Assisted dying debate next week… To think this is a relief. So glad they’re finally debating this important issue.

[Mavenss]

We will be able to see which MPs are for or against assisted dying.

This Monday 29th April, assisted dying will be debated in Westminster for the first time in two years. An absolutely incredible 203,000 people added their name to the government petitionspearheaded by Dame Esther Rantzen to make this happen, creating the largest ever parliamentary petition on assisted dying.

There will not be a vote on Monday, but this debate will be the last time before the General Election that MPs have an opportunity to show you that they are listening to our calls for safe and compassionate choice at the end of life. A majority of voters in every constituency support an assisted dying law.

The debate starts at 4:30pmand you can watch it live online through the UK parliament website.

YABU- it’s a silly idea, why are government even debating it? Assisted dying is a terrible idea.

YANBU - I support the debate and assisted dying (under the agreed circumstances)

I’m interested in the MN feedback here.

Because it is accurate to say ‘killing someone’ ? Killing is the generic term that means doing an action that results in death of another human. We have legal killing like abortion, we used have executions which are legal killings, our military are legally allowed to kill enemy military. Then we also have illegal killings like manslaughter, murder, massacres, genocides…

Currently both assisted suicide and euthanasia are illegal. The debate is to discuss legalising BOTH.

Not unevidenced. It actually happened in the Netherlands (you know, the country where it's working really well and there has definitely been no slippery slope):

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/aug/26/doctor-on-trial-landmark-euthanasia-case-netherlands-dementia

"The doctor slipped a sedative into the woman’s coffee, before administering a lethal drug, as the patient was held down by her family and struggled against the injection."

The problem with this is that an accident that causes life changing disabilities is over 90% of the time followed by severe Depression and PTSD with suicidal ideation. It is almost 100% of the time if there was a traumatic brain injury (TBI)

To mistake a recently disabled person expressing a wish to die as their real, unvarnished consent to die rather than the severe Depression and to help them kill themselves is really a cost and time cutting exercise. So much easier to pretend that it’s not mental illness than to put in the effort and years of therapy to get them to a better mental place and enjoying their new life.

As @AderynBach has posted, this was a true story of a woman who did exactly what you plan to do and exactly how she was euthanised.

Your plan isn’t assisted suicide btw, it is for euthanasia as it depends on a physician giving you the drugs when they decide your condition has reached the threshold you described in your advance directive.

As I say, the debate is called “assisted dying” for a reason, because it includes both assisted suicide and euthanasia.

This is exactly the point. There's enough evidence on this thread to suggest that shortly after the 'safeguarded' law came in, there would be (as has happened, for example, in Canada), calls to widen it.

“Ask train drivers which way is the best. Or anyone who has found a loved one hanging by the rafters, or blue in the closed garage, or messy overdoses which have gone too far, cannot be reversed, and will take days of screaming agony to come to a conclusion.”

@fungipie this is quite alarming that you are saying that this should be an option for those in a mental crisis rather than, say, funding the NHS’ Tory defunded mental health care provision? It is very disturbing that you are assuming people that are mentally ill to the point of suicidal behaviours are in their right minds and have full mental capacity. Why even have a Mental Health Act or the ability to section people if suicide attempts and completions are perfectly sane acts? There goes the biggest safety net for the disabled with severe and chronic mental health conditions. Thanks

@BIossomtoes
Oh, the outcome of the court case was no one was charged with anything no doctor was struck off or reprimanded for the way that poor woman with dementia was euthanised. Her fighting back during the euthanasia was written off as nothing to see here.

I guess this thread’s an indication of what MN would have been like if it had existed before abortion was legalised. The emotion and hyperbole from people who think they have the right to deny others the choice about ending their own lives is very telling. We need a law with safeguards drawing from the best globally, based on clear evidence. It will very probably exclude dementia so my family will probably have to endure years of watching me become a travesty of myself.

And they would have a strong case at that point. How is it fair to restrict assisted dying to the terminally ill? If this is all about personal choice and subjective or woolly concepts like dignity or quality of life, then those 'safeguards' are simply inequitable and discriminatory.

Very worrying.

And quite right too because the woman who made the advance directive was the one with capacity.

Sickening comment.

You don’t think quality of life is important? Or dignity? Are you for real?

Culturally the UK is a somewhat harsher country in terms of how it treats the vulnerable compared to some of our European neighbours

Yes it is and there are often threads saying so, along the lines of (insert country) does it much better", "care in the UK's a nightmare" and so on

Only of course now that doesn't suit, the narrative changes to pretend the greatest of care would be taken to prevent abuses

Sorry, but it just doesn't compute

What I said is they are woolly (hard to define) and subjective. Reading comprehension.

Quality of life is defined by the owner of that life. It doesn’t need to be defined because it’s different for everyone.

You won’t persuade anyone by insulting them.

Yes the one making the directive had capacity, but are you really sure the woman fighting off the euthanasia to the point she kicked the syringe out of the doctors hand and had to be physically restrained also did not have capacity? Very convenient to let off everyone involved, even her relatives who might have lost their inheritance.

