| Life
MPs are wrestling with the thorny question of making assisted suicide legal.
Bill Ralston
It was hard to reconcile the image of Lycra-clad Act leader David Seymour waggling his bum on Dancing with the Stars with the man who has sponsored a weighty bill concerning suicide that is before Parliament. I was ready to put him out of his misery after his first appearance on the TV series, but it seems a small legion of millennials jokingly block-voted for him week after week until someone in the studio managed to pull the plug and dispatch him back to the House.
When it comes to euthanasia, delicately retitled for the bill as “End of Life Choice”, I prefer the choice of staying alive as long as I physically can. However, Seymour’s bill aims to give people with a terminal illness or some awful debilitating condition the option of what the bill calls “assisted dying”, the right to die “in peace and dignity, surrounded by loved ones”.
I don’t think I’d want my loved ones hanging around my deathbed, but I acknowledge the right of others who want to be able to call it a day and head off into the big sleep when they feel they can no longer carry on.
A few years ago, I was shocked to read a news story about a woman who, with her family’s apparent complicity, ended her life because of the onset of a terminal illness. I watched her videoed last testament online and was stunned to realise she was my first real love. We met in the 1980s and went out for some years before life moved on and we grew apart.
Rosie hadn’t changed much since that time. She was still beautiful, still intelligent and still determined in whatever she did. In this case, she was determined to kill herself in a horrible makeshift way. Her partner was charged in connection with her death, but, thankfully, a compassionate jury acquitted him.
No one that resolute in their intention to die as a result of having an illness should be left by the state to end it all in such a “do-it-yourself” fashion. No partners or family should be left behind to face the police and the justice system as a result. A couple of months ago, I read the story of David Goodall, a 104-year-old Australia-based scientist, who flew to Switzerland where he had organised his own death at a clinic that specialised in assisted dying.
After an enormously active life, he felt he was, at his advanced age, losing his independence. He had no wish to go on living, even though he did not have any serious illness. Given his age, why shouldn’t he choose when to go in peace and dignity?
More than 35,000 submissions have been made on Seymour’s bill and I would not want to be one of the select committee members wrestling with the questions it raises. What about a patient with dementia who requests to end their life?
Are they rational enough to make that choice? How do you determine whether an elderly patient is being coerced into an end-of-life choice by greedy relatives? Who makes those calls? Doctors seem very reluctant to do it.
I have been at enough deathbeds to know that medical staff urge the dying to “let go” and “stop fighting”, often assisting the process with huge doses of medication, but that is usually at the very end of life.
I’m glad I’m not on that committee.
How do you determine whether an elderly patient is being coerced?