Assisted Dying on Conservative Home

There’s a niggly article on Conservative Home poo-poohing the idea of legalised assisted suicide with the largely fallacious argument about hypothetical abuse  and an emotive and innaccurate comparisson with abortion.

Below is my comment:

I have multiple sclerosis and it is quite conceivable that I could end up completely paralysed, trapped in an immobile husk of a body. Under those circumstances, the current law would tell me that I lost my legal right to commit suicide at the time that I lost the physical capacity to carry out the act.

It is quite conceivable that I would rather die than live as a passive observer as my wife loses our house and my inability to earn money drives us into penury. However, fears of ‘abuse’ will condemn me to suffer, in my view, quite needlessly.

Since no instances of abuse have come to light in the countries where Assisted Dying is legal, one must conclude that I am being told that I have to suffer because of other people’s belief that hypothetical straw-men may suffer. Real, actual, suffering, I contend, such as that experienced by Debbie Purdy, trumps hypothetical suffering in my book.

And:

I only raised my own MS by way of declaring an interest.

As someone who does not believe in your god, why should my life’s choices be proscribed by reference to a thing I don’t recognise. I refuse to suffer for someone-else’s beliefs and yet that is what you say you want, drawing a parallel between the existential suffering of the locked-in and the execution of Jesus in terms of the morality of suffering.

I am no Jesus and don’t want to suffer for anyone. Sorry ’bout that!

Plus:

Indeed, Dave.

I am optimistic regarding my MS, except with respect to NHS funding for the individualised genetic and bionic interventions around the corner, since the over-arching science has received an enormous boost following it’s ‘weaponisation’ early last year. By this I mean that a quick survey of neurological research reveals not only the usual suspects but arms companies too since bluntly rewiring the damage from MS is going to provide cures for a lot of central-nervous system impairments impoverishing the US Veterans department with expensive battlefield injuries. Not to mention the imaging of thoughts which, I’d obliquely point out, can now be done with an 80% accuracy for what a person is seeing at that time and a 50% accuracy for remembered images. So I am not without hope.

However, I argue now for assisted suicide’s legality as, bluntly, experience has taught me to hope for the best but to plan for the worst. And in what I consider to be the worst case (immobility and isolation while being forced to endure seeing my family financially devastated), I’d want a way out but will be almost certainly unable to argue for one, let alone effect one!

Of course I agree that suicide is never desirable, per se, but I see that it does offer a reasonable way out of otherwise unending suffering.

As I understand it, Jesus is recorded as not only said that people should not cause suffering to others (do unto others..) but, in a slightly different context, also urged ‘judge not lest ye be judged’. People who choose to end their own lives or have those lives ended should not be persecuted. However, as an atheist, this is not my bailiwick.

And:

Shaun Pilkington said in reply to Elaine Turner…

I’d go further than that and suggest that people in my hypothetical position should apply to the Courts and a Jury, via the Police, to have an ‘assisted suicide’. That way they investigate the motives and circumstances BEFORE the fact, rather than AFTER the fact. In doing so, you won’t find people killed who shouldn’t have been, since permission for a hospital death would not be granted.

In all seriousness, people genuinely in this position don’t mind going to the authorities or jumping through metaphorical hoops!

With:

Shaun Pilkington said in reply to Elaine Turner…

I’d hope so as I was a conservative voter and instinctive liberal Tory long before I got a disease! I’ve thought about this for a long time, or rather, for a couple of years but uncomfortably intensively, and realised that the simple expedient of putting the trial BEFORE the act would remove the vast majority of problems.