Lets Legalise Assisted Suicide

It is reported today that Assisted Suicide is being introduced by stealth.

The reason for this suggestion is that nobody has been prosecuted in recent times for helping someone to die. In the last eighteen months,out of forty-four suspects, for thirty-one the decision has been made not to prosecute under rules introduced by the Director of Public Prosecutions.

Well I say brilliant, that’s good news. Bring it on.

It’s time that this government got its act together and took the next step. Lets formally introduced legislation to allow, in this country, the type of services that are provided by the Dignitas clinic in Zurich. There would have to be safe guards, that is obvious but lets remove the suggestion of criminality.

We are a nation of animal lovers and do not let our pets and farm animals suffer. We “put them down”. As a nation we are outraged when our animals are mistreated in any way.

Yet we do not, are not permitted to offer the same compassion to the “human animal”.

Instead we watch the terminally ill suffer, we prolong their misery with our drugs and our machines. I have seen this with my own eyes, experienced this with members of my own family. We tend to think of animals as dumb, that they do not know any better, do not understand and therefore it is better to let them die.

But think on. Because humans are the thinking being isn’t the enforced prolonging of life through the process of dying just a form of torture.

As a terminal illness progresses the patient quite often loses the ability to move, they can go through increasing levels of hypersensitivity and pain and more often than not they go through a total loss of ability to communicate.

The single act of “kindness” we offer is that the doctor or nurse can jack up the amount of morphine to a level where the patient is in a state of oblivion.

We like to spout off about preserving personal dignity. Where is the dignity in being taken to a drug induced vegetative state.