Euthanasia, Assisted Dying is back on the Table

It is amazing how long supposedly progressive and developed societies take to change, amend or even tweak legislation that devolves any more power to Joe Public. Our societies are becoming more not less restrictive. The ancient Greeks would be horrified with our current do’s and don’ts enabled by our legislature and enforced by our police and judiciary. This is the Guardian article and yes!

Lord Falconer headed the Commission

The Commission on Assisted Dying was set up in September 2010 and Demos has made available a 400 odd page report on its findings and recommendations here. Its terms of reference were:

· to investigate the circumstances under which it should be possible for people to be assisted to die

· to recommend what system, if any, should exist to allow people to be  assisted to die

· to identify who should be entitled to be assisted to die

· to determine what safeguards should be put in place to ensure that vulnerable  people are neither      abused nor pressured to choose an assisted death

· to recommend what changes in the law, if any, should be introduced

Now I think they are very carefully worded aims and the Commission has been very circumspect in its recommendations and to my mind did not go far enough. After all, surveys of the public and of medical practitioners show a very substantial majority in favour of euthanasia being legalised. The Commission was far too accommodating to the religite mores that seem to abound on this island.

This is from the wiki article

 Even though polling in Great Britain reveals that “80% of British citizens and 64% of Britain’s general practitioners” are in favour of euthanasia being legalised, Parliament has refused to pass any laws of (sic) the issue.^[4] In 1997, the British Parliament voted 234-89 to defeat the seventh attempt to legalize the act. The Church of England view is that “physician assisted suicide is incompatible with the Christian faith and should not be permitted by civil law.”

Seven attempts!! Good grief. When will these parliamentary representatives learn? Those of us who are part of that public majority are rightly annoyed that our parliamentary representatives are not voting to reflect our wishes. The toothless CofE still seems to have its sticky fingers into our legislative decision making. I suppose the 26 appointed bishops see themselves as arbiters of moral virtue in this island regardless of the increase in atheism in this island.

So far as I am concerned, the Commission’s recommendations are not comprehensive enough. Not that it will matter to me personally. I will exit this life when I am good and ready thank you very much.

It is a shame that Pratchett is not seen as qualifying because he has more than 12 months to live with his dementia, nor is Tony Nicklinson who suffers from locked-in syndrome and will live for more than 12 months. So, from my perspective, the recommendations actually don’t progress this issue very far at all. The unconscionable cruelty and neglect for people’s wishes still exists.

This is from the BBC’s article regarding the Commission’s recommendations:

The commission has been quite clear that a person first of all would have to be terminally ill to be considered for assisted suicide under its proposals.

 The group has defined that as a patient who has less than 12 months to live.

 It said that they should also be acting under their own steam and not be mentally impaired in any way.

 In practice this means that dementia patients would not be eligible, including the author Sir Terry Pratchett, who helped to fund the commission, as those in the final year of the condition would not be considered mentally fit enough.

 Nor would a person who has a significant physical impairment, such as locked-in syndrome, as they would have longer than 12 months to live under normal circumstances.

 But a cancer patient with a prognosis of nine months would be eligible, if he or she met the other criteria.

This is tame stuff indeed. However, the religites have come out in force denouncing anything to do with suicide, assisted or not, as immoral and insupportable under their god’s supposed laws. These laws come, of course, in an ancient book, cobbled together with salient parts omitted by various rulers, by a group of illiterates in ancient lands purporting to be transcribing the word of their god. The rest of us call this fantasy visual and auditory schizophrenia, while the religites call it touched by god. Touched is right!.

I don’t have a problem with organisations like Care Not Killing, emotive though their choice of name is. Neither should they have a problem with

Terry Pratchett good solid citizen

Terry Pratchett’s Dignity in Dying or

Philip Nitschke’s Exit International or a myriad of other Voluntary Euthanasia societies worldwide. People who want to die need the assurance that those assisting them will not be treated as criminals. So yes, the law does need changing. It needs more than the Commission has recommended though. Poor Andrew Colgan

Andrew Colgan by himself

(and how many others) had to travel to Switzerland to Dignitas to end the life he did not want to continue with. And this is the wonderful Terry Pratchett.

It is not that long ago that suicide was a crime in itself. If you failed in your attempt to kill yourself you were charged with a crime and incarcerated. It wasn’t that long ago that having an abortion was a criminal offence. Slowly, very slowly, we are getting rid of religite influence in secular affairs but it is not quick enough for me. Religion’s perceived privileged role, now aided and abetted by the Tories in the sphere of education, is galling to a growing number of us. As well it should.

