Tony Nicklinson’s grief upon receiving the High Court’s judgement
The Guardian reports that the man who took his appeal for legal permission for help in dying to the High Court in London has died. Having refused food since the verdict, he contracted pneumonia in his weakened state, and died around 10:00 o’clock this morning. There was some sign that he would appeal the verdict – a verdict which shook him to the very depths with sorrow and despair — but, having been sentenced by the verdict to intolerable imprisonment in his body, the existential crisis of being forced to go on living in misery, and his desire to be free, won out in the end. I am not surprised. As I said earlier, my wife Elizabeth said that, had she been turned down by Dignitas in Switzerland, she would have stopped eating on the very day she learned of the refusal. Yet she might have lived longer had the right to die been available in Canada. And so might Tony Nicklinson, if the judges had recognised his right to die.State coercion to live must be justified, and there is no obvious justification for it. All the arguments of substance are religious, and you must share the beliefs if they are to have any substance at all. But how can the law force people to die as their diseases dictate, if they do not force people to live with their diseases (but instead let them seek cures and remedies for them)? Simply saying that there is no precedent is not sufficient grounds for the continued enslavement of those who are dying. As Richard Dawkins said, they could simply have established a precedent. Yet Tony Nicklinson snatched his freedom from the hands of the High Court, and despite their myopia, escaped the clutches of the law that had let him down so badly. When the right to die movement has won a victory over the forces of patronising religious interference in the lives of others, Tony Nicklinson will be numbered amongst its heroes.
Hear Hear!
I have the right to discharge myself from hospital
I have the right to drink myself to death
I have the right to end my own life
I have no right to ask others to help me to die, for fear of them being prosecuted
Spot the odd one out.
I got a shockingly callous response on Twitter after I linked to the news of Nicklinson’s death, which said he chose to commit suicide by refusing food. No he didn’t. He chose to have the ability to get help to die when and if he chose to, and the court refused to let him enact that choice. He was forced to take a nastier way of escaping, sooner than he would otherwise have chosen.
I looked at the responder’s twitter feed and it has a lot of bollocks about paraplegics at Stoke Mandeville. Some paraplegics adjust to it. Fine!!! But some don’t, and the fact that some do is not a reason to torture the ones who don’t!
Grrrrrrrrrrr
The bloody awful thing about this is that Nicklinson was not a paraplegic! He had locked-in syndrome. Soem locked-in syndrome victims seem able to cope with it, but I do not see why it should be thought that they must. It is so disturbing to hear this nonsense being repeated, as though one person, or a group of such persons, can make a decision for someone else. The claim is made that this devalues the lives of all those so afflicted, but that is nonsense. If you find life tolerable or even good, then your life is not devalued. What bullshit people speak about these things!
Oh god Eric if you want to see some bullshit – a Facebook friend sent me this.
http://carvath.wordpress.com/2012/08/20/for-the-love-of-tony-nicklinson/
The writer wants to be a UK MP.
This makes me so mad – someone has to starve himself to death slowly and painfully, and this is somehow better than someone else helping him to end his life in a more humane manner. How can anyone look at the picture above and not feel empathy for this man?
Richard Carvath is obviously a Christian idiot. For someone to say something like this:
is an offence against humanity so great that the man doesn’t deserve to breathe. Hand-to-fucking heart indeed! If you’re a Christian, in other words, you can bear any trouble. Nonsense. The man hasn’t an idea in hell what he’s talking about. This kind of thing makes me so angry, I end up almost speechless. No one wanted to kill Tony Nicklinson. Tony Nicklinson had had enough. He wanted to die. The outrageous arrogance of these religious idiots, who think they have a right to say how other people must experience pain, disability, paralysis, and all the rest, should stop and think what they are saying, that they have a right to speak for others, that their solution is applicable to others, that their feelings and values are the measure of others’ feelings and values — and it just goes on and on in the narcissitic circle, all for love of themselves. It does make me sick. You’re right, Ophelia, this really is bullshit. As for wanting to be UK MP, idiocy seems to be one of the qualifications lately for entering politics. Paul Ryan, Todd Akin, und so weiter. Madness, sheer unadulterated madness, all in the name of someone’s god.
Well, those judges certainly killed Tony Nicklinson, didn’t they? I hope they are feeling at the least the nipping of remorse and guilt over their cowardice.