is the question: ‘So why hasn’t she?’
Not only is such uninformed speculation a silly, and meaningless thing to do… it is also quite a cruel thing to say to a loving husband who has supported his wife for the last two years as she struggles with a life reduced by stroke.
We can argue and disagree all we like, but there really is no need to be so casually cruel.
Same here.
Timothy I am not an over-emotive person but your story brought tears to my eyes. Your care for your wife in the face of implacable, uncaring bureaucracy is as strong a manifestation of love as I have ever witnessed. I used to employ my blasé rationalism about AD , seeing it as the ultimate expression of autonomy. However as Canada demonstrates we now we have a sociopathic incompetent technocracy overseen my the most incurious, least informed, politicians ever. The speed with which these decisions are being made is that fir the sake of reason and true compassion, am stepping back from the slope.
I think both sides of the argument comes from love, however this is the bit that isn’t always remembered and is definitely worth remembering.
“ sociopathic incompetent technocracy overseen my the most incurious, least informed, politicians ever”
They want her pension and her life? Unconscionable government overreach!
Your account is very moving and more than a little alarming. Is it true?
Thinking of the corruption of procedures we should recall the notorious “Liverpool pathway” which withdrew food and water from patients. It was eventually abolished. Here is a BBC report from 2013 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-23698071.
Also the “iron law of oligarchy” of Robert Michels that all organisations however noble their founding principles rapidly become self-serving.
I have always been a believer in Mr Spock’s dictum that we are “carbon-based life forms” and will be recycled like any other organism.
The reason Christian-based societies are upset is mainly due to their declining influence in evolving civilizations. Facts trump superstition every time.
After many people die artificially extended, painful deaths, due to the medical industry wanting its say, people say, “I wouldn’t put a dog through that”
I’m all for euthanasia for any who want it.
We should not allow assisted suicide. It will not end well for any of us.
Both of my parents died of dementia related illnesses. My father had a long demise over ten years, slowly losing his memories, his strong, articulate voice and lucid thinking. But his warm hug was still there, his bright blue eyes. I held his hand after he died, and said goodbye.
My mother’s dementia was very different – for lack of a more precise medical diagnosis, she went crazy. But she always was crazy. She claimed the government was after her, she raised hell at the assisted living and nursing home. She raged against the dying of the light. She went fast, in just a year and a half. The end was brutal, but the care was good. Again, I held her hand and said goodbye.
I pray nightly to not go like either of them, or if I do, I have the care they had.
Hospice in many ways, when a person is diagnosed with 6 months or less to live, provides palliative care that focuses on pain relief not life-saving care. This allows a person to pass with peace. It’s not assisted suicide, but it makes death as painless as possible.
BUT, I do not believe in assisted suicide. It is a dangerous path we should not go down. Once, we allow governments to decide who is allowed to choose death, and who is worthy of life and government resources, I have no doubt human life will assigned categories of value.
It already is. Look at the organ transplant process. If you need an organ, you must go through a review process. If you are disabled, you will be turned down because your life is deemed as less valuable as non-disabled person. And that is just one rating category.
My 25 year-old daughter is autistic. She is sweet, loving, charming, polite, loves fashion, Disney princesses, and everyone she meets. Her life is inherently sacred and valuable. I wouldn’t change her for the world, but I wish I could change the world for her. She brings joy to everyone she meets with her kindness and innocence, and works hard at every job she has.
In an assisted suicide world, I have no doubt that the first people to be deemed as unworthy will be the disabled, as they often have expensive health issues. They are already aborted if discovered during pregnancy. The rates of Down’s in Iceland and other countries is nearly zero because it’s considered socially unacceptable to have a Down’s baby. Yet, Down’s people have so much to teach the world about joy, love, and humility.
Then the homeless and mentally ill will be next. And in a youth obsessed culture, the elderly will be swiftly dispensed of, especially since there are so many and they are so expensive.
Life is already so degraded, a commodity to be bought and sold. Babies are purchased through surrogacy. Prostitution is now sex work. Pornography is everywhere. Drugs are legal. Children are sexualized and persuaded to change “gender.”
Erasing the sacred line that says medicine must do no harm will be the final sign of a society that with no soul.
What a beautiful and insightful comment!
Thank you
No one wants old sick folk to suffer. But if the alternative is to allow other folk to persuade the elderly to commit suicide to get their assets. Can’t buy that.
