Mercy Killing?
The past week has seen one mother, Frances Inglis, jailed for life for murdering a son who was in a persistent vegetative state, and another mother, Kay Gilderdale, acquitted of the attempted murder of her daughter, whose suicide she assisted.
The BBC has seen fit to mark these sad events by a ‘poll‘ – ‘vote now or the grand-mother gets it…’. That the BBC should think that a Simon Cowell type opportunity for the public to vote on such a sensitive matter is only to be expected when the media in general have failed to adequately distinguish between the different acts of assisted dying, assisted suicide, mercy killings and murder. I have spoken to several people this week who are under (myriad variations of) the impression that the two cases had different results merely because of the ‘vagaries of the jury system’.
The media likes to portray these cases as an example of the inflexibility of stony hearted judges who should not be allowed to judge the actions of the warm hearted parent or lover – who is invariably shown on the steps of the Royal Courts of Justice supported by other loving members of the same family in a manner designed to sway our emotions. Does the media ever portray the human side of our judges?
Let us first make the distinction between assisted suicide and any other type of assisted death. Suicide is legal. You are welcome to take your own life for any rational or irrational reason. You do not have to have a terminal disease, you can be barking mad if you wish, your life is yours to terminate. If you wish to jump off Beachy Head, and your nearest and dearest book you a train ticket, (so far) they have not found themselves up before a judge charged with assisted suicide, not even if they have shouted out after you – ‘go on then, get a move on with it’. Woe betide you if you book them a ticket to the Dignitas clinic in Switzerland, worse, if you accompany them on their journey, perhaps hoping to change their mind en route, perhaps as an act of charity that they shouldn’t be alone on this final journey, then prepare to see your every action played out in the media – the mere mention of Dignitas is enough to get the CPS juices flowing.
However, accompanying someone to a country where euthanasia is legal, when they have made the decision that suicide is their choice, is a different matter from someone who has made that choice, but wishes you to ‘help them’ in a country where euthanasia is not legal. Because euthanasia is not legal in this country, there is no equivalent clinic where your death is supervised by objective medical staff, now we are in the realm of the back bedroom, and the lone statement of the surviving person that having a plastic bag put over your head, and sleeping pills ground up in your porridge was indeed your fervent wish.
It is hard enough to asertain the truth as to what goes on in the bed room when both parties are alive and well, as in a rape case, it is near to impossible when one party is uanble to speak for themselves. That is why I am concerned by the emotive route this debate is taking. Instead of an objective decision taken by a range of people in an objective setting, we are being asked to judge by media portrayal.
Mrs Gilderdale seems like a very nice and charming woman, her son was well spoken and supported her. The great and the good are loudly calling for a change in this ‘cold, inflexible law’ – we are quietly being groomed for the day when all Mothers can call for ‘closure’ when they find the ‘pain and suffering’, whether mental or physical, of a child ‘unbearable’.
There walk amongst us Mothers who would cheerfully put a pillow over our head if they thought they could plead putting an end to ‘our mental torture’ – ‘oh, he hated being gay, he cried himself to sleep every night…’, ‘she begged me to help her end the torture of her anorexia’ says the Mother who has an anorexic daughter and the possibility of a new marriage to hand – is that really what we want? The very words ‘mercy killings’ with their connotations of ‘merciful Mary’ are part of the MSM attempt to soften us up, on a par with ‘joy riding’.
Assisted Dying and Murder are two completely different categories, as Francis Inglis is contemplating this week. Again we are asked to contemplate the ‘terrible agony’ of a Mother who could not bear to see her son lying immobile and brain damaged. We were offered no evidence by the media as to his chances of recovery, nor of why the High Court were not asked to rule that his life was ‘futile’ as they did in the case of Tony Bland.
