AIBU to see the government vote against assisted Dying, as preventing personal choice in how we might want to die?

I agree with the principle of assisted dying in terminally ill patients. But its being implemented in so many other disturbing ways across the world. And if you have never been suicidal you cant possibly imagine. I hacked at my wrists twice when I was a late teen following rape - if assisted dying was available i would have absolutely been supported in 'choosing to end' my life. I would have had professionals around me explaining it all and making the choice painless and easy.
Thankfully that choice wasnt available, unlike the poor girl in Spain. Yes its been an uphill struggle but 20+ years later I can see the struggle was worth it.

You are assuming their life is miserable. Loads of projection going on here. Yes it is distressing and miserable to not be recognised and to think about losing your marbles, but often the patient with dementia is not miserable. My grandmother who passed when I was 28 confused me with her little sister. It was hard for me, but she was really enjoying talking to her little sister who had died in her 20s back during WWII during the blitz. She was able to say things and get hugs that put her at ease in her final months.

@TotaleclipseinFrance the countries that have AS seen to find medics prepared to oversee the process and bekieve they are doing the right thing. No reason to assume thats not the same here. Were I to be a medical.professional, I would do it as part of my role.

Bur how can you be sure that the person with dementia living a miserable life in the care home wants their money to go to the care home?

If that was me I’d much rather be dead than living like this and paying for the privilege.

Totally agree. And yet those who are against AD are the empathy free people!
Time this odious narrative changed.

100% this. A person who has been diagnosed with dementia can have a few years until they are deemed to not have capacity. A greedy relative, eyeing up their inheritance being spent on care bills enters the scene…!

If people think this doesn’t happen, they’d be very wrong. ‘The love of money is the root of all evil’.

People are not being truthful when they'd say they'd do anything to put a relative 'out of their misery'. It's bullshit.

If that were true they'd do it themselves.
No they mean they want some other person to do it. Somebody else to shoulder the guilt.

I do believe, though it is another topic altogether, that this is a consequence of the NHS being free at the point of delivery.
The medical staff aren't really human in most people's eyes.

Yes this sounds harsh but it is true and harshness is now needed because of the attempts of emotional blackmail from the pro- assisted dying side.

Doing 'anything' means just that.

@TotaleclipseinFrance wow, calm down. Many of these deaths are exactly as you describe, peaceful with relatives holding their hands. There's thousands of accounts of it. Some few are not, but are they as bad as the alternative? I teach this topic at a level so every year do a round of updating myself on the latest reports etc. I havent seen one documentary that includes relatives saying it was terrible. Even the anti-AS ones dont have them. The figures in tje quoted reports were not high and one of the terrible things listed was 'bad taste'. Hardly something to offset the wedding that some people are trying to avoid.

Young nurses are not going to be asked to hand out the drugs on a ward round. ADHD meds are tightly controlled, let alone these. How about instead of telling people to 'grow up ffs' you take a calm.look at the thousands of testimonials that give a totally opposite view to you.

That's really splitting hairs.

Do you honestly think the young nurse who is ordered, subtly coerced perhaps, into getting the suicide pills is going to feel any better that the patient took it themselves?

Or the doctor who is told - without actually being told, just heavily implied-that his career will not go any further if he doesn't prescribe the pills?

You'd have to be sociopathic or have a God complex to want to be the provider of pills here.

For once I'm going to utilise the dreaded passive-aggresive mn phrase: you sound very young.

You have not considered the actual reality of this situation, have you?

You've got this stupid fantasy of loving relatives gathering round the soon to be deceased watching them die peacefully.
(a pp very thoroughly pointed out with evidence that these deaths aren't peaceful at all.)

Life's not fucking like that. Very few people die peacefully and everybody dies alone.

Grow up about this, ffs.

It really annoys me that 625 people in parliament have been allowed to dictate how an entire nation dies. There should have been a referendum for assisted dying, for me it's a bigger matter than Brexit because we all die in the end & we should all have a choice of how we die.

