Ongoing battle over assisted suicide
Lord Falconer has reiterated his determination to continue to pursue legalisation of assisted suicide in the UK. This comes after his Private Member’s Bill failed to receive a high enough number in the peers’ lottery for the matter to be scheduled for debate during this parliamentary session.
Lord Falconer’s relentless push for assisted suicide carries over from last year, when his Bill ran out of debating time.
Meanwhile, a 54-year-old British man recently committed assisted suicide at the Dignitas clinic in Switzerland. Jeffrey Spector, a husband and father of three with an inoperable tumour, admitted prior to his death that he was “jumping the gun” by committing suicide.
Spector’s family disagreed with his decision, but he claimed he could not face living as a quadriplegic – a possible result of the growing tumour near his spine.
In his comment piece in The Telegraph, Charles Moore offers a critique of the modern, first-world mind-set that can propel people towards assisted suicide.
He states: “If a member of your family kills himself, the last thing you want to say is anything critical, but how do the families of suicides live with the dead person’s judgment of their best interests? How could anyone who loved anyone not reproach herself afterwards if that person killed himself? Self-slaughter may seem to solve one problem, but it certainly creates others which, by definition, the dead person will not have to live with.”
Moore also comments that, whilst those who commit assisted suicide are at times portrayed as choosing ‘dignity’, we really ought to accord such respect to those who live with debilitating conditions, rather than attempting to escape them.
One such courageous individual is Nikki Kenward, who was once so paralysed she could only blink her right eye. Now, she and her husband Merv are fighting for a reversal of a DPP guidance change.
These alterations have made it less likely that healthcare professionals who assist individuals to commit suicide will be prosecuted.
Nikki and Merv Kenward are being supported by the Christian Legal Centre, and recently they succeeded in obtaining permission for a Judicial Review of the liberalised assisted suicide prosecution policy.
Nikki said after the decision: “The judge's decision today is a great relief to me and people like me. We are the ones who will suffer as a result of the change in guidance. The message from these new guidelines is that society thinks you are in the way. The best thing you can do is to agree to die.
“With the judge granting a Judicial Review we now have hope that the decision will be reversed and vulnerable people will be protected.”
Related News:
High Court grants appeal for assisted suicide challenge
Related Coverage:
Arranging an assisted suicide is the ultimate in control freakery (Telegraph)
Lord Falconer: government must clean up assisted dying legal mess (Guardian)
