Category Archives: Legalisation

Why can’t opponents (or very tentative supporters?) of assisted dying get it right?

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This Post is now available in Polish at Racjonalista. Thanks to Malgorzata once again.

There is a column in the Guardian this morning which goes through all the usual misunderstandings of assisted dying, and ends with a claim that, on the face of it, no one would deny, least of all those who support assisted dying, but in such a way as to suggest that the author has made her point, and this is the reductio of anyone who chooses to oppose what she says. As Haggis says below (comment #9), this first one sentence paragraph may not make sense, so I have revised it as follows, trying to say more clearly what I had in mind when I wrote it:

There’s a column in the Guardian this morning which runs through all the usual misunderstandings of assisted dying. However, it ends with a claim that few would wish to deny — namely, that it can be quite rational to cling to life. No one who supports assisted dying would wish to deny that. But she makes this perfectly reasonable claim in such a way as to make support for assisted dying look like a denial that clinging to life can be a reasonable thing to do. Thus she turns a perfectly reasonable claim into an apparent reductio of support for assisted dying, even though those who support assisted dying can themselves reasonably make the claim. This, it seems to me, is a measure of the author’s confusion.

The column is by Deborah Orr, who, apparently, has all the right credentials, being, as the blurb that goes with her name says, “one of Britain’s leading social and political commentators.” If this is a sample of her work, the adjective is in doubt. The column is entitled, “Most of us would rather cling to life – any life – than choose to kill ourselves.” That may or may not be true, but that is not the issue when the question of assisted dying is raised. What is at issue is the choices that people make, and whether or not people should have control over their own dying — or, what comes to the same thing, their own living. And the truth is that most people are in control of their own dying. Not everyone is like Tony Nicklinson, living in a condition that they find intolerable. Most people would rather, as Deborah Orr says, cling to life, any life, rather than die. But some, like Tony Nicklinson, or like my wife Elizabeth, want to be in control in a way that turns out to be a crucial aspect of what it is for them to have worth and dignity. Whether, as some people who receive a legal prescription for a lethal dose of barbiturates in the US state of Oregon, go on to use those drugs, is irrelevant to the question of control. The fact that they have them, and can use them if they choose, is the real heart of the matter.

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Required Reading

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Update, 16:37, Atlantic Daylight Time, Monday, 20th August 2012: “Required Reading” is now available in Polish translation at Racjonalista. Thanks again to Malgorzata for taking an interest in my occasional thoughts.

Update, 10:40 Atlantic Daylight Time, Friday, 17th August 2012: The Tony Nicklinson judgement is now in, and is downloadable as a pdf file here. I have not read it yet, but the judgement does not rule in his favour. According to the Telegraph:

Tony Nicklinson, the “locked-in syndrome” sufferer, broke down in tears on live television as it was confirmed that he had lost his legal battle to be allowed to die.

The judgement says that it is not up to the courts to decide the issue, but is a matter for Parliament to decide. However, it is clear that, in cases where Parliament fails to act to uphold people’s rights, the courts should make it clear that Parliamentary failure will not be upheld by the courts. While it is true that a judgement in favour of Tony Nicklinson might have had implications far beyond his case, the judgement could have made those implications conditional only upon Parliament’s failure to act. There is not a necessary or logical connexion between a favourable judgement in the Nicklinson case, and an immediate extension of that judgement to other similar cases. The cruelty of the judgement is the direct outcome of years of campaigning by religious entities which will continue to oppose assistance in dying no matter what the outcome. This case however shows how wrong Tallis is in the article linked below, to confine assisted dying to the terminally ill alone. Being trapped in your body, as Nicklinson is, and may be for many years, provides a lack of quality of life which may, in individual cases, be seen to be a great harm.

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The following two articles are, for those who are concerned about assisted dying, required reading. The first is an article, published in the British Medical Journal, of the misery in dying of Ann McPherson, founder of Healthcare Professionals for Assisted Dying. Tess McPherson, Ann’s daughter, is also a physician, a specialist in dermatology, practicing in Oxford, and she writes a hair-raising account of her mother’s death which should put an end to the absurd spectacle of palliative care physicians like José Pereira claiming that palliative medicine can control all the pain, distress and indignity of dying. You can access Tess McPherson’s account as a pdf here.

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Why did anyone think that pain was the only issue?

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An article in yesterday’s New York Times, oddly entitled “In Ill Doctor, a Surprise Reflection of Who Picks Assisted Suicide,” expresses surprise at the type of patient who chooses assisted suicide as a way of bringing their lives to an end. Indeed, the author, Katie Hafner, quotes Linda Ganzini, a professor of psychiatry at Oregon Health and Science University, as saying:

Everybody thought this was going to be about pain … It turns out that pain is kind of irrelevant.

