more and better palliative care
It's getting a bit late, but I've just written a letter to a selection of peers about Lord Joffe's bill, Assisted Dying for the Terminally Ill, which is due to have its second reading in the House of Lords on May 12th (ie this Friday coming).
It aims to make physician-assisted suicide legal for adults undergoing "unbearable suffering," but it comes with all the usual problems and flaws of this kind of thing. There aren't enough safeguards to ensure that vulnerable people won't be subtly pressurised into asking for their lives to be ended - it doesn't have an adequate definition of "suffering", and it doesn't require any psychiatric screening (people are more likely to ask for euthanasia if they're depressed), and so on.
In the light of the Voluntary Euthanasia Society's recent rebranding of themselves under the title Dignity in Dying, it's also worth considering which option really ascribes more dignity to human beings in need - the approach that thinks it's better to get them killed to get them out of their needy situation, or the approach that wants to meet those needs and address the reasons why they're suffering. We don't need easier earlier deaths, as if that's somehow helpful to anyone: what we need is more and better palliative care, and greater efforts to care for terminally ill people to allow them to live out the rest of their natural lives in circumstances that are as comfortable as possible. See the Care NOT Killing alliance's site for much much more in the same strain.
It aims to make physician-assisted suicide legal for adults undergoing "unbearable suffering," but it comes with all the usual problems and flaws of this kind of thing. There aren't enough safeguards to ensure that vulnerable people won't be subtly pressurised into asking for their lives to be ended - it doesn't have an adequate definition of "suffering", and it doesn't require any psychiatric screening (people are more likely to ask for euthanasia if they're depressed), and so on.
In the light of the Voluntary Euthanasia Society's recent rebranding of themselves under the title Dignity in Dying, it's also worth considering which option really ascribes more dignity to human beings in need - the approach that thinks it's better to get them killed to get them out of their needy situation, or the approach that wants to meet those needs and address the reasons why they're suffering. We don't need easier earlier deaths, as if that's somehow helpful to anyone: what we need is more and better palliative care, and greater efforts to care for terminally ill people to allow them to live out the rest of their natural lives in circumstances that are as comfortable as possible. See the Care NOT Killing alliance's site for much much more in the same strain.
posted by cath at
2:57 pm
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