Lots of religious lobbying against and others just clueless.This is an emotive issue for sure and people have different opinions on things but I cannot see where those who are against this are coming from. Its beyond cruel to put people and their loved ones through unbearable pain because some don't have the stomach to do what is right.
This is an emotive issue for sure and people have different opinions on things but I cannot see where those who are against this are coming from. Its beyond cruel to put people and their loved ones through unbearable pain because some don't have the stomach to do what is right.
We need to get past the laughable but kids will convince granny to top herself bollocks or the religious shite.If memory serves me well there was uproar with the LCP at end of life which allowed death to naturally occur. Stories about hospitals given extra money if they put patients on them and false stories about people dying of thirst… but 10 years later it’s fine and HCPs can kill you!!
The main issues I see are;
No one should be in unbearable pain. If they are that is a failure of the existing MDT supporting that patient. We should not accept people preferring death to life due to uncontrolled pain - that’s just a cop out of a medical professional not doing their job properly. I do accept there is a limit to this and that is where the pain control is leaving the patient so sedated they have no quality of life. So here a patient should be given a choice, we can ramp up the pain management but you are not going to know what day of week it is and offer the option of death then. That seems a reasonable point for pain (for other conditions there can be very fixed points in the disease trajectory a decision can be made).
Who is going to provide the assistance? It will be wholly unreasonable to expect to pitch up at your local hospital and expect a nurse or doctor to do this. You will need a single centralised place where this can happen - somewhere in the middle of the country. That will require multiple visits to provide psychological support.
People must have capacity at point of death to confirm that is their wish. You cannot rely on something like a DNR, it’s fundamentally different - with a DNR you are already dead.
Primarily I have little issue in concept with allowing people to choose death - my issues is - ok great, but who, how, under what conditions, and what guardrails. Will our MPs think of the practical implementation of their policy when voting? we can only hope.
That something is happening doesn't mean that it should be enshrined.I tend to agree but I do think it's probably like abortion in that no matter what the law says or doesn't say it will always go on. Murder is pretty much a crime everywhere but it has not stopped it. Bottom line, assisted dying is moving in only one direction and it is only a matter of time.
Zen is here. One of my favorite posters. Disagree almost every time. But I appreciate the meticulous information.Some of the more prominent secular ethicists of recent times (Peter Singer, Jonathan Glover, Ronald Dworkin and Mary Warnock) have all been in favour of the legalisation of euthanasia and address concerns about potential 'slippery slopes' and other issues in their writings.
For example, Ronald Dworkin has argued that ‘making someone die in a way that others approve, but he believes a horrifying contradiction of his life, is a devastating, odious form of tyranny.’ On the other hand, for others, ‘the struggle to stay alive, no matter how hopeless or how thin the life, expresses a virtue central to their lives, the virtue of defiance in the face of inevitable death.’
Dworkin therefore thinks that the laws we make about euthanasia should reflect the patient’s right to self-determination as an expression of the sanctity of their own individual existence when it comes to deciding how their life should be completed. In other words, the law should be flexible enough to allow them to end their lives with dignity if they wish, whilst allowing others to fight on if that is what they want to do.
In addition, the state should ‘encourage people to make provision for their future care themselves’. By this, Dworkin meant that the government should prompt people to make it known what their wishes would be should they, for example, become terminally ill or involved in an accident which renders them brain dead.
In cases where no prior wish has been expressed, he thinks ‘the law should so far as possible leave decisions in the hands of their relatives or other people close to them, whose sense of their own best interests…is likely to be much sounder than some universal, theoretical, abstract judgement born in the stony walls where interest groups manoeuvre and political deals are done.’
For me, the opposition from those Christians who are opposed to assisted dying (and not all are) amount to nothing more than fideism at the end of the day.
We need to get past the laughable but kids will convince granny to top herself bollocks or the religious shite.