Assistance

The current debate over euthanasia or assisted suicide is just heartbreaking.

I felt very strongly about it when it came back into the news a couple of weeks ago with the case of Debbie Purdy.

It seems unconscionable that this incredibly brave woman, who is now confined to a wheelchair because of her MS, should not be allowed to end her life at a time of her choosing and run the risk that her husband might be held accountable for assisting her.

However, as Baroness Warnock said in The Times “It would seem to me to be a blatant abuse to say we are going to allow for assisted suicide abroad but not in our own backyard.”

Lady Warnock, 84, who recently provoked an outcry when she said that people suffering from dementia should be allowed to end their lives for the greater good, said that unless the ban on assisted suicides was also lifted in Britain, such a move would lead to a “two-tier death service”.

I have a close family member with Alzheimer’s. The ravages of this disease have turned a beautiful lady into a skeletal animal whose physical attacks on members of staff and her own family are only controlled by large doses of sedatives so that she sleeps most of the day. She is not the woman that any of us knew and no longer recognises any family member but, even though she previously expressed the wish to die, we are powerless to help her because her religion precludes suicide. What is worse is that, when she catches any illnesses that, in days gone by, would have carried her off this mortal coil, she is kept alive with doses of antibiotics.

And then we come to Dan James, the most recent entry in this sad ethical quandary. A healthy young athlete cut down in his prime by a random sports injury that paralysed him from the chest down. The proposed laws would not apply to him for his was not a terminal illness and yet, to him, it was a death sentence. The inability to move for himself, to be forced to rely on others to carry out his every need. The indignity and the horrendous loss of his freedom made him try to take his own life on at least one occasion. Until, finally, his parents took it on themselves to help their child to carry out his final wish, with the help of Dignitas. I cannot even begin to imagine how horrendous such a decision could have been. To have to bury your own child is, surely, the most unnatural thing in the world.

There were reports in the paper from other people who have been similarly injured explaining that they too went through the suicidal stage but, in time, came out the other side to a better life that is fulfilling enough for them to want to continue living.

Perhaps we should have a law that starts with an Expression of Intent but which can only be carried through after a period of a year…?

I don’t know the answers. I only know that it seems wrong to force someone to live as a shadow of their former self when they no longer want to. And just as wrong to prosecute a relative for assisting them to carry out their desire.