This was the jokey demand of our dear Auntie Peg as she moved deeper into old age and felt less than fully alive. She was a countrywoman who had seen farmers putting distressed animals out of their misery. She was a lovable and gifted human being - an artist, a musician and a cook who regularly fed us to bursting. She was a lot of fun. But as her strength waned, life lost its savour. A woman of faith, she would tell us that she daily ‘asked the Lord to take her’. But he did not...not until she was 92.
We thought about her and other relatives we have accompanied in the final years of their lives as the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life Bill 2024-25) began to be discussed apparently with great seriousness in Parliament last Friday. We also thought about our aging selves and the possibility that we could feel pressure to relinquish our lives for practical, economic reasons. Both parliament and country are divided but in both there is a majority in favour. Despite there being more parliamentary stages to go through, we sense that it is an idea whose time may have come.
We bring to our responses both experience and theory.
Mike’s mother died at 95. The last time he saw her alive she seemed terribly distressed. He asked the doctor if there was anything he could do to relieve her apparent distress. He and his colleagues would consider increasing the dose of morphine, he replied. Within hours she was dead and he never knew if his intervention had influenced medical judgement.
In a world where everyone is so busy and aged relatives can represent deferred bequests, there must be ultra strict safeguards to deter family members who are just too impatient to get on with their own lives to offer care to their loved ones. Legislation on assisted dying takes us into deep waters. Sometimes we do not know what we are doing. We must proceed with great caution and utmost seriousness.
Helen never felt called to be a medic of any kind! But she has been enriched by the great privileges and (to her) many surprising rewards of the sometimes onerous task of accompanying elderly family members in the final years of life. She has become very slightly more positive about the idea of euthanasia, especially where good palliative care is unavailable. It can be the lesser of two evils. She has sometimes seen death, when it did arrive as what a friend called ‘a merciful providence’. All she wanted for these beloved sufferers long before the end came was ‘to be gently put to sleep’. Aging herself, as someone with a very low pain threshold, she like Auntie Peg, feels she would be more than willing to be lovingly ‘put out of her misery’ were she to be in great pain.
Mike’s reservations are of the ethical slippery slope variety. He fears that over time legal provision will morph into expectation which will eventually become a norm. At a certain point ailing people will be expected to do the ‘decent thing’ for the sake of the family or even perhaps for a community struggling to provide adequate health and social care provision.
This slide is precisely what happened with the Abortion Act 1967 and Divorce Reform Act 1969. Each was intended to deal with a small minority of difficult cases but within just a few years the numbers mushroomed till they became what they are today. Having an abortion and getting a divorce are now regarded as everyday events.
So much depends on whether people see human beings as primarily a unit of production or consumption of limited resources, or as wonderful beings of value in and of themselves, wherever they are on their human journey. Making euthanasia a ‘right’ would take our society to a very dark place. It may seem far off, but such changes could take place surprisingly quickly in our unstable world.
There are of course many other considerations beyond the ones we have mentioned in this slightly longer blog than usual. The subject is hugely complex and takes us to the heart of what it is to be a human being.
There are perhaps two things that we can all do. We can inform ourselves about the complex theoretical issues surrounding the decision to end a life and then think about the way that we and our own loved ones would wish or have wished to come to their ends.
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