There is the British Humanist Association and the National Secular Society that keep trying to increase public awareness in this country; I wish they had more members and I wish more people spoke out publicly.

Come on you guys, either agree or add a comment. There are so many opinions, surely you have one.

Bi-Polar Brains, Panicky Feelings & Suicide

Beautiful, strong and colourful

My life, like other people’s, has been peppered with its fair share of human tragedies. I don’t go to school reunions but I notice the student lists from my scholastic years are ones of diminishing returns. I never know what has happened to the names that are marked ‘deceased’ or, euphemistically, ‘no longer with us’ or ‘passed away’. There are always the accidents, the terminal diseases and illnesses, deaths due to unexplained causes and then there are the suicides.

It doesn’t matter that people gloss over suicides, there is always the niggledy question as to why did they do it? The how matters only because of the shock that attends suicides and is mentioned in hushed terms and then again in legal terminology at the Inquest held after the post mortem.

The why is the question in everyone’s mind, usually the first thing to be voiced and it is said in wringing tones of bafflement, non-understanding and distress.  Except for those who know what despair can be and how unanswerable that question of ‘why’ actually is.

While this may be a blog post about suicide, there is another dimension to it. It is an acknowledgement of the life of my hairdresser who killed herself last week.

She was a terrific woman, younger than I am, single with a gorgeous little daughter. She also had the sort of oomph that I appreciated and was drawn to. She had her own business and, with it, a strong personality. She and I were just starting to reveal ourselves to each other and I was so looking forward to watching her laugh about my life’s disclosures and being able to laugh with her about her own. Wry, self-deprecating humour is so binding. As I say, she was good.

I saw her once a little contemplative and she told me she was concerned that she wasn’t thinking positively or helpfully. I lent her a book called A Mind of Its Own : How your brain distorts and deceives by one Cordelia Fine (what a fine name!). It is a well written and researched book with a quirky style about the way we use and abuse our minds and how we are used and abused in turn by our minds. What we think and why; how we deceive ourselves and why and how that 3lb bulk of tissue between our ears can let us down.

The next time I saw her she was happy and beckoned me into her salon. She introduced me to her daughter and her daughter’s dad; told me she loved my blog and its irreverence; that she was half way through Fine’s book and thoroughly enjoying it. She had a good bounce to her. She gave me a quick hug before we parted and I would not see her again.

A week later, I phoned her to make an appointment so the hunter gatherer could have his locks trimmed and tidied. She was fine with that – told me to give her half an hour to get organised; something was wrong with the salon phones. Not a problem. The appointment was kept, his hair was cut and jokes were made. That night she was unable to continue.

I have been here before. My husband of four years suicided in 1966 leaving me with the enormous problem of trying to make the sort of sense of this tragedy that would allow me to live and look after our 2½ year old son without descending into guilt and drug dependence. It is a very big ask.

Now my hairdresser’s family has this same enormity to deal with. It is still a very big ask.

It used to be called manic depression and is now called bipolar disorder. The problem with renaming medical symptoms is that current naming tends to smooth over the unadulterated horror of what can happen. I have known a couple of manic depressives. I was utterly out of my depth. The manic phase was so uncontrollable that I had nothing of substance to offer and the same happened when the depression took hold. I have watched, pretty helplessly, while a couple of my friends have terminated their lives. There is one still alive and married to a good woman. I hope he survives. I hope she does!

I am the sort of person who likes to build my knowledge through research and peer reviewed data. It is of little help though when confronted with human problems of interaction and having to cope on a minute by minute basis. While neuroscience and fMRI research is detailing the way our brains work, there will always be the problem of what do you do now when time is of the essence.

Meanwhile there are people whose brains tell them that they are worth nothing and that everyone would be better off if they were dead. That because they are useless and feel they can do no good whatsoever; that no one can talk them out of this awful neurological state and feel the world would be better off without them. And so they die.

What else can I say? I, like all of us, feel helpless in the face of such determined destruction. I wish I could stop this senseless waste. But I know I can’t.

So, farewell my dear as I fare welled my husband and others in my life. You live on because my and others’ memories keep you alive; for the rest of the short time of our lives at least.

Another glorious colourful flower