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]

*devil's advocate*

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.

[watervole]

Oh, I don't think it will ever happen, for the reasons you give. Cutting out winter fuel payments was sensible. The majority of recipients don't really need it.
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.