Had such a ruling been made, and Mrs Inglis had merely pre-empted his certain death as a result of dehydration and starvation – the Gold Standard for an obscene death, as documented here many times – I would have had sympathy for her revulsion of the state approved manner of obtaining ‘closure’ as it is so carefully called. But Mrs Inglis hadn’t applied to the High Court for a ruling that her son should not suffer any longer – she had decided that she/he shouldn’t suffer any longer, and with that we return to the back bedroom scenario. Indeed, had Mrs Inglis obtained that ruling first, and since she had already tried to dispatch her son once, she had nothing to lose by making public her wish that he should die, I suspect that she, like Mrs Gilderdale, would have been making emotive statements on the need to change the law from the front steps of the High Court, rather than leaving by the back door in a prison van.
Changes in the ability of medicine to maintain people in a state of ‘life’ that would have been unthinkable 20 years ago, and changes in our own ability to withstand any kind of distress or emotional discomfort – witness the ever rising divorce laws – have combined to bring us where we are today. That the great and the good are campaigning for us to see so called ‘Mercy Killing’, not as Murder, but as a brave and selfless act of love.
If Tom Inglis had been starved to death and agonisingly deprived of water until he died of thirst and dehydration, that act of cruelty would have been within the law. Because his mother loved him, and was prepared to risk her life for his, she is being punished. I hate living in a society where the law is as much of an ass as this. For God’s sake, let us change the law.
We are asked to compare the ‘cruel death’ that the state may or may not have sanctioned, with the ‘brave and selfless’ death which his Mother meted out to him – without any mention of why one death was within the law, and one was not. His Mother was not saving him from the ‘cruel death’ – she had decided that death was his fate.
This is Tiger country. Make no mistake, there are powerful forces in our utilitarian society who wish us to accept the death of those who are not productive, the elderly, the disabled, the less than perfect; they contribute nothing and are a drain on our resources at a time when we have no resources.
The Government have already armed themselves with legislation that allows them to make a decision on our death when we are no longer mentally competent to absolve a doctor from blame for complying – there is nothing they would like better than for the main stream media, that organ of government propaganda, to reposition this in our minds as a merciful act on their part.
I am not against euthanasia per se, I am against absolving ourselves of the responsibility to decide that this is what we want for ourselves, you and me, for it is not just that brain damaged boy you have never met, ‘ it’, in the fabled words of the Lottery adverts, ‘could be you-hoo’ and allowing it to be introduced by the back door on the basis of clever marketing by the masters of spin.
Honesty and Objectivity, that is all I ask – and don’t give my Mother the right to plead ‘mercy killing’ – I’d never have seen the light of day!
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February 1, 2010 at 08:36 -
Euthanasia for the terminally unemployed, like me, should be available.
I would welcome the opportunity of being helped to die. I find that I cannot do it on my own. I would rather die with minimal pain, distress and in a dignified way where the results can be cleaned up with little fuss (burn me with the rest of the clinical waste will do fine). The alternative is that I do it alone at home, in pain and with the distinct possibility of great suffering as I try to get it right. I live alone without any contact with anyone so my body will not be discovered until it is in an advanced state of decay.
Of course, I would rather live and be a productive member of society. If I was allowed to work, I would be a higher rate tax payer too. However, the government has other ideas and I am now permanently excluded from working. I am condemned to spend the rest of my life in poverty and squalor. The only alternatives the government has for me is some form of prison either regular or mental.
It is all such a waste; all I ever wanted to do was to earn a living in peace.
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February 1, 2010 at 09:52 -
This is indeed a complex area.
Leaving aside the rights and wrongs of legalised assisted suicide for a minute, one of my major concerns is that when the state (ie doctors etc) decides you should “be allowed to die” as your quality of life is very poor their solution is actually to starve you to death, or more likely force you to die of thirst. This seems to me an incredibly barbaric act. If someone other than the state did this to you they would be tried for murder and the details of your evil and callous act spread across the tabloids.
