Letters - 18 July 2014
From assisted suicide to bees
Assisted suicide
These two Friends say ‘Yes’ to assisted suicide as proposed in the Bill to be discussed in the House of Lords on Friday. On the following day, Quakers in Yorkshire will be discussing the report produced by Friends from the Leeds area on ‘End of Life Issues’.
About twenty years ago a young Dutch friend of ours who had an inoperable brain tumour decided that he did not want to die in pain and anguish, gradually losing his faculties. His father (a Dutch Reformed minister), his mother and his younger sister were able to be present at his prearranged death following the application of the procedures allowed under Dutch law, which are very similar to those now being proposed in Charles Falconer’s Bill. These procedures in the Netherlands ensure that the system is not abused.
George Carey, former archbishop of Canterbury, is quoted as saying: ‘The fact is that I have changed my mind.’ He asks of himself: ‘Had I been putting doctrine before compassion, dogma before human dignity?’
Surely, as Friends, our priorities should be for compassion and for human dignity!
Gareth Evans (11 July) says ‘we should choose life’. Surely this Bill would enable some whose life is intolerable to avoid a living death!
Chris and Michael Yates
For a person who is suffering and in a terminal condition, it is not our need to show loving care, nor our concern to prevent greedy relations from encouraging their death that is important, but the need of the sufferer. That can be judged only by that sufferer in conjunction with his/her doctors. We don’t want new laws. We want an element of flexibility that allows the sufferer to decide together with more than one doctor (possibly through a close relative if that is unavoidable) whether that life can be ended medically without the doctors being prosecuted. We evidently do not have that flexibility at the moment. That is not encouraging suicide in such cases. It is just making it possible. We should not sit in judgement ourselves from outside.
Elaine Miles
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