Esther Rantzen "too frail" to travel to Switzerland (Dignitas)

[ItWasnaMeGuv]

Hopefully a family member of friend will take her and she can get her wish.

So how do they afford that when we can't?

But it helps!

New Zealand has a mixed private/public funded model.

Because they decided to fund it properly. The thing with AD, in countries that have it, not many people take it up. They just want the option if they end up in intractable pain. If the can manage the dying process with good palliative care, that’s all good.

NL law didn’t start with the very lax suffering unbearably requirement.
AD countries have a clear trajectory from strict to so liberal you can get away with murder.

That’s entirely reductive, you could make a “slippery slope” argument about virtually anything, for example cars should be outlawed in case someone gets hit and killed, no processed food should be sold because it is bad for health and causes cancer, no international travel should be allowed because it’s bad for the environment and will lead to global warming, famine and societal collapse.

People are suffering horribly and being denied the choice to try and have a dignified death and you, and people like you, are selfishly depriving them of it. If you don’t want an assisted death fine, don’t have one, but don’t make other people suffer for your hysterical fears or prejudices.

Our politicians are cowards and I am horribly disappointed with the government for allowing this to happen.

Not many people? I think 6% of all deaths in the NLs and 5% in Canada are by euthanasia now.

The slippery slope isn’t an hysterical, prejudiced argument, it’s a documented reality. AD is a Pandora’s box. We open it, the slippery slope will happen. No country or US state that has opened the AD box has avoided it. We are not superior to these other places, we will experience it.

It’s odd, the activists for AD were insisting we look at other countries with AD and learn from them but as soon as we did and learned of the unavoidable slippery slope then all of a sudden looking at AD in other countries is to be avoided or dismissed.

Yes, not many. And those countries have a much wider acceptance into the AD programme. In the UK it would be far less if just limited to the terminally ill with fewer than six months to live.

Ok… but (taking the NL) - AD is for life limiting and severe illness so someone dying as a result of AD would most likely have died of cancer, heart failure etc within weeks or months of their AD death date.

The percentage isn’t helpful without context.

But who are you to decide whether or not that person WANTS to die?
And at what level should “quality of life” be placed at?

Also those with cancer who want to die could take an overdose… I believe you have to have the strength to administer the pills yourself at dignitas in any event, so what is the difference?

“Severe illness” is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. It doesn’t mean terminal within six months. So the NL are bound to include more people under that definition.

It's just priorities.

Probably also a false economy because not providing the services will lead to people having to go to hospital.

An overdose of what, though? You can’t guarantee it will work, you can’t guarantee you won’t vomit it up whilst unconscious, you can’t guarantee that you just take pills and die. If you overdose on paracetamol, you get liver damage but don’t die for several very painful days.

I'm not religious at all.

There's nothing civilised about having a system that allows the government to kill off its own people by the back door via coercion and other tactics.
You'd have to be really naive to think this bill would mean anything else.

I always find it funny when Switzerland is mentioned (Diginitas, obviously).

One of the most amoral (not a typo, I do mean amoral) places on earth where money is the most important thing being hailed as a bastion of well-being and civility.

you don’t have to travel overseas to commit suicide 🤷‍♀️ many other people ways of doing it if you so choose and wish to end your
life.

Stopping drinking any fluids is a very straightforward way to fall into unconsciousness and die. If you have written the wishes not to be resuscitated or given fluids and paramedics etc are told this then you can die at home in your own bed

And if the person is in that much distress that they want to end it , then the risk of it not working is surely better than a law which is open to the most dystopian abuse.

I have lived in a country where assisted dying is available.

What it meant in reality was that strict guidelines were introduced surrounding the level of drugs you could give to people at the end of their life.

And from that point on, doctors who treated people who wanted to die naturally, were worried about being sent to prison if they gave them significant pain relief.

As you can imagine, as soon as the legislation is introduced, two very strict pathways are created with a totally different set of doctors dealing with assisted dying to the ones treating patients, and very tight rules are introduced around the levels of pain medication that both sets of doctors are allowed to use.