When I read this I was deeply troubled, because it seems to miss the point altogether, and shows just how distant people are from understanding what happens when we die. Anyone who had understood this would not have made the mistake of assuming that pain was the central issue in appeals for assisted dying.

Recall, here, that assisted dying is all about choice. In England the association which first attempted — as long ago as 1936 — to get voluntary euthanasia legalised was called the Voluntary Euthanasia Legalization Society, and although one of the conditions specified in their propaganda for the right to receive voluntary euthanasia includes severe pain, the composition of the society itself should have been an indication that this was not really the issue. For the society was composed entirely of high-ranking physicians and men of influence and power, lawyers and churchmen amongst them, some of whom were members of the House of Lords — in other words, just the sort of people who customarily have a great deal of control over their own lives. One of them was the onetime Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, the Very Rev’d William Inge. But he was not the only supporter amongst the clergy, as this linked article in the Montreal Gazette confirms. They did not carry the day then, and they certainly have not carried the day with the contemporary Church of England, which, according to its website,

is opposed to any change in the law, or medical practice, to make assisted suicide permissible or acceptable.

The point, however, is that those who have come out in support of assisted dying are not at all the type of people who are content to lie back supinely and let other people make decisions for them. They are, by and large, active, educated people, known to value control of their own life and decisions.

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Misrepresenting Religion

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Over the last few months both the Archbishop of Canterbury, episcopal head of the Church of England, and the Archbishop of Westminster, as well as Cardinal Keith O’Brien, the senior Roman Catholic cleric in Britain, have come out in strong opposition to gay marriage. Keith O’Brien, according to the Daily Mail, went so far as to suggest that “same sex unions were the ‘thin end of the wedge’ and would lead to the ‘further degeneration of society into immorality’.” (I cannot forbear remarking that this always seems to be the Roman Catholic reaction to moral change. Accordiing to its bishops and archbishops and its moral ”experts”, the seem to see every moral change as a decline into immorality and sheer chaos. They seem unable to see that many of the changes they deplore have improved life for many who were once excluded and unjustly victimised by what the religious guardians of morality think of as the moral law.) According to Vincent Nichols, Archbishop of Westminster, in a letter to be read in every church in the archdiocese:

Changing the legal definition of marriage would be a profoundly radical step. Its consequences should be taken seriously now. The law helps to shape and form social and cultural values.

A change in the law would gradually and inevitably transform society’s understanding of the purpose of marriage. It would reduce it just to the commitment of the two people involved. There would be no recognition of the complementarity of male and female or that marriage is intended for the procreation and education of children.

This was reported in the Guardian. The Archbishop of Canterbury, on the other hand, holding, as he does, a post in the national church, said that the government had no mandate to change the definition of marriage, not having included this in its party manifesto. There were some members of the church, however, who felt it was high time for the church to desist in its opposition to gay marriage: a priest from Derbyshire sent a petition to the archbishops of York and Canterbury, signed by 4,000 church members, objecting to the church’s refusal to endorse same-sex marriage.

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A Broken Record — and other musings on the right to choice in dying

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Reaffirming Schadenberg’s standing as a broken record, the National Post has resurrected an old Schadenberg op-ed as a response to the decision of Madame Justice Lynn Smith in Carter vs. Attorney General (Canada). He was wrong then (22nd. March 2012), and, in the light of Madame Justice Smith’s judgement, he is even more wrong now. He continues to play the old fear-mongering song of the vulnerable in danger, even though he has never presented evidence to this effect. This is a remarkable feat for someone who has remained for so many years the Executive Director of the Roman Catholic Church’s star assisted dying vehicle in Canada. It was he who weighed in against the decision of my wife Elizabeth to seek assistance in dying in Switzerland in 2007. His organisation even had the audacity to imply, through its lawyer Hugh Sher, who also acted for the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition (EPC) in the recent Carter case before the British Columbia Supreme Court, that Elizabeth had been (in Hugh Sher’s words) “bundled onto an airplane”, as though Elizabeth herself was unable to make the decision that she made with great seriousness and forethought. This is mistaken. It was, as I now remember, a doctor, speaking on behalf of the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition, who spoke of Elizabeth having been “bundled onto an airplane.” (The effect, however, was the same.) Later denying that the EPC had accused me of wrongdoing in the matter of Elizabeth’s death – which they had in effect, if not in direct speech, done — Schadenberg attempted to mollify an increasingly hostile public opinion that he was speaking in broad general terms, about the danger to society of the practice of assisted dying, and had never spoken directly about one person and her decision to receive assistance in dying from Dignitas in Zürich, Switzerland.

