You’re supposed to tough it out so you don’t go downstairs. (Hell)
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They are not asking someone else to make the decision, the sick person makes the decision, the doctors merely facilitate it.
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This really shows how deeply personal and complex the issue is.
Dignity and compassion should always be at the heart of such decisions.
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Not in every case Bruce… 
And how long before the doctors and family members make the ultimate decision…
Thin end of the wedge.
There’s nothing wrong with the system the way it is now.
It shouldn’t be made a law, how many more laws do we need?
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Perhaps read how another country sets out the rules for medical assistance in dying - such as Canada. Your speculation above seems very wrong.
https://www.canada.ca/en/health-canada/services/health-services-benefits/medical-assistance-dying.html
As I understand it the folks going to hell will include the doctor, nurse, the receptionist and of course all of the family members that encouraged him or her. Oh yeah, him or her too.
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I think you are making problems where none exist OGF, the legislation has a lot of safeguards including residentiary and age provision as well as life expectancy.
Several other safeguards were considered and included in the legislation in NSW (other states have similar regulations but with differences for example in some states the dose must be administered by the patient themselves).
- The patient can stop or pause the VAD process at any moment without reason
- Three separate requests to end their life must be made
- Each decision must be made without pressure, influence or coercion
- A family member or friend cannot make the request on a patient’s behalf
- The patient must be given information about their diagnosis, prognosis, treatment options and palliative care during the process
- Medical practitioners involved must have completed VAD training
- The Voluntary Assisted Dying Board will oversee, monitor and review all decisions
It is also an offence, punishable by a term of imprisonment, to persuade a patient to access VAD or administer VAD medication without following the formal process.
Bruce the trouble is that Britain would make a mess of it.
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Whilst I can understand your point, this is not really much of an argument, is it? If this is true then why bother making any improvement in the UK? Why bother with any new safety measure? Why bother with any new regulation to reduce risks? Why bother change anything?
Besides, there’s plenty of things successfully introduced and run in the UK.
We haven’t even been able to launch an ID card. We aren’t even able to decriminalise marijuana.
You only need a few court cases before things that are controversial but considered successfully introduced end up being withdrawn and an “inquiry” set up which takes years to conclude that whatever it was was badly introduced. There is then a “blame game” and whoever did whatever wrong is publicly disgraced.
This type of law is incredibly controversial and divisive as there are so many ifs and buts and so many groups who are against it.
There is great fear by politicians because so much could go wrong particularly where mental illness crosses over into physical illness.
What we usually do in Britain to introduce something without formally introducing it is to do so in a sideways move. For example in the case of ID cards they have instead gone for a far more invasive move to gain access to bank accounts, ban large cash transactions without invasive checks, introduced facial recognition tech etc. Far more controversial moves but these are more difficult to challenge as they are bitty and in many cases loopholes in other legislation such as data protection act amendments etc.
In the case of assisted dying, the sideways move would be to decriminalise those who go abroad with a relative, etc.
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I do see your concern. However I’m weighing that against the reality of condemning people to weeks or months or years of needless suffering with no upside. And I would again point to countries who are running assisted dying schemes with little problem. And just because their population is a bit smaller, 40 million in the case of Canada, I really do not see how that is a significant factor. 40 million is not much different from 65 million when it comes to infrastructure, dissemination, governance. organisation, or anything.
It seems to be there is on the one hand a vague, small, potential risk of problems and on the other a whole bunch of needless suffering. On a set of scales it is surely clear which way the scales would fall.
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I totally agree that we should have legislation, I just don’t think this will happen for a long time for the reasons given.
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Well I’d still vote against if asked.
And I still think it’s the thin end of the wedge.
I don’t care what other countries do, that’s for those citizens to decide, but unless the common man or woman has lost all control of the democracy in the UK we should be asked to vote on Assisted Dying, instead of allowing some grumpy old men in government who are not in touch with the people do it for us.
Everybody has a smartphone now, so how hard could it be?
I would have nothing against a referendum on such an issue - provided it was simply to determine the views of the nation. That is, the result would not be binding.
This is because its a complex and emotive issue. Referendums are always bad at giving an answer to complex and emotive issues. They are prone to misinformation, misleading notions and poor logical conclusions (from both sides). But the worse thing about referendums is that they fail to provide the “what next, how will that work”. The question is necessarily one of support or not support. That fails to give the details of exactly what system, requirements, process, safety guards, monitoring, governance, etc. are people being asked to support or not support.
Of course we run a representative democracy precisely because of such complex issue.
one thing is for sure and that is that we will never ever have another referendum about anything ever.
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Yes, I agree Ms Pimmy…
I’m in favour of it though recognise people’s concerns …
but surely it was the same when the Abortion Laws were first brought in. I wonder how many times they were tweaked and fine tuned.
Abortion, Assisted Dying … They’re both dealing with Life or the death of Life… in protecting individual rights and fighting a balance that does not offend but suits everyone’s needs.
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And in your opinion I suspect they never give the result that you agree with Lincs…Most people are just thick aren’t they…?
You can blame the internet and the media for all the misinformation, and it’s usually presented by the establishment.
I think they are only now fine tuning them, at least the legislation is being debated to decriminalise abortion.
Abortion laws are a good example of how the law can be adapted to let anything happen. The laws are actually very strict but there are hundreds of thousands of abortions each year because about 90% are for the “mental distress” reason. Now I don’t know for sure whether a doctor has to make a diagnosis to even prove the mother would be so depressed that it would be more harm to her to keep a baby, but it is expedient to use that option so it becomes a tick box.
Many people are quite de-sensitised to abortion, but if the same tick box process was used for euthanasia they would be up in arms. The right to life becomes very subjective.
Actually that is not true - the 2014 Scottish independence referendum ended up with exactly the outcome I was hoping for.
And, no-one can deny that the “establishment” (whatever that is but lets call it the government of the time) provides lots of misinformation in the lead up to a referendum. We saw that in the project fear of the 2014 referendum - lots of exaggerated claims of imminent disaster if there was a leave vote. Then they did the same in 2016.
The bigger problem is that a referendum assumes the possible change being voted on is fully understood and well defined. That was not the case in either 2014 or 2016. Both were just “leave” with no details on what that would actually look like.
I would not say that people who voted (in what I would call the wrong way) to leave in either referendum were thick. I would say that they let gut feelings of rejecting a perceived bad thing (either the English Westminster or the EU Brussels) and a jingoistic believe that walking away from that “bad thing” would necessarily be better. And as there was no detail in either case of what the leaving would result in, this allowed that jingoistic believe to settle on vague ideas, not specific hard arrangements. That is not being thick, but it is definitely not applying clear headed, objective thinking. It is subjective hoping.
Back in 2014 it seemed certain that full Scottish separation from the UK was going to be problematic, economically damaging and very risky. A trade border with England? A loss of military capability? Either a dependency of the English pound or joining the euro zone?
Back in 2016 it seems very clear that that leaving the EU would be economically damaging, stifle trade with the closest partners & difficult (impossible) to replace further afield, and increase Putin’s threat to Europe. That is what has happened, as would similar worries for the 2014 leave vote.
Both sets of worries about leaving are simply looking objectively at what certainly would be lost, what risks and unknowns are created and how difficult it would be to address both. However this objectivity gets blurred by there not being a clear definition of what the post-leave situation would be in detail. Every objective worry can be (was) countered by a “not necessarily” made up vagueness on how things would be after leaving.
I hope this makes sense - even if one continues to be in the mindset of jingoistic hope and warm fuzziness of imagined (but not actually real) independence.
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