Mother admits ending sons life

[vacay]

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I'm not sure how I feel about this?
On the one hand she didn't want to see her son suffer anymore. But surely a 7 year old when he asked his mom to take the pain away didn't mean to end his life?

Sorry if there is already a thread going I haven't checked

But coercing someone to do so would still be illegal. As it would be now.

So we are depriving thousands of people of a more pleasant end of life experience just in case a sick few take advantage.

There are sick people everywhere. A law won’t encourage to be more sick

It’s the ultimate act of selfless love. No mother would want to end her child’s life, so doing the very worst thing a parent could imagine happening, in order to end their child’s suffering is incredibly brave. Her child was never going to recover and had a cruel, painful end. If she could give him peace and dignity in his final moments then she did the right thing. I can’t imagine what she went through. It is terrible that the current law meant that she had to tbh; if her son had been a dog she would have been given the support to stop his suffering rather than take it into her own hands.

I hope the law finally changes. It would be very easy to put guard rails in place to protect against abuse. Ending the life of someone with a terminal or degenerative diagnoses would be easy to evidence and mean you’re not suddenly going to legalise murder.

I don’t understand how people could be ‘against’ this and if I was on the jury of a trial for this woman, or another like her, I would acquit even in the face of the law.

Have you ever seen a person die?

could you sit and see your child suffer and tell them it was god’s wish?

That was my experience with my mum, she died 5 days after coming home from hospital to die and a lot of that time was in pain. The district nurses were so reluctant to increase her medication, one of them said we don't want to flatten her which I couldn't actually believe. Thank god for the Marie Curie nurses we had for 2 overnights who actually knew how to relieve her suffering.
I would like to think I could be as brave as this woman.

My uncle is haunted by the memory of his son dying from leukaemia many years ago. I get the impression there was very little pain relief and he really suffered.
I understand why that mother did what she did.

I think many people believe in the concept of a ‘good death’ and think that they and their loved ones will be protected from unbelievable, unbearable, unimaginable and undignified pain and suffering at the end.
They may be lucky, I hope they are.
If you have witnessed a ‘bad death’ you truly understand the limitations and failings of our current medical model.

Vets have it right - it is a welfare issue and moral imperative to end unnecessary suffering.

You have misquoted me. I assume you meant to quote a different poster.

I watched my dad drown to death from lung cancer. The most horrific thing I’ve ever witnessed, and it was over fucking FaceTime because he died in May 2020.

He could have come home and died a peaceful and chosen death and had us with him. He knew he was dying long before Covid hit.

But no, he had to suffer alone in hospital with his only comfort an iPad.

Thank god this woman loved her son enough to give him the absolute kindness of a dignified and pain free death. I hope when it’s my time the laws have changed.

Assisted dying will result in less suffering. We put too much value on quantity of life when we should be prioritising quality

There have been so may threads about this and they invariably end in someone pontificating how wrong assisted dying is.

It's posters are not happy just to tell someone how they should live their life. Oh no, they need to tell people how they have to die as well.

And people like this mother and her child are paying the price .

Who knows if it would only be a few? It's not unknown in human history, after all.

❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️

Very much agree with you. Capacity is important. I am surprised that so many are unaware of the pitfalls evident in allowing assisted dying. The law has to bear in mind that not everyone is acting in the best interests of others and thus make certain that those with capacity are not suborned and those without capacity are not made to suffer unnecessarily. Thus, it is legal to give a lethal dose of painkiller to a dying person with the intention to relieve pain - the unintended result that they die a few days/hours sooner is accepted as collateral damage to an act of humanity: relieving pain.
To legalise assisted dying opens the gates to those who are not of goodwill, who may act to remove people inconvenient: incontinent old granny costing a fortune in a care home, who enjoys life there and is full of beans but spending the family inheritance (her money, in fact) on selfishly not dying. To legalise assisted dying opens the door to pressure on parents to terminate the life of a severely disabled child, who is happy and not in pain, because it is costing the state money (wrapped in the idea that their lives and their other children's lives are being damaged, that it is 'kinder' to allow a disabled child to die etc).
Then there are the homeless, the mentally ill, the bereaved who could all be persuaded that 'assisted dying' is the way out of their troubles.

Not a way to go.

@Grammarnut allowing or supporting assisted suicide isn’t denial of all those issues, it’s perfectly possible to appreciate all those things AND still believe it should be legal.

Exactly - I read on here that it’s not what you die of you should be worried about. But what you live with, that really resonated with me. It’s so true. Life in poor health and pain is mor
life at all.

Absolutely. It's the stuff of nightmares.

My mother when dying of cancer told us no matter what she wanted no pain. She agreed to some minor hospital treatment and one day screamed at me and my sister because of the pain, it took us two full hours to persuade the weekend medical staff to up her medication. They were afraid it would kill her. She and we only wanted for her to get the relief she wanted.

Luckily we got her home and her GP gave us, her adult children as much morphine as we wanted, told us the dose and said give her more if she wants it. A kind and caring man. He did what she wanted. As it happens we never upped the dose because she passed away. With no pain.

No we are not required to preserve life if the person involved has decided the life they live is unbearable. God has nothing to do with it.

Yes, of course it is. But these issues tend to surface because not everyone is as of goodwill as some appear on this board. It can become a way of getting rid of problematical people. That is not fantasy. In countries with assisted dying there has been a move away from it just being terminally ill adults in great pain to people who just are not very happy, are homeless, autistic etc. And there is no way you can protect incontinent granny from pressure from DCs who want to have her money before it's all 'wasted' on her care. So you don't allow a legal way they can do that and succeed and not face a murder charge - but you are compassionate to the wife/son/husband etc who helped their quadriplegic relative end their life when it had become utterly unbearable, who said 'yes' to more painkillers when the doctor suggested this, both knowing it will hasten death. If you make a law allowing people to be killed, then people will use it to their advantage. And 'assisted dying' is a positive law - currently we are with allowing lethal amounts of morphine which are used to reduce pain but also cause death etc. It's messy but it's better than greedy DiL pushing DH to persuade mum she ought to die now (or vice versa, of course).

@Grammarnut i don’t think the law goes far enough and I don’t think overprescribing pain killers is as routine as you make it sound. Probably in a hospice setting, but unlikely elsewhere.

I found the information about dying children in pain extremely disturbing it made me feel very low last night. Maybe I've led a charmed life, (obviously!) but I just thought it would have been possible to give them enough morphine that they were out of it. Or put them in an induced coma?

Horrible, horrible. How cruel nature can be.

Sadly, under prescribing pain relieving drugs at the end is now more normal, hence people dying painful, prolonged and undignified deaths.

As a nurse since the early 90's and a mother I want to hug that mum.
She did what she felt was right for her son and he wasn't in any more pain, that was being a good mum to me.
I have seen so many people die and 100% agree that if we can euthanais our pets we should have the choice ourselves.

The specialist palliative care team saw my Nan on a Friday morning and she was moved to a side room. We were told she had around 24 hours. She lived for six days with no food or water, we were allowed to moisten her lips but that was all. Six days for a 96 year old woman to die. It was horrific, I will never forget her death rattle and distress. Absolutely inhumane.

She never got over it. There but for the grace . ..

I read this and feel conflicted. Of course no parent wants to see their child in pain, terminally ill. So heartbreaking. But euthanasia is a complex topic and obviously has to be implemented in an extremely careful, considered way. It’s the only way to safeguard people. Generally speaking, do I think that relatives should be making this decision for their loved one and then administering the drugs to that relative themselves? No! Should euthanasia be legalised for the terminally ill (who have the capacity to make that decision ), physician assisted? Yes.