I think it was a shit way to broach the issue. I’m not against AD in principle but for fucks sake, get a properly organised government review in place and draw up the best bill possible with considered input from ever relevant party. And make sure there is well funded, good quality palliative care in place as well so people can make a genuine choice as to what they feel is best for them. That wasn’t this bill.

I apologise, you are right.

The CPS seems to think differently.

It would usually be charged as something else, but it can be charged as murder as it meets all the criteria.

If you are thinking of doctors, the doctrine of double effect wouldn’t necessarily apply either to the cases encompassed by the bill.

I’m actually not against having some form of assisted suicide law. But it does no credit at all to the side proposing it that they shy away from using plain language. This is about making things legal that currently meet the definition of murder.

But having a painful, unpleasant illness wasn’t the criteria in the bill.

If you think it should be, you need a different bill.

Blame the govt for not doing this properly.

A poorly written private members bill is not the way to pass legislation the PM wants.

He could have put it in his manifesto, had the bill properly drafted and considered, and I think it would have passed.

The more MPs saw of this bill the less they liked it.

There was no override of the lords possible either because of Starmer’s decision not to adopt the bill. He was happy to claim credit (doing it because he’d promised it to a celeb) but not to do the work.

This is the result.

I recall Dignitas is about £15k to be member of.
And if you have even been sectioned under the MH act, you can't join either.

Yes, and people who can't afford Dignitas have to DIY it, which is a lot more common than most people think, I've been to one suicide that fits this scenerio this month.

People who oppose it or want to make the AD bill so difficult to access as to effectively oppose it seem to ignore these facts.

As someone who has witnessed the horrific, painful, undignified deaths of my relatives, who had VERY CLEARLY stated, they did not want to die like that, I am and always will be, in favour of assisted dying.
So many in the UK have given up any kind of personal responsibility. “The state” must pay and “I am entitled to” is endemic. Nothing is ever the fault or the choice of the individual. So perhaps this is the by product of that? If you spend your life letting “the state” provide, expecting others to pay for your choices, then ultimately, the state can decide when your time is up?

I disagree. Lots of things are hard. Doesn't mean we shouldn't do them. A pp just said she wouldn't want the option of Maid presented..but she can just refuse it. No different to abortion really, except that there we champion bodily autonomy over a 'life' which arguably has more going for it than a person in terminal decline or great pain and distress. Just because abortion is legal, doesn't mean you have to take the option. I see no difference between that an AS.

People are forced to do it even earlier now if they are under a service like Dignitas. They have to be well enough to get a flight and get to the centre.
Esther Ranzen wanted to go there, and is now not well enough to do so.

If AD was allowed in the UK, people could do it a lot later than they would if they had to be well enough to fly to Switzerland.

I completely agree with this. It’s a slippery slope. I know far too many people who would be easily swayed by their family into ‘doing the right thing’ when really it’s about money or just not wanting the effort of dealing with them any more. Yes I work in social care and have seen a lot.

@Periperi2025i agree that the means to hard wire more autonomy and a shorter decline already exist. I also agree that they are poorly understood and also, in my experience, not respected. There’s an issue in trying to word them to cover enough but be sufficiently directive, especially if it’s decline rather than a specific illness with obvious milestones to cover.

There is a lot of talk of pressure to end life, but there is also pressure the other way - I couldn’t believe the pressure put on my dad by a care home to get a flu jab for my granny, who was bedbound, barely aware of her environment, doubly incontinent and realistically was either going to die of pneumonia or starvation, as her body was outliving her dementia. There’s a lot of pressure to look caring, which always means extending life come what may, even if it’s undignified and causes pain and suffering and not what a relative would have wanted.

Which is illogical because it will force people to do it early, whilst they are still physically/ cognitively able to, whithout risking loosing that ability, how is that pro-life? It reduces peoples life further than they would choose!