Assisted Dying

[watervole]

 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.

Comments

[igenlode]

I know someone whose terminally-ill grandfather (in a country where assisted suicide has been legal for over twenty years) attempted to have himself euthanised, and according to her the process was so complicated and long-drawn-out that he actually died in suffering before he managed to get permission; it's not something that they do lightly.

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.

[kerravonsen]

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.