So essentially the assisted dying legislation has resulted in more patients dying without adequate pain management because GPs or hospital doctors who ordinarily would have known their patients, and sometimes their families, could no longer at their own discretion give someone a larger dose of morphine at the end to facilitate a more comfortable death.

But my understanding is that when a patient goes on a morphine “driver” , it’s three days at most. I’m sure that in the interests of making the patient more comfortable, dosages are exceeded

I I think that that is different to euthanasia … when it’s clear that the patient has days at most to live, then dosages can be increased to help relieve pain.

Agree 100%. Very well said. People seem to want to throw up any objection to AD without realising that the present situation also leads to suffering and abuse.

Yes, if a person attempts suicide and it doesn't work, the results can be really bad. I once met a young woman in a carehome who had taken an overdose and ended up needed 24/7 care through brain damage. Also people have jumped off buildings and survived but were then in a worse condition that before.

There's always the option of jumping in front of a high speed train, fine if you don't mind traumatising a train driver for life. Or jumping from a multistorey carpark, OK as long as you don't mind your remains being scraped off the pavement by a council worker on a minimum wage. Same problem with jumping in a canal.

To my mind, being able to choose AD, with appropriate safeguards, seems like a better option.

I struggle to read past the word "hysterical" in any argument. Different opinions do not make a woman hysterical.

Yes, everyone should have right to choose…but everyone would’ve have been forced to be involved in killing someone, should also have right to opt out of getting involved. No one should be forced to support someone’s “right to choose”

I was massive supporter of right to die, until it all kicked off legislatively. I’d Sen case after case at high court turned down in the most tragic circumstances that seemed inhumane to not support, so it seemed a good thing to change the law…

But then, being curious, I then asked myself the question “ how do doctors actually assist this dying”

and that is what has changed my mind. It is actually pretty hard to kill someone prematurely…I’ve lost both my parents and ILs now, and a fair few others…cancers, dementia, heart failure…some, like Esther manage to hang onto life long after loved one think their quality of life is so poor it’d be a mercy to die. My dad, who had an awful death, you’d not allow a animal to have, did not want to die, he bounced back from the brink, incredibly frail, not eating or drinking for weeks, multiple times.

so look at how we actually assist death. The drugs. Read up the success rate of “quick painless deaths” with these drug cocktails and be prepared to be shocked. Read this, just one science paper https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9270985/
read up on what happened to the latest innovation of a suffocation chamber. Or good forbid the latest invention by doctor death of a pressure neck collar, helpfully modelled on a female dummy …it’s grim

look at it another way too: the USA has been trying for decades to kill people on death row with these drug cocktails and frequently enough they’ve stopped supply of some drugs entirely , or been held for stays due to horrific failures. There’s a reason hanging was used in this country- it is quicker and more reliably done with a professional who knows where to place knot, heights and weights.
alternatively we could just get doctors to give people a gun- a shot to head is pretty effective, painless…we do that to animals, right?

oh wait… im being horrific? Sick?

just because you can’t see someone writhing in agony because you’ve given them drugs to paralyse them doesn’t mean it’s kinder then a shot to the head…it just doesn’t elicit horror in those observing

there are no clinical trials on what drugs work. Mainly because it’s clinically unethical. But USA death row are about as close to trials as you can get. As the article above states, very few clinicians involved in assisted dying record medical outcomes..especially clinics specialising in assisted dying or euthanasia who’ve a reputation to uphold. The failure rate is unknown but far from rare in data we have. The ability of patients to swallow all those pills is often unpractical and equally as horrific and distressing

There is literally no proven method to give a guarantee of a quicker, or kind, painless death than a natural death with decent palliative care in a good environment with nursing supervision. If we went ahead it’s a lottery on what death you’d have

so, right now I’m against any change in law. Especially one forcing clinicians down a path of assisting what could easily be a form of torture to a significant minority of uninformed people .