Noel Conway is 67 and wants to die. He suffers from Motor Neurone Disease (MND). He uses a ventilator overnight, requires a wheelchair and needs help to dress, eat and with personal care. Personal care means going to the toilet. Imagine every aspect of going to the toilet and then imagine needing help to carry out every aspect.
His MND is not going to get better. Within a year, Mr Conway will almost certainly die and he fears he will die of suffocation or choking. When his health deteriorates, as it will, he wants a doctor to give him a lethal dose of drugs. I cannot, for the life of me, understand why he should not be allowed to do so.
The most important aspect is surely that this is the business of Mr Conway and his family. Given certain essential safeguards he should be able to choose the time of his passing. After all, I have visited numerous vets over the years, accompanying sick animals to whom a lethal injection of drugs was administered to prevent the animal from further suffering. Have you ever seen a much-loved family dog or cat suffer horribly? Some friends of ours had a cat which developed a blood clot that wedged in his pelvic causing paralysis in his back legs. The animal was in terrible distress and was humanely killed. What kind of person would allow a beautiful animal to carry on living like that? No one, I hope, but why doesn’t this apply to we humans?
The usual suspects are out tonight, the religious zealots who regard all human life as sacred, sticking their noses in where they aren’t wanted. What right have they to tell others what to do with their lives and deaths? I appreciate they are wedded to their religious superstition and if that superstition prevents them deciding to take their own lives in such circumstances, that’s their business and not mine. But if someone else of sound mind, but not body, feels differently, quite frankly the devout can butt out.
Have you ever come across someone ravaged by Alzheimers, Huntingdons, MND and all those other ghastly diseases and thought, “Well, I hope that doesn’t happen to me.”? I know I have and I would not want to be kept alive, but not living. What purpose does that serve? Who wins there? The ailing person, the desperate family and – let’s be brutal here – the taxpayer? There is such a difference between being alive and living.
And what if there was a heaven and what if you met that sick grandfather who died all those years ago from Alzheimers? Does God operate care homes in heaven, too? I hope he pays more than the minimum wage. And don’t tell me that God cures dead people from their various ailments when they pass through the Pearly Gates without first explaining why he didn’t do that when they were still alive on earth?
This is no slippery slope to some sinister Nazi programme of killing off the weak and vulnerable. It is a common sense view of how the world is and how it should be, properly regulated, yes, but with people in charge of their own destiny.
Of course, Mr Conway should be allowed to choose when his life ends. He should not have to dread being carted off to Dignitas in Switzerland when the time gets near, or worse suffocating or choking to death.
I am often accused of having a black and white view of life and that’s never been more true tonight. There are no shades of grey with assisted suicide but that’s okay too. No one should be compelled to end their life in that way but no one should be prevented from doing so either. To assist in suicide can see someone sent to prison for 14 years. Not all cats reach that age. And no one is sent to prison when Tiddles is put to sleep, are they?