Can’t buy that. In which case, you are at liberty to not avail yourself of the process.
I like you, Martin. Love Australia best place in the world to live .
It’s not either or.
What is creating more acceptance towards assisted suicide?
People are living longer.
I am totally in favour of people being allowed to choose when and how to end their lives. Those who disagree on the grounds of Religious belief won’t be forced to participate. This is a private matter for people to decide about with their loved ones.
The apologists for assisted-dying always claim that there will be proper safeguards but, in fact, the grounds for allowing this gonly become more permissive in time. Here in the Netherlands there are those who demand that anyone over 70 should be allowed to be “euthanized” on request if they consider their life to have been fulfilled and complete. Ironically only a qualified nurse or doctor can administer the lethal cocktail unlike what is proposed in Scotland where the person has to assist in their own death. IN any event, surely this should be duly noted as an assisted death and not concealed as being a natural demise!
Who really cares what is written on the Death Certificate? The important thing is that people have a right to the process!
If there is no Heaven, no Hell, then everything is permissible.
And given that infinite permissible, then Right & Wrong is just a bunch of Feelz, as in ‘If it feels good do it’…and if it doesn’t, end it.
So of course we countenance suicide, though we don’t like calling it that.
Rather the Platinum Spa Visit, the Grand Departure, the Endless Cruise which never returns to Dock! Here your luxury State Room, rentable by the hour! There your 100% organic Closure Process with its zero carbon footprint yielding a totally natural (thank you Scotland) compostable corpse complete with customer’s choice of nature’s own wildflower seeds, sprinkled liberally across the mound by the flight of tiny birds. (Imagine the blossoms come spring!).
Would you like a personalized plush robe…to go with your delicious Beverage (perhaps with a tiny umbrella? and speared slices of the freshest fruit, hand-selected by perfect virgins just at the instant the sun kisses the horizon at your particular day’s particular end?
Of course you would.
And need we say you have total access to our Infinite Playlist on our World’s Best Sound System? (Technical Specs available for those who care!) Rock your life away with Morrison and the Doors intoning, “This is the End!” Napalm optional.
Welcome to the Ministry of Love, my friends, to the Show that Never Ends.
(Well yours does, of course, but We the State. our show goes on forever)
You can’t argue with it really. If there is no Absolute, then Value is Relative and Pleasure is everything. And who can argue with Pleasure in the absence of Absolutes?
Dancers at the End of Time, we are. Eloi at our Picnics. Lotus eaters in our dreaming. Sad, pathetic, corrupt…but our hair is perfect.
When reading your post, I thought “That’s brilliant! I should put that business idea into practice!” However, your last sentence suggests that you were being ironic….
If you don’t someone else will.
And actually I can’t take total credit for the Marketing Plan above. Vonnegut outlined the basics about a half-century ago in ‘Welcome to the Monkey House’. He described his “Ethical Suicide Parlors” thusly: “The two Hostesses there in Hyannis were Nancy McLuhan and Mary Kraft. Nancy was a strawberry blonde. Mary was a glossy brunette. Their uniforms were white lipstick, heavy eye makeup, purple body stockings with nothing underneath, and black-leather boots. They ran a small operation (there at the Ethical Suicide Parlor) – with only six suicide booths. In a really good week, say the one before Christmas, they might put sixty people to sleep. It was done with a hypodermic syringe.
When Nancy came into the suicide booth to see what he wanted, the Foxy Grandpa was lying on the mint-green Barcalounger, where hundreds had died so peacefully over the years. He was studying the menu from the Howard Johnson’s next door and beating time to the Muzak coming from the loudspeaker on the lemon-yellow wall.”
Vonnegut was just a bit ahead of his time.
The Swiss and Belgiums have had assisted dying for decades without issue.
To assisted suicide activists: You first, let me know how it goes.
To everyone else, remember what Thoreau wrote: “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.”
You think that no “assisted suicide activists” have ever availed themselves of assisted suicide?
The seemingly inexorable movement towards assisted dying is not really about the triumph of emotionalism over religious faith. Rather it is about the triumph of individualism over collective benefit. The value and sanctity of human life, though often supported by religious people, is fundamentally a collective benefit in many ways, and the loss of such will inevitably have untold utilitarian consequences as the value of human life in itself ebbs away. It is sometime said that the real test of a civilized society lies in the ways it cares for its most vulnerable members. It is this value that is fundamentally undermined by assisted dying.