If it’s OK for this person to die, then why is it not ok to have some legally sanctioned way of making the process painless and a lot more rapid? (This is, of course, code for euthanasia). Seems as if the state wants to have the right to make the decision but not face up to the consequences.
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February 1, 2010 at 11:11 -
This post is the most intelligent thing on this subject I have read for a very long time. The key here for me is informed consent. If the would-be suicide is fully and completely in charge of the process, and would do it themselves if they could but require physical assistance, then who has the right the prevent them? Tom Inglis could not and did not ask for or consent to his murder. Mrs Gilderdale was responding to her daughter’s firmly articulated desire and completing a process her daughter had begun.
The one Dignitas case which made the headlines in the UK which disturbs me involves the clinically depressed couple who both wished to die. I can only see their ability to give informed consent as seriously compromised and there were no physical reasons why they could not end their own lives themselves.
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February 1, 2010 at 13:08 -
This is what happens once you start down the slippery slope of accepting the legality of killing. It would have been better, in my view, not to have legalised suicide, let alone euthanasia.
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February 1, 2010 at 13:49 -
Sir Terry Pratchett is giving The Richard Dimbleby Lecture (tonight, BBC1-10.35pm) in which he is likely to call for the formation of a tribunal system within which people wishing to secure physician-assisted suicide may make their case and document their wishes. This strikes me as a logical and practical suggestion.
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February 1, 2010 at 14:28 -
Precisely. A terminally-ill patient should, if it is their own determined decision, be able to document legally the intention to end their life at a time of their choosing and to request the assistance of a physician. At present, a patient couldn’t even raise the subject with a trusted GP because the GP simply wouldn’t be able to discuss it. Far better I believe that, following the initial consultation between patient and doctor, it was possible to refer the case to a tribunal for the medical prognosis to be confirmed and the independence of the patient’s decision to be legally established.
I agree with you that media treatment of the two recent ‘mercy killing’ cases served only to blur the important distinction between assisted-suicide and euthanasia.
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February 1, 2010 at 14:58 -
I’m in favour of Euthenasia. But not in the culture we have the UK at the moment. Every Tom, Dick and Harry Shipman would be sticking needles in arms and doing whatever it takes to get their hands on the inheritance.
It doesn’t matter how abuse-bombproof you try and make it, where there’s a will (living or otherwise) there’s an argument – and where there’s a legacy, in Cruel Britannia there’ll be some greedy toe-rag convinced he or she is ‘titled to der money, innit?
The only winners, as ever, will be the lawyers.xx
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February 1, 2010 at 15:47 -
“Every Tom, Dick and Harry Shipman would be sticking needles in arms and doing whatever it takes to get their hands on the inheritance.”
And your organs.
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February 1, 2010 at 18:46 -
Below are excerpts copied from ‘Suicide – the uneasy option’ (this site, 04.09.09) because I cannot write my thoughts on the subject any more clearly than I did for this piece.
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What our society should now properly debate is that, for some, the prospect of humiliating physical helplessness is an emotional ordeal more terrifying than the fearful option of planning and competently achieving one -
February 1, 2010 at 23:47 -
I’ve just watched Terry Pratchett’s Richard Dimbleby Lecture. I applaud the way he has put his argument together. Well said, that man, to stand back and let Tony Robinson (Baldrick) read his (Terry’s ) measured argument for what he insists is assisted-death (rather than my term assisted-suicide), staring the extinction of his own mind in the face but spending what’s left of his functioning brain writing the only cohesive patient-based argument yet broadcast which argues convincingly in favour of ‘assisted death’.
I give Terry Pratchett a round of applause and even suspend my lifelong dislike of Tony Robinson who seems to have read from the autocue to Sir Terry’s approval.
This is a huge topic and I can’t say more this evening than to thank Mme Raccoon for her terrierish worrying of the subject. It’s a subject which should be worried by a blog-terrier and a subject which deserves comment.
So, again, I sign of with the word: Discuss…. Please do.
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