Assisted dying
Merry Cross on the opposition among disabled people to the bill currently passing through parliament
Left Unity members may be unaware of the strong opposition amongst disabled people to the Assisted Dying Bill. Or perhaps you just don’t know the basis for it.
As disabled people, we have plenty of experience of pain and suffering! We therefore have enormous sympathy for anyone experiencing it. I have as much reason as any to be truly scared of ending my days in unbearable circumstances.
Also, many of us have also had the experience of being told that our lives are not worth living (or it may have been our parents being told this). There are those, like Jane Campbell, who have been in hospital and would have been left to die (or helped to die) were it not for the determined efforts of their loved ones to insist on good care.
We know, don’t we, of hospitals in which doctors have used the Liverpool Pathway as a way of ending patients’ lives, without consulting the patient or their families. Many of us know people who get clear messages from their family that they are too much of a burden. And often those families are now indeed burdened – because the government has scrapped essential aspects of the support we or our families are supposed to get, leaving family members to have to resign from their jobs, to provide that support, further reducing the family income.
We argue, though, that given the right kind of support (the Independent Living Fund provides it now for many with high support needs, but it is due to be scrapped next year) most of us can lead fulfilling lives in which we contribute to the community. And even those who can no longer contribute to the community at large, can often bring joy and laughter to their families.
Doctors are also hugely against this bill being passed. Their arguments include that they have taken an oath to support life; that their prognoses are fallible (as we all know) and that anyway, they have always been able to help people in their final days, with increasingly strong doses of medication, like morphine. And we can, after all, already make a living will, stating if we don’t want to be resuscitated should that situation arise. In the Independent last week (16/7/14) Lord Alton of Liverpool had this to say:
“The Bill itself is flawed. It contains no safeguards to protect the vulnerable, just a vague promise of safeguards at some future date. It defines terminal illness in such a way as to encompass large numbers of people with chronic conditions and disabilities as well as terminal illnesses. It contains no compliance system – not even a requirement for a doctor supplying lethal drugs to report.”
Given all this then, it is not difficult to understand that disabled people are frankly terrified of this bill being passed. In a political context where the government is intent on making our lives as hard as possible, the thrust of our argument is ‘Give us Assisted Living!’
10 comments
10 responses to “Assisted dying”
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Good points well made. I also don’t like the rush to get families to agree to ‘no resuscitation’ that is already prevalent. This bill has sinister implications for the state’s power over dissidents & all of us defined as a ‘problem’, particularly at a time of Nhs cuts.
Assisted Living gets less sympathetic coverage from the liberal press than assisted dying – because it’s a liberal idea. We’re not liberals, we’re socialists so we make positive demands of the state, not simply a requirement to leave us alone to exercise our individual freedom of choice.
We might want the right to die, but first, we also want the right to get on a bus
There seem to me to be two related, but distinct, issues at stake here. Firstly , the current Bill itself. It may well be that the opponents writing here are correct and the the current Bill is deeply flawed, without the necessary safeguards to ensure that the institutional cruelties of the ghastly “Liverpool Pathway” are not reintroduced into the treatment of the terminally ill.
And yes of course the demand for an independent Living Fund as described is surely one all socialists can support. The Independent Living Fund demand seems rather a Red Herring to the issue of assisted dying for those terminally ill and in pain though.
I have read plenty of stuff in the press recently around the debate on the Bill to suggest that in fact there are plenty of safeguards proposed – and that the conditions required for a person to be able to access assisted dying are pretty restrictive. I understand the Bill is based on experience in the state of Oregon USA – and is widely consider to have been very successful and popular with citizens.
The bigger , more general issue though – the right of every person, in possession of their mental faculties, to CHOOSE the time of their death – and to be able to call upon the free medical support to bring about their death in as painless a manner as possible ? Here I am firmly of the view that , with adequate safeguards in place it IS the right of every individual to decide the time of their death. I personally am in good health, but I’m getting old, and I have witnesses good friends and relatives die from cancer, having suffered terrible pain for a year or more – only alleviated by wonderful hospice care in the last few months of life. In that situation I personally would definitely choose to miss out on the months and months of agony, and fruitless chemotherapy – and would seek a civilised assisted suicide . That’s my PERSONAL choice. that is my right as a human being – and no one else has the right to deny me a “good end” at the time of MY choosing.
So, OK, maybe the current Bill is NBG. But the principle of the right to live both a good, fulfilling life, and to achieve a “good death” at the time and place of ones own choosing, is equally important – in my personal view
I agree with Merry and the many disabled people who have been fighting against this bill. The climate and context in which people with progressive illnesses or impairments are already committing suicide because of the loss of all financial support on the whim of the DWP should be evidence enough that until the oppression aimed at disabled people is eliminated, we must never, never, never sanction the killing of disabled or sick people by others.
I disagree with John Penney. Suicide is a right because you only involve one person – yourself. Assisted suicide is another thing entirely because it requires another person to kill you.I do not believe we do have the right to ask this of anyone else, and certainly, doctors don’t want it.
The Netherlands, where Assisted suicide is legal, have now said they made a mistake.Even Michael Portillo on ‘This Week’ said something very important on the issue of ‘the slippery slope’ which might follow such a precedent. He said the abortion law was originally only for extreme circumstances where the mother or child’s life was in danger, needing two doctors to give authorisation etc etc. Now it is just a routine operation. It happens.
