The assisted dying bill has reached the House of Lords, which probably isn't the best place for an objective discussion on bumping off people who are past it.
There's a very fine line drawn between actively helping people die, and just not keeping them alive any longer. You can spot the extremes, not necessarily the bits in the middle.
Still, it occurs to me that places like Switzerland's Dignitas clinic don't come cheap, and assisted dying is extremely unlikely to be available on the NHS, if only because the queues would be so long that people would have died naturally anyway by the time their ticket came up. Therefore it's going to be a private procedure, and as it will be relatively rare, it will be an expensive private procedure. (Can you see the fund raising drives being a success? Terminally ill patients jingling their money boxes outside Waitrose or in the shopping precinct, saying "help me die now!"?) In other words, it will only really be available to very rich people.
Must resist temptation to say bring it on, now ...
We have much the same debate in the antipodes, but right now it's largely centered on the efforts of one Philip Nitschke from Australia who has embraced the whole D.I.Y. movement with his voluntary euthanasia workshops. With the motto 'A peaceful death is everybody's right' he offers helpful advice on how to do it yourself. Check out this link for his modus operandi:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/05/31/1054177766490.html
(After you read this, imagine old people scurrying around to collect ants) So you might be right about it being a private procedure, in that there are few places more private than your home. Alternatively, we can wait until the world's population reaches 17 billion and the government introduces 'ethical suicide parlours' as Kurt Vonnegut imagined in the short story 'Welcome to the monkey house.' At least then it will be free and our death will be hastened by beautiful six-foot tall 'hostesses' ...
Ben, have you heard of Arts and Letters Daily?
http://aldaily.com
Great site, a collection of links to various things, updated by a professor named Dennis Sutton here in the South Island. See what you think.