Should assisted suicide be made legal in the UK?

[RootsBooster]

For a local it's still well over £3,000.

 

Big responsibilities are big money. I'm led to believe that the cost also includes your cremation, but I'm not 100% sure of that.

[plekhanov]

Because the potential for abuse of the relaxation of this type of law is massive.

It seems obvious to me that there is nothing which doesn't have "potential for abuse"?

 

Power of Attorney for example has "potential for abuse" but we still have laws to allow this, laws which are of course devised to try and minimise abuse, because the alternative is worse.

 

If we can do this for power of attorney then why not for assisted suicide?

[Twiglet]

In that case you could say that Kwik-fit are selfish because they charged you £55 to fit a tyre, or Blundells are selfish because they charged you £145,000 for a house.

 

Of course they are, they're businesses which don't operate under a law preventing them from being motivated by self interest.

[Twiglet]

Big responsibilities are big money. I'm led to believe that the cost also includes your cremation, but I'm not 100% sure of that.

 

£5,500 ish to include the funeral as well.

[Bonzo77]

For a local it's still well over £3,000.

 

I think £3K is pretty cheap considering the length of the process from start to finish. It's not just a walk in service. You are under consultation for several days before your time comes.

 

£3K..... that's the price of a boob job isn't it?

[RootsBooster]

Of course they are, they're businesses which don't operate under a law preventing them from being motivated by self interest.

 

Apart from self-interest not being the same as selfishness, I'm not sure you could class a business as a "self"

[Twiglet]

Apart from self-interest not being the same as selfishness, I'm not sure you could class a business as a "self"

 

Ok fine if you're going to put it that way Dignitas can do what the hell they want because they aren't a self so are exempt from the law governing assisted dying.

[plekhanov]

I agree with you. I think everyone should have the potion. But you wouldn't be able to go to a clinic such as Dignitas in such a state. They will only medicate people who can make the choice themselves, there and then.

Which is of course why people should have to option of making living wills in which they can specify circumstances in which they want their suffering ended humanely.

 

You would have to visit them well before you were due to die of natural causes.

This is a real problem there are people today faced with degenerative conditions who feel compelled to take their own lives when they are still physically able, when if they had the option of a living will they could have specified a time to die when they were physically disabled but when the suffering hadn't yet got too much for them to endure.

 

The current law actually makes people commit suicide sooner than they would have if assisted suicide was permitted.

[poppins]

That's not assisting death, it's withdrawing medication/nutrition. This is what leads to a lengthy and horrific death. I've witnessed it first hand.

 

I have too Roots, it was a peaceful way for the person to go on morphine

[quisquose]

I was originally writing in response to a poster who stated that voluntary euthanasia in Switzerland was only legal in cases of terminal illness.

 

That would have been me. But the reference to "terminal illness" was made in that nasty anti-choice site that you linked to remember. That's why I bolded it, because it is quite clearly nonsense. There cannot be a legal line called "terminal illness" because nobody knows what it means, it can mean an illness that will never go away, or one that will kill you. Daniel James certainly didn't suffer the latter, but his assisted death was within the law.

 

The links you provided for RootsBooster contained two of the most contentious cases. From your first link; Former GP Michael Irwin said Nan Maitland, 84, who was not terminally ill but suffered from arthritis, did not want to "linger on".

 

On the day Maitland was in the news, I recall Dr Sarah Jarvis talking with Jeremy Vine on R2 about a woman who went to Dignitas because she also suffered from arthritis. I think Jarvis is quite anti-euthanasia on balance, but she was very careful to explain the differences between types of arthritis, and how utterly horrible it can be, and how she understood that people with serious arthritis would want to end it.