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Assisted Dying
Pleased to say that MP (Vikki Slade, Liberal) voted in favour of the bill, as she'd promised when I wrote to her about it.
(Our previous MP, Conservative, - but not necessarily representative of the rest of the party - did not always vote to match what his letters implied.)
My heath is fine at present (expect when I get sciatica or break something), but I'm terrified of dementia (the bill doesn't cover that, but hopefully it may one day extend to it, such that if wishes are expressed in a proper power of Attorney while a person is still of sound mind).
I wrote my POA several years ago, and made my wishes clear. If I ever can't recognise my family, then that person is no longer a person I wish to be. And I certainly don't want my family to live with that kind of pain or to spend their time caring (or paying for care for) someone who can't appreciate it.
I want my money to go to my grandchildren and not on end of life care for me.
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Talking about money is also a big red flag for most people, with the idea being that the elderly will be made to feel 'a burden' and morally pressurised by their heirs to kill themselves before they have 'used up the children's inheritance' -- I even had that from one of my own relatives, a highly educated and strong-willed woman who to my astonishment felt convinced that if she wasn't actively banned by law from committing suicide then she would somehow feel herself inescapably compelled to do so for her children's benefit (both of whom she loves very much, and who so far as I know have no desire to kill off their mother in order to inherit her grotty old flat!)
Personally I feel that it is entirely wrong for the general public to believe that it is fine for doctors to kill people passively through protracted dehydration (withholding nourishment from those who are clearly dying), but wicked for them to kill the same patients actively and more mercifully. But then I just don't see human life as something that should be preserved indefinitely and at any cost: suicide to me has always seemed an entirely rational response to the unbearable, and keeping the 'soul' clinging to the body for a few more days of an existence that has to be medicated out of all awareness in order to make it vaguely tolerable seems both pointless and cruel. What good does it do a dying man to prolong his final agonies beyond what nature would ever allow? It's like those arguments about whether or not you should ever 'switch off the life-support machine' for patients in a vegetative state, because very occasionally a very few of them do recover a certain amount of awareness -- but if you have a patient whose body is actively shutting down, what is gained by stretching out the process while drugging him into a coma so that you can say he isn't actually in pain? What is the value of those extra days -- beyond the easing of the carers' conscience?
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Most people have a pretty strong instinctive will to live when it comes down to it,and I can't easily envision disabled people agreeing to apply for an assisted death just because a doctor tells them to (or doctors doing so at the behest of the government's budget; opposition to euthanasia is much higher among the doctors who would actually be required to carry it out than among the population at large). Although of course people *have* been made so miserable and persecuted by recent benefits regimes that they have simply gone out and killed themselves of their own accord -- and nothing in the current proposals is going to fix that.
People who are sick and suffering are already trying to kill themselves because they are afraid that if they get any worse they will no longer be physically capable of doing so, or are putting the responsibility onto their relatives, which is a terrible situation to be in. One of the arguments in favour of legalised euthanasia is that, like legalised abortion, it makes something that is *already happening* take place in a safer and less punitive environment; banning it doesn't stop it happening, it just makes it happen in a worse way.
But what I *can* easily envision happening, I'm afraid, is that there will be pressure on hospitals to push terminally-ill patients into euthanasia rather than 'end-of-life care' which takes time and money to set up, on the grounds that they are dying anyway and the beds are needed to save those who have a chance: the 'Save our NHS' argument.
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Yeah, I have a friend in a country where assisted suicide is legal, and her elderly father was infirm, and the nurse-assistant who was helping him, started pressuring my friend to have her father killed, and when my friend protested (because it was against her religion to do so) the nurse merely said, "oh, well, I suppose rather than using an active method, you could let him starve to death" -- like, the nurse could not comprehend how utterly abhorrent the whole idea was to my friend.
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I made certain to mention dementia in my Power of Attorney. Precisely so that no bugger can claim I'm being coerced into requesting death at a later date.
Society is in complete denial about the elderly and infirm being a massive burden on society. The elderly have a higher voter turnout...
but it's my generation that hold most of the housing stock, get a pension that is guaranteed to increase each year, and take up a very large chunk of the NHS budget, etc.
If we allow more people to die when their time comes, then we free up a whole load of money for the government to spend on education, free school meals, etc.