The remarkable thing about religious opponents of assisted dying is their Machiavellian reliance upon lies and half-truths. What counts is convincing ordinary people that they are right. How they do this, whether they are honest, or whether the facts and figures to which they advert actually make their point, seems to be largely irrelevant to their purpose. What counts is making an impression, arousing fear and anxiety about dying, about which people are already anxious and unsure, so that they can carry their main point; namely, that human life has about it an absolute quality of sanctity such that no one may carry out an act which is in any way associated with bringing life to an end. In this the individual plays no part at all. The previous pope, Karol Józef Wojtyła, also known by his chosen title, John Paul II — a practice which hides from us the fact that these are ordinary men with all the faults and foibles of the rest of us, with additional ones (largely the result of their deliberate isolation from ordinary life through their chosen or pretended celibacy) thrown in for good measure – had the audacity in this connexion to say that what the individual wants is irrelevant, and that, even when they are asking for help to die, this is not what they are really asking for. Rather, he said, they are asking for someone to hope for them, when they are no longer able to hope for themselves. This kind of prevarication is the normal coin of this gang of pious thugs, for whom the suffering of individuals at the end of life, and their most carefully and thoughtfully chosen words, are irrelevant to decisions which others make on their behalf. Here, at the end point of their lives, their own wishes count for nothing. Here, when they are at the point of making their last major decision, what they decide is beside the point, and others are given rights over them which, at other points in their life, would be taken as the most egregious violation of their rights and dignity as persons.

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Finally! A Canadian Ruling in Favour of Assisted Dying!

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Entitled, oddly,

B.C. ruling reopens assisted suicide debate

the Globe and Mail reports that

Nineteen years after Sue Rodriguez lost her fight in Canada’s highest court, the country has been thrust back into the debate over physician-assisted suicide.

British Columbia’s Supreme Court on Friday declared unconstitutional Criminal Code provisions that prohibit doctors from helping their patients commit suicide. In the landmark decision, Madam Justice Lynn Smith said the provisions discriminate against people who are too ill to take their lives. [my italics]

No doubt Canada has been thrust back into debate — since the religious opposition to assisted dying will not simply die a natural death; however, the decision of Madame Justice Lynn Smith is not a debatable proposition. Madame Justice Smith gave the government a year to draft new legislation which will provide the framework for legalised assisted dying in this country. According to a Globe and Mail editorial this morning,

The federal government should have addressed this socially explosive issue long ago, but in the absence of political leadership, the court is correct to reform the law.

And, while I agree with the general tenour of the editorial, the claim that the right to die should be framed “as narrowly as possible” misses the point of the decision of Madame Justice Smith, that the refusal of legalised assistance in dying violates the charter rights of citizens.

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PD James, the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Pope

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Roya Nikkhah reports, in the Telegraph, that PD James, the author of detective fiction for the discerning, and a conservative Peer, has revealed, in an interview with The Tatler, that she would

   … help a friend or family member die if there was “nothing to be done” and they “wanted to go”.

On the other hand she does not think that the country should change the laws of murder to accommodate such acts. You have to have the courage to act, she suggested, apparently comparing it to coming to the defence of a loved one being attacked.

“If I saw someone attacking one of my grandchildren in a way that was going to   kill and I had a knife, I’d stop it,” she said. “And maybe I’d stop him straight away by sticking the knife in. And I think the better so.”

All very dramatic, but it is not really the same thing, and it is unfortunate that James takes this particular line on assistance in dying. Baroness James apparently does not think that a person has a right to be assisted to die, and that it should be left to the courage of a person’s friends or relations to provide assistance, and then defend their decision in law.

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“Nowadays the Catholic Church is not an institution for respectable people”

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Words spoken by Hilary Mantel in an interview with Valerie Grove of the Sunday Times, and picked up by the Telegraph. Which, of course, doesn’t lead the church to fight back. In a lecture at Leicester University, the former senior bishop of the English Catholic Church Cardinal Murphy-O’Connor – you know you’re in trouble when a cardinal has two hyphenated Irish names as a surname — suggests that secularism intends to “wipe out” Christianity. Indeed, he casts a wide net:

He added: “The propaganda of secularism and its high priests want us to  believe that religion is dangerous for our health. It suits them to have no  opposition to their vision of a brave new world, the world which they see as   somehow governed only by people like themselves.

“They conveniently forget that secularism itself does not guarantee  freedom, rationality … or violence. Indeed, in the last century, most  violence was perpetrated by secular states on their own people.”

As usual, confusing atheism with secularism, the cardinal manages to include the Nazis, and the Communists as well, in his blanket condemnation of what he calls “secularism,” knowing full well, as he must, that the Vatican, in the thirties, saw the Nazis as a bulwark against the marauding hordes of communists to the East, and that Hitler’s Germany was the first state that the pretend state of the Vatican signed a concordat with. All the pope and his cronies needed to know was that Nazism was anti-modern and dictatorial — and therefore not unlike the church. That alone was enough to convince Vatican officials that Nazism would be a useful tool in its opposition to modernism, democracy and the forces of progress. It’s wonderful how Cormac Murphy-O’Conner seems to have missed the point that the Catholic Church is regressive and theocratic by nature, and that the Catholic Church, like the captains of German industry, thought that they could control Hitler for their own purposes.

