And today's debate is on the theme of assisted dying ...
Post date: 01-Jan-2016 09:37:55
We had a lively discussion this morning, after listening to the debate between Baroness Jane Campbell and Matthew Parris over assisted suicide on the Today Programme (http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06sp65d). Basically, she was against legalisation while he was advocating a “right to die”. Unsurprisingly, there was an overwhelming majority in favour of the baroness’ point of view. Only Peter, who never likes to condemn anyone (which is possibly a bit of a rather problematic approach for a police officer!), spoke up for Matthew Parris, saying that he could imagine a situation where someone might find life intolerable and feel that they were nothing but a burden to those around them and that, in that case, it was reasonable to allow them to choose to die.
Lucy got very indignant at that suggestion and repeated Jane Campbell’s example of a young man who had wanted to die after suffering a paralysing injury, but later discovered that he could still have a useful and fulfilling life, after all. Jonah backed her up, saying that he never wanted to die, but he had sometimes felt that it might be better for his family not to have the bother of caring for him, and he didn’t see how you could distinguish between people for whom life was a burden and those who thought that they were being a burden on other people.
Of course, we all leapt to reassure him that he was anything but a burden as far as we were concerned – until it occurred to me that he was perfectly well-aware of that fact and didn’t need us to boost his already inflated opinion of his own worth! So I made a point of bringing him down to earth a bit by reminding him about some of the times his refusal to accept his own limitations had made things difficult for those around him. That sort of thing is usually funny in retrospect, although highly annoying at the time, so we spent quite a long time after that laughing at reminiscences.
Lucy insisted on bringing us back to the issue in hand and demanded that we be serious. (I think she often finds adults far too frivolous for her liking.) She wanted to know how likely we thought it was that assisted dying would be made legal – and what she could do to stop it. None of us knew the answer to that. Peter tentatively suggested that a better way might be to campaign for really effective measures to prevent people asking to die when it wasn’t necessary. He’d seen a case of suicide during his police career, where the person involved had suffered from some degenerative disease and had killed themselves before they became completely disabled, because they were afraid that if they waited until life became intolerable they wouldn’t be capable of doing it for themselves and nobody would be allowed to do it for them.
That made me think about the times when even Jonah – self-assured, optimistic, anything-you-can-do-I-can-do-better, Jonah – had been frustrated at no longer being able to do everything that he used to do and depressed about the demands that he was putting on his family. Despite what he said, might he ever have been tempted to put an end to the indignity of it all? What if he had not had so many people around him who were consciously going out of their way to make sure that he knew how much they still valued him?
In the end, we all agreed that, if assisted dying were to be introduced, it ought to be compulsory for anyone who asked for it to talk to other people with similar conditions to their own and who didn’t want to die, so that they could see another point of view. Jonah reckoned that he would certainly have had a few things to say to the young rugger player that Baroness Campbell talked about!