Cancer Patient Glad He Didn't Commit Assisted Suicide
Stories like this receive way too little attention. A cancer patient in the UK seriously considered assisted suicide, but is now very glad he didn't do the deed and opposes the Joffe Bill that would legalize Oregon-style assisted suicide. I know of several stories like this, including my last hospice patient Bob (I was a volunteer), who died of ALS and who wanted to go to Kevorkian but ended up so grateful that he didn't. (With his permission, I have told Bob's story in several articles and in my books.)
Good for the BBC in publicizing this man's opinion.
posted by Wesley J. Smith @ 9:51 AM
4 Comments
4 Comments:
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The disability rights movement is unanimous in its condemnation of assisted suicide. Your disdain for people like my "beloved" hospice friend is all too clear, as is your apparent acceptance of the concept of the life not worthy of being lived.
Diane Pretty wanted to have her husband kill her without legal consequence. I was in the UK to debate that case when it was happening. That does not mean the law should permit it. Indeed, the British trial court, court of appeal, and the Lords, as well as the EU High Court all agreed to deny her case. She ultimately died peacefully in her sleep.
Your validation of someone's suicide desires is uncompassionate, not kind. It validates their own worst fears--that they are burdens, that they are not loveable, that their lives are not worth living. But the point of this entry and my friend Bob's change of mind--which does not penetrate your euthanasia mindset--is that they are happy to be alive, when, if your views prevailed, they would have died. People change their minds. People overcome that which they don't believe they can overcome. Not always, but often. It is part of being human.
It seems to me that our job as loving and truly compassionate neighbors to help them do that, and supporting their suicides is exactly the wrong message and public policy.
One of my best friend's daughter is named Winston.
The idea medical killing is ever acceptable is insane. This isn't "freedom," or "autonomy," despite tons of propaganda from the "bioethicists," especially when we are talking about people's rights being violated when they can't make the decision themselves.
Who are people to decide whether another's life is worth living because of their disabilities? WHY are we talking about MONEY when health care should be a RIGHT regardless of illness or disability?
The bioethicists have done a tremendous con job on the public by couching the destruction of civil rights of the weakest as somehow being a "civil liberties" issue.
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