Beautifully put. Thank you.
Interesting observation, but I fundamentally disagree with the last sentence. I don’t see how you can be said to “care” for a person by saying, “You might be terminally ill, in pain and with no hope, but we say you have to linger on and suffer for a while longer yet”.
“All that is left for most of us are vague intuitions and orphaned remnants of moral reasoning inherited from a formerly Christian outlook”. Ah, Kathleen Stock on top form, as usual! Another thought-provoking and brilliantly written article.
Elizabeth Anscombe said exactly this more than 65 years ago.
This is the most honest analysis of this issue that I have seen. Thank you, Kathleen.
Deeply insightful piece, thank you. I’m all for assisted death, but not by the state. In other words, letting people quietly get on with what they had been doing before busy-bodies got involved who don’t have the wit or sensibility to work this stuff out on their own, within families. In that sense, I completely agree with Kathleen’s depiction of the fear of death and discomfort driving their desire to farm the matter out to a State they imagine is competent and benevolent.
BTW, I’ve noted the dramatic difference between how media report on the assisted death throes of prisoners put to death in the states, and the descriptions of calm, beautiful deaths of willing suicides.
BTW, I’ve noted the dramatic difference between how media report on the assisted death throes of prisoners put to death in the states, and the descriptions of calm, beautiful deaths of willing suicides.
I suspect the distinction is that in one case, the people concerned want to die, and in the other, they don’t.
Exactly
and you think this changes the physical effects of death-causing chemicals on the body?
Yes.
Reading the comments, it seems dementia is a big issue. Why is that? it seems to me that if we need a difference to be made it isn’t how to humanely get rid of the suffering demented, but to try and find out what is causing this condition. Is it perhaps a consequence of the atomisation of society? I am personally convinced it isn’t a chemical imbalance that should be cured or solved with a procedure or a pill, but with the way we relate to and live with eachother.
Already baked into the cake of the assisted dying slippery slope, why would we ever bother to find out? So much cheaper to just take the special drink.
Is this proposed Scottish bill a further step towards the routine falsification of public records? If doctor assisted death will be recorded as “natural”……
That demented murderer in Oxford had his crime recorded as being committed by a female. Thus distorting the statistics on the small number of murders committed by real women. And as journalists are prepared to validate his delusion by using female pronouns, as in this link, the Truth may be mighty but probably won’t prevail in the UK.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/feb/26/cat-killer-sentenced-to-life-for-oxford-as-part-of-sexual-fantasy
I’m a half-Canadian alarmed at how quickly my birth country has embraced a looser and looser definition of an intolerably miserable or even “sub-human” life–over a quarter think homelessness passes the cutoff?!
But after watching my matriarch of a grandmother wither away over two very long years, totally bed bound in the last several months, I can’t maintain the level of staunch opposition to assisted suicide that I once had. Thanks to good insurance (by U.S. standards) and contributions from her seven children–plus, importantly, the home hospice care provided by Visiting Angels–she was able to live with family until the end. As one of her caregivers, I wish I’d given her the snacks she wanted more often, instead of the salads she despised and vegetable/cheese plates she tolerated. It was hard for me to accept the total, unstoppable decline of such a beloved person, my last surviving grandparent. I wasn’t totally stingy with her though.
Her enduring Catholic faith proved to be an enduring obstacle, though some in the extended family advocated her expedited exit, and she was not totally deaf to the idea. She did manage to find enjoyment via visitors, reading, and continual use of a cell-phone she could barely operate without help. Only the last few weeks were unremittingly grim. She died on Valentine’s Day 2020, right before the outbreak that would have further battered her ailing heart.
I think Kathleen Stock overlooks or underestimates the amount of cruelty and indifference that existed in more robustly Christian times: in 1870, 1590, 1350, or 1095. People tended to explain away the suffering of the poor and sick as God’s will, something that would be corrected in a (forever) future state, provided one didn’t get sent to Hell with the vast majority of sinners. As most know, from about 1515-1715 or so–Charles Stanhope can provide greater context and detail– huge numbers were slaughtered, or exiled for being “the wrong kind” of Christian. In 1350 they’d board up your doors and let your whole household die of the Plague. In 1096, back when Christians did “jihad” or Holy War, they took their blood show on the road, to punish infidels in the supposed name of the Lord. And even the mid-Victorian version of religion was tinged with considerable inhumanity or hyper-pragmatic coldness–at least to hear Dickens tell it.
