[The Weeping Angel]

Pressure will be put on those who are considered a burden to end their own lives. We need to improve palliative care instead.

[The Weeping Angel]

I've been following Danielle for 8 years she's not a bad actor.

Then you'll know she mainly posts about American Football...

She posts about a lot of stuff including American and British politics and it's baseball not American Football.

[Andy McDandy]

My dad spent his last 3 months in an absolutely brilliant hospice, dosed up on morphine as cancer spread through his bones. The care was great. He still wanted to blow his own brains out every day of it.

[Tubby Isaacs]

Palliative care a non-sequitur that Wes Streeting has put in the public domain because he opposes assisted dying on principle (which I don't agree with, but I can see there is a big issue of principle here, so respect that position).

If I'm the sort of person who thinks the terminally ill are a burden, or just wants to get my inheritance now, which I'm not, what's the standard of palliative care got to do with it?

[Abernathy]

We need to improve palliative care as well.

FTFY.

[The Weeping Angel]

This article by Gordon Brown has really helped shape my views on this issue.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... nd-of-life

[Tubby Isaacs]

How does that address Andy's point?

The end of life care can be great. You can still be in agony for months on end.

[Tubby Isaacs]

As I've said before, virtually nobody now says that people who travel with their love ones to Dignitas should be prosecuted. Surely, these cases set off all the alarm bells for opponents of assisted dying? Patient well enough to travel to Switzerland. loved one will inherit. If it's OK to take someone to Switzerland for an assisted death, why is it wrong to have the same possibility here?

[Crabcakes]

Pressure will be put on those who are considered a burden to end their own lives. We need to improve palliative care instead.

You’re putting vague concerns about an unlikely hypothetical scenario there will be multiple safeguards against ahead of ending the bizarre practice of thinking people being effectively slowly tortured to death by their own failing bodies is morally superior.

Palliative care, if you need it, is not some magic wand that turns your last few months or weeks into a guaranteed pain-free wonderland of bucket-list activities and joyous goodbyes. It is often the fact that effective palliative care renders you more or less already gone because you are so drugged up to merely ensure you are comfortable that you are capable of little more than sitting in a bed, drifting in and out of consciousness, waiting for your organs to fail - and this is the medical definition of ‘comfortable’ where you may still feel mostly ghastly but you’re at least not rolling around screaming or constantly vomiting your insides out, not comfortable as in propping yourself up on a sofa with a good book and a single malt. It is not a good way to go, it is merely a better way to go than to not have it at all.

Improving palliative care is something we should strive to do regardless, but it is not an alternative to assisted dying. Even if it was