Lack of capacity doesn’t mean the person is not aware of what is being done to them. You might want to read the experiences of people who have been sectioned (judged to not have capacity and be a danger to themselves or others) and then you might understand that lack of capacity doesn’t mean a mental fuge state akin to a coma. People remember what happened, they are often traumatised at the inhumanity they are treated with.

Theres a few things in terms of unintended consequences to consider.

If you bring in assisted dying where is the incentive to improve end of life care? It's put up with poor care or 'why don't you just stop complaining and kill yourself?'

Then there's very traumatic life changing injuries. Plenty of people who have had them say they wanted to die and it takes them years to come to terms with that and rebuild their lives in ways that they hadn't envisaged. Again if the option to end your life is there would it just act as limiting the drive to rebuild your life as youd either have a directive to end your life or focus on ending your life rather than rebuilding it.

Then there's the 'ask train drivers' or 'they are going to do it anyway' arguments. What percentage of these deaths are people who a) very elderly b) have terminal illnesses c) have untreated mental health issues? This goes back to my point about the slippery slope. A large number of those people who jump in front of trains don't have an terminal illness and aren't at the end of their life expectancy. So why are train drivers and people with untreated mental health conditions being brought into this argument as a valid one for assisted dying at the end of life? This is weaponising suicide and is emotional blackmail and actually isn't anything to do with the type of cases that are apparently being advocated for here. These are the cases that are raising serious concerns about how otherwise healthy people could be allowed to be euthanased because of mental illness. THIS IS MY POINT.

Suicide like this should never be used as an argument. It's appalling.

As for the 'they are going to do it anyway' argument the whole point of making assisted dying available is precisely to 'widen access to death' for people who wouldn't or couldn't do it by other means.

It's funny, for all the 'the slippery slope wouldn't happen here' some of the arguments being used to legalise assisted dying - and the thought processes people are going through when doing polls for the likes Guardian are using logic like this making that choice - are very much in the camp of being very much further down the line of who can access assisted dying than many posters would like to believe.

The fact that the emotive arguments about train drivers and doing it anyway exist, is worrying. Where does that lead? The expectation that someone should put themselves forward to die? That the proposed law isn't going far enough at this stage because the poor old train driver isn't any better off?

It's clear that there's no necessarily a clear understanding of what this means and who it would effect...

Exactly.

Then don't put words into my mouth, please.

I am NOT saying that AT ALL. You are maming it up. Some of those who do commit suicide in the most awful of ways, including trains, do so because of their medical conditions.

Then there's very traumatic life changing injuries. Plenty of people who have had them say they wanted to die and it takes them years to come to terms with that and rebuild their lives in ways that they hadn't envisaged.

This was me. I had an accident and it was life changing. I had to give up my job and go on disability benefits. I had to have painful, boring physical therapy which took ages to make a difference. I thought there was very little point or value to my life.

At the same time as this I had to contend with the media pushing the story that people on benefits were faking it, or needed less money etc etc as the media do. It made me feel utterly worthless and useless to society. A burden on my husband.

Roll on a few years and I have retrained into a job that I can do with my physical limitations. I care for a child (my nephew) who otherwise would have ended up in foster care. Im a higher rate tax payer so I feel of value to society rather than a burden. I am happy.

Now not everyone had the luck to end up in my position. But many like me who have rebuilt our lives, whether we can work or not, provide value to our family, our friends, our society.

Or, you know, instead of funding rehabilitation, the media and the government could have made me feel like my life was worthless and then I could have killed myself easily with their support and encouragement.

Yes, people who use those suicide methods often do so because of their medical conditions going untreated- a mental illness is a medical condition and quite frequently you get more people with physical health conditions also developing mental illness when society devalues them, tells them they are better off dead, withholds the financial assistance they need to live in dignity (as the Gov has pledged with their stop PIP paper), violates their human rights, withholds the medical treatment they need for both physical and mental conditions…they despair.

I didn’t make up what you posted as an alarming justification for assisted dying- you were implying that it should be encouraged for the severely mentally ill with no thought at all for the vulnerable human being that is at their lowest point in their life. A human being that is acknowledged by the medical experts to not have the mental capacity needed to meet the requirements to consent to assisted suicide. They need a helping hand, not a poison pill.

“Ask train drivers which way is the best. Or anyone who has found a loved one hanging by the rafters, or blue in the closed garage, or messy overdoses which have gone too far, cannot be reversed, and will take days of screaming agony to come to a conclusion.”

The difference is that the evidence surrounding abortion is that it is a benefit to lives, but the evidence surrounding assisted dying is that it has always led to abuses and what is essentially the death penalty for a person whose only crime is to be vulnerable- the elderly, the disabled, the teens and young adults.

You’ve missed the point. Never mind.

Every human should have the right to decide if they want to live or not regardless of why.

We make humans live horrible horrible lives just because we can. When it would put you in jail to keep a dog in such situations.

Yeah yeah sure people can think of some way to kill themselves but some who would won’t because they worry about the the person finding them. Having proper clinics means anyone who want to can and in a dignified why, causing no harm to anyone else. No the train driver, not the cleaner going into the hotel room, not the lorry or car driver from that person jumping off a bridge. Not that missing person who turns up weeks later jumped into a river.

Dignified deaths for all and living wills for when people hit a point there they have made clear they wouldn’t want to live anymore.