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I'm totally against assisted suicide: (a) for myself, it's against my religion, and (b) for others, I think the risk of it being abused and people being pressured is too great (see above for example of where a daughter was pressured to have her father "assisted to die").
I agree with you on "the removal of artificially extending life". I don't want any heroic measures performed on me. Heck, if I had a terminal condition and was given six months to live, or given twelve months to live if I had lots of invasive treatments, I'm not sure I'd want to bother with the treatments.
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Glad we agree on one aspect :) (I knew someone who turned down chemo on the grounds that she'd rather enjoy what was left of her life. She'd had chemo before and knew just how bad it was)
Yes, pressure can be applied, though I believe the UK law would make that difficult. Yet your friend was able to hold her own and have her wishes followed. Strong belief can achieve that.
Pressure, sadly, can go both ways.
When my mother was dying (in a month of pain and delirium that was horrifying to see), my dad was actively researching anything that might give her a few days extra life and pressuring the hospital into doing it.
I do not believe that would have been her desire (we'd discussed the subject a year before when she'd nearly died), but I think my Dad saw it - like he did most things - as a puzzle to be solved and a fight that was somehow winnable.
For himself, fighting for every possible moment of life, was a natural choice. He would never have asked for assisted dying, no matter what was killing him.
For my mother... He should not have fought to give her MORE days of horror. (When I saw her, she didn't recognise us, but was babbling away and batting at things that weren't there. Yet there was still a trace of her remaining. When I mentioned the name of my dead sister, I saw a tear form in her eye. She was aware to some small degree, which made it so much worse.)
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Yes, dementia can be horrifying. My Aunt Elizabeth had what IIRC is called "sundown syndrome" where they are fine most of the time, and then there comes a point in the day where they lose time and forget what is going on. Yes, that is very mild compared to what you are describing, but it was utterly chilling to me to visit her and start talking, and then a minute later she would repeat the exact same phrase in the exact same intonation (shudder). I couldn't bear visiting her after that; I wanted to remember her from when she was whole, not this shadow.
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I know exactly what you mean about wanting to remember the person someone really was.
Exact repetition - that's so scary.
I hope that if I am ever like that, that my grandchildren do not visit. And that no one pressures them into visiting, in the belief that I would want it...
I am forever grateful that my beloved mother-in-law died quickly (a week) in hospital, and was coherent and intelligent to the last.
She was very practical, asked us to pay the upholsterer for the fabric he'd bought to cover a chair she would now never use.
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(hugs)
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It's true that, as Henry Marsh says ("Do No Harm"), the fact that we *can* save people's lives, at least temporarily, using modern medicine doesn't necessarily mean that we *should* always use those interventions ("the cancer specialists think it's a big success if the latest expensive new drug keeps a patient alive for an extra few months[...] And then there is always the fear that you might be wrong, that maybe the patient is right to hope against hope, to hope for a miracle, and maybe you should operate just one more time").
But while many people accept that in principle the population is top-heavy with the elderly, that doesn't generally mean that they are in favour of either themselves or individuals whom they know being killed off for the benefit of the nation as a whole, and I can't see any political party managing to sell such a policy in those terms!
In a similar vein, people who believe that the world is in principle over-populated by humans are rarely in favour of their own locality being depopulated, let alone forcibly depopulated; it is always the faceless masses 'over there' who are breeding too fast and would benefit from a famine or plague to restore the natural balance (look at the response to Covid-19, which had a relatively tiny death rate compared to most historic epidemics...) Certainly nobody was going round saying that Covid was reducing the burden on society by being nature's way of killing off the elderly and infirm.
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But people get very angry about losing something they already have, and have a beam in their eye about the things other people never had in the first place.
But I can still see the unfairness of it.
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Though the law as proposed would not cover dementia in any case, as it's not a terminal illness.
I see no value to those extra days. My mother spend her last month in pain and delirium. She'd had her leg amputated already, because it had gangrene, but whether she was aware of that was a moot point.
I do not believe it was what she would have wanted (because of a conversation we'd had a year earlier when she only just pulled through, but was still mentally herself), but I don't think she'd ever written a POA.
My father refused to allow the use of any drug (such as morphine) that would have reduced her lifespan. He insisted that it had to be the infection which killed her. Which it did, eventually.
My sisters and I loved my dad - he was a really intelligent man - but this is the one thing we cannot forgive him for.