Having recently had to experience a much loved friend suffering agonies from stomach cancer for TWO YEARS, with endless courses of chemotherapy, I can assure you that if it had been technically and legally possible, and if my friend had asked me to assist, I would have had no qualms whatsoever in assisting him to end his suffering early via assisted suicide.
The idea that “doctors don’t want it” is simply an inaccurate generalisation. Until 30 years ago or so, when there was a spate of, mainly Catholic , nurses, “grassing up” family doctors routinely assisting patients with terminal illnesses and in pain, to achieve early deaths through morphine overdoses, it was an absolutely widespread practice. Much unnecessary suffering was avoided through this informal practice. It was deeply unsatisfactory of course, being illegal, and depending on the particular views of ones family doctor (or doctors in terminal care units in hospitals).
Apart from the religious lobby with its “it is God who will decide when you die – no one else” tenet, the feeling in the country at large today is hugely in favour of assisted dying – of course with adequate safeguards”. And for once, public opinion is quite right. I’m afraid I view the opinion of Michael Portillo on assisted dying with the same seriousness that I view his opinions on political matters. How “The Netherlands” as a country of millions of people with widely differing views can collectively be said to have said “they made a mistake” in providing assisted dying , is just an example of the over-simplified generalisations and scare stories being deployed in this discussion by the opponents of assisted dying.
Micheline, You also don’t appear to support a Woman’s Right to Choose on abortion either. Abortion in the UK (or the Netherlands) doesn’t actually require that either the mother or the “child’s” (that would be the foetus of course – not “the child” )life is in danger. Why should it ? It is a woman’s personal right to control her own body – up to a legally agreed maximum gestation period – when abortion is still illegal except in extreme medical circumstances.
Is there an underlying religious basis for some of the opponents of assisted dying expressing their views here ?
If the current Bill falls, people who wish to end their personal suffering, and require assistance to do so in as painless manner (some people are too paralysed or generally ill to secure their own suicide themselves), will continue to have to ask for assistance from a loving friend or relative – who will then have to face legal sanction – or find the funds to visit a clinic in Switzerland to secure a civilised , painless end.
I support the right of anyone to end their own life if for them it is no longer worth living, and I support the provision of medical services which support a person seeking release from what has for them become an unbearable existence. To whip up scares about “slippery slopes” – presumably leading effortlessly to a Nazi-style Euthanasia Programme – is in my opinion to cheapen what is a serious issue of personal choice and the alleviation of suffering.
I don’t think following Portillo’s argument about the slippery slope by using the analogy to abortions is a very good one. Yes, abortions have become routine – so what? Women should have the right to chose if they carry a baby to term or not and that should be a “routine choice”.
On the assisted dying aspect, I have to agree with John on this one, providing the right safe guards are in place then people should be allowed to chose the time of their deaths. Some diseases mean that people die in absolute agony and if their are doctors there that are willing to assist in a patient ending their life then they should be allowed to do so.
I also think the argument that doctors don’t want it has to be seen in a general social context. I mean a lot of teachers were horrified when the government abolished corporal punishment in schools – they got used to it though and now they would be horrified with the idea of bringing it back. There is a more important ethical point around the Hippocratic oath and the right to life, but the right not to live in constant pain should also be born in mind, surely?
John Penney. You have no idea how much I sympathise with some of this. My own father wanted to be allowed to be released from his suffering and I am haunted by aspects of his last days. However, I’m afraid you betray a real unfamiliarity with the lived world of swathes of disabled people and people with chronic and/life limiting illnesses, especially the fact that we are all suffering now under the DWP cosh.
It may well be true that the majority of the country (the reasonably healthy ones) now support assisted dying. The majority have also always supported hanging! It doesn’t make it right. And that saying… ‘You can judge a society by how it treats its most vulnerable citizens’ comes to mind again. Legislating for the more powerful majority, whilst keeping the minority out of the picture is an all too depressingly familiar scenario.
Passing the law would leave thousands in fear for the rest of their lives. Not passing it might do the same (to a smaller number and for a smaller period of time). But sometimes I have to admit to myself that very, very few humans have ever been able to determine the time or means of their own deaths. Of course it is a comforting notion. So is the idea of guardian angels and heaven…
In 1976 I spoke at my union conference in support of a woman’s right to choose. Now I have motor neurone disease – and though no longer able to speak, decided for now to swim, not sink.
Assisted dying, gives the right to choose to the terminally ill, that the able bodied have.
I hope Left Unity will support extending the right to choose, to the terminally ill.
Oh Alan, I do understand what you are saying. If only those who were terminally ill always had the right support and love from those around them. Sadly, of course, that is far too often not the case.
Regarding simon’s point – when we are talking in liberty terms e.g. freedom of the individual, then the right to assisted dying at the time you choose must also be the right to assisted living. But the public are never invited to explicitly defend the latter.
The historical reality is that the assisted dying bill is quite clearly a part of a state-led ideological operation, as Merry and Micheline point out, and, like the outbreaks of public racism that follow far right and fascist agitation, nearly every bill across the world has taken place during a political environment similar to now, with disabled people’s rights threatened and services cut.
What I object to is the way public are encouraged via the media to weigh in and make hypotheses along the lines of ‘if it were me’ and if so, ‘how ill would i be’, thus inviting them to judge the lives of those who really are in such a condition, as lives not worth living. There’s a very ‘ancien’ authoritarian flavour to this, like a Roman crowd deciding whether a gladiator who’s lost their fight should live or die.
This must sound hard to the few for whom the Living Will does not suit. But making law for everyone on the basis of individual freedom when it affects so few, and when there is so much moral hazard affecting so many, can’t be right or just.