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Parliament Rejects Freedom for the Suffering

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This is an old editorial I did long before choiceindying,com existed (some time in 2010). I was sorting through some old stuff and thought it might interest a few of you. It was done for Dying with Dignity Canada‘s newsletter, The Voice. They edited it down quite a bit, and left out much of my more mordant comments about religion and the part that it plays in keeping the laws repressive and cruel. I thought some of you might find it interesting, and it is a bit of a change of pace from the hectic comment stream on some recent posts!

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Francine Lalonde

Well, the votes are in and the result is known. Bill C-384 has been defeated. Of course, everyone sensed that this would happen. So, no surprise there. Very few surprises in the debate either. Members pulled the same old chestnuts out of the fire and then mumbled them for a moment or two with borderline intelligibility. They knew that the Bill would go down to defeat. This was not a matter of argument, but of religion. It would be true to say, I believe, that there was not one intelligent point made in opposition to Francine Lalonde’s Bill. The same old tired excuses not to face the question of dying head on, the same old hiding behind the vulnerable and the disabled, the same old refusal to face the fact of intense and unbearable human suffering. The same old reflexive support for palliative care to the exclusion of freedom for the dying, the same old prevarications about places where assisted dying has been legalised. For the most part Members of Parliament just don’t care. During the debate, and at other times, petitions were presented, which is normal procedure. However, some members went to greater lengths than usual. One petition, for example, was organised by the St. Vincent de Paul Roman Catholic Parish in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia. The MP for the area, Michael Savage, even thanked a church member by name for organising the petition. Another MP, Tim Uppal, thanked the Catholic Women’s League for their petition. In incidental remarks made during debate it seemed clear that this Bill was being rejected principally on religious grounds. Yesterday, for example, 20 April 2010, one member even mentioned the prayer sessions he and family members had had with his dying mother and father, using a Benedictine book of prayer, and testified that his experience of his dying parents, and the choices they made, had even changed his mind on this Bill.

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Guest Post: Isobel McLachlan to Members of the Scottish Parliament

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[I want to thank Isobel for allowing her email to the Members of the Scottish Parliament on Margo MacDonald's assisted dying bill, which she is reintroducing to the House, to be published here. This is a thoughtful and courageous letter from someone who is on the brink of death, and wants to be in control of her dying. While I wish her well in her ongoing treatments and care, I also recognise with admiration her courage and her determination to argue for her right, and the right of others, to receive assistance in dying and to be permitted to die with the same dignity she shows in her appeal to the Members of the Scottish Parliament.]

I understand Margo Macdonald’s End of Life Bill will be debated & voted on in the the near future.  I wish my views on this matter to be known and considered.

I am 55 years old and suffering from Stage IV Breast Cancer.  Although I have great faith in, and admiration for, the scientists & doctors who work tirelessly and with incredible ingenuity to produce treatments which give people in my situation a good quality of life for as long as possible, the fact remains the condition is incurable.  I have, therefore, had to come to terms with my death in the not too distant future.  In this I am resigned, as I can do nothing to change the fact.  The manner of my death, however, is another matter and, over this, I strongly feel I can and should be able to exert a degree of control.

This Bill would mean that those with the necessary expertise, i.e. doctors, would provide a suitable drug to ensure a peaceful end.  I have heard too many horror stories of dreadfully distressing attempts by family members trying to help a loved one die.  A doctor takes an oath “to do no harm”.  This can be interpreted as prolonging life at all cost.  Weight must also be given, however, to the principle of providing relief from pain and distress, even if this results in the end coming slightly sooner for a terminally ill patient.  I can understand that some medical professionals would not wish to be involved in assisted suicide and so there must, of course, be a means of allowing doctors to “opt out” if it gives them a problem of conscience.

I supported Margo’s previous Bill, but its defeat came as no great surprise.  The breadth of qualification for assistance – with which I agreed – was always going to allow plenty of scope for alarmists to do their worst, ignoring examples in other parts of the world where protection for the vulnerable has been put in place and has been effective.  Her new Bill is, of course, greatly pared down to applying only to the mentally competent terminally ill.  Frankly, it is beyond me how anyone can seriously justify objecting to this, other than sadists and the religious.  In a secular society such as ours, the latter – a minority – should not be allowed to force their beliefs on the majority.  To anyone who would want to deny a peaceful and dignified death to the terminally ill, I would ask “Where is your compassion?”, “Where is your humanity?”

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