It may very well be difficult to maintain the sacred without a formal, ancestral religion, but I agree with one-time frequent commenter Steve Murray that it is far from impossible (I don’t agree with his hard separation between religion and spirituality or assessment of religion as an intrinsic net-negative). Most of us must try harder to find meaning, purpose, and consolation–for all of our sakes. Was that so easy for the mass of mankind to find in 1590?
Dare to give thanks, even pray harder, to the God or Unknowable Something of your own understanding. And hold out hope in the value of hope and gratitude, despite the lack of unfalsifiable evidence of their worth.
All that said, I would not presume to judge the soul of someone who choose an assisted exit, not even while physically healthy in his 50s–like my great-grandfather (1929) or uncle (2009).
“Jannèt drank the potion handed to her, and 15 minutes later reportedly met a peaceful and painless death.”
Then she was ground up into Soylent Green and fed to her three ‘pelican daughters’ with a dash of sanctimony sauce. Hurrah!
I say to the author: who benefits from prolonging the life of someone whose quality of life is non-existent, when they and their loved ones are in terrible pain?
Answer: no one. Not the people who care about them, not society, not the health and social services.
The ageing population means we’re going to be swamped by aged people suffering.
Has any harm been done in the Netherlands? No, I don’t think so.
Sounds like you’re keen to take away the individual’s right to determine what a “nonexistent” quality of life means.
*No harm if it doesn’t seem to affect you personally? I don’t think so, lady.
Well, my generation (that is generation X) is looking forward to assisting dying. Actually we are all dealing with ageing parents who are so tired of life and we see our own pensions and savings disappearing & the cost of living going up
So the idea of just simply checking out by 70 before things get too bad to be really appealing; that’s before we even factor in debilitation and illness.
I think our generation just really doesn’t want to be told what to do and we’re willing to take the matter into our own hands.
Anybody see the movie “Soylent Green”? The appealing and beautiful assisted suicide is memorable — but I won’t ruin the ending for you. (It’s objectively a terrible movie, but that suicide scene is indelibly burned into my brain). No, “assisted suicide” should NOT be normalized as an “option”. It’s too easily abused and making it a social good is dystopian.
God bless Kathleen Stock.
The issue with basing society’s ethics on any kind of sky god is there isn’t one and I just cannot pretend there is… Still, morals and ethics can flow from themselves into themselves:
Human Life is Valuable because Human Life is Valuable (repeat ad infinitum)… It is because it is, next question…
All dogma reduces to tautology. Yours is indistinguishable from more formalized versions in scripture. Except that it lacks codification and the wisdom of our ancestors.
Your point is ultimately nihilistic and self-defeating. To suggest we’re incapable of finding a moral position in this or any other matter without recourse to a non-existent entity is to deny the whole of humanity any agency whatsoever.
Not what I am saying. I am not saying that we must rely on a false diety I am saying the we do Not have to nor do we have to justify our first principles such as life having value…
It doesn’t deny agency at all. It simply denies Moral Relativism. Without the anchor of an Absolute then everything is permissible and Better or Worse is simply measured by whatever subjective rule one might care to apply.
Certainly in such a world, we can set whatever moral position we like but it will always be as reeds, shaken by the wind.
Agency…free will, of course, exists in both belief systems… And Matt is free to build self-referential tautologies all he likes, even given God. That Matt denies Him is Matt’s problem, not God’s.
Quite so and well said… But there still ain’t no sky god…
Thanks!
But as I said, your problem…. not God’s.
Allow me to share a brief but beautifully eloquent quote from Mark Helprin, as to the question of Faith:
““As long as you have life and breath, believe. Believe for those who cannot. Believe even if you have stopped believing. Believe for the sake of the dead, for love, to keep your heart beating, believe. Never give up, never despair, let no mystery confound you into the conclusion that mystery cannot be yours.”
Or…with Pascal…make the wager!
Perfectly said.
Mine does not rely on a fundamental lie.
What does yours rely on, and is it true?
Mine relies on nothing as subatomic particles rely on nothing…It stands on its own and it is true simply because it is (yes, circular, that’s the point)
But it isn’t. Nor does it have to be. And isn’t that the point?