Good news, I feel, that the Assisted Dying Bill is returning to parliament in two weeks time. The assisted dying law would enable people expected to die within six months to be given help to end their own life. In the last parliamentary session, a series of religious fanatics and so-called disability campaigners used cynical denying mechanisms in the House of Lords – known as filibustering – to kill the bill. Now it’s coming back. I am at a loss as to why the bill should not get parliamentary approval. If proper safeguards are in place, then what’s the problem?
I am a great believer in individual freedom. If you object to equal (gay) marriage, then don’t marry a gay person. If you disapprove of abortion, then don’t have one. By the same token, if you would prefer to suffer, potentially, an horrendous, painful death rather than being helped to end it at a time of your choosing, then good luck to you: no one would be forcing you. With regards to the choices of others, then mind your own business, right?
I genuinely don’t get it. My partner and I decided long ago that if the other was incurably sick, a DNR notice would be placed prominently on the bed. I want to be able to live a good, quality (or should that be good quality?) life, not kept alive if I have no idea where I am or what I’m doing. I would not want life for life’s sake. But, by the same token, I would argue, equally strongly, for the rights of those who would like to be kept alive by whatever method for as long as they would have wished.
As a card-carrying atheist, I am obviously not troubled by how a possible assisted death would be viewed by a religious person, or indeed by the God who, to all intents and purposes, isn’t there. I struggle with the notion that a kindly, caring God would want his worshippers to suffer what I would consider to be an unnecessarily grim death. I don’t have ‘faith’ in the existence of a supernatural creator. Instead, I have free will and I would like to have the opportunity to exercise it, not least with my death.
As well as being disappointed with the powerful and largely unelected forces – particularly the House of Lords and the various houses of God – who are lined-up against the freedom to choose, I am disappointed too in the comments of the prime minister Andy Burnham, who has said he has his own personal views on the issue but will not seek to influence how MPs vote in the House of Commons. Well, why not? One likely explanation could be that Burnham is a Catholic and we all know how conservative the Catholic Church can be when it comes to the freedom of choice. I cannot know whether he is putting his ‘faith’ above his duty to lead the country but I am not impressed. Again, no one is asking the PM to choose whether to be assisted to die when the time comes. Broken record time: it’s up to the individual. Shouldn’t politicians respect that?
Anyone who has seen a loved one die a long, slow and often agonising death will have a view on this. If you’re of the view that ‘God’s will’ matters most and that no one should ‘play God’, then I can’t help you. I saw close relatives and friends die horrible deaths and I can’t help feeling if it was me, I would rather my own come about in a manner of my choosing. My life, my death, my choice.
And that’s all I am asking for. It’s not that I want to die before I get old, at Pete Townshend put it when he was young but I’d like to pass without pain and with dignity. In an ideal world, I’d rather not die at all, but sadly that’s not an option. So let me choose and you can choose, too. It’s no one else’s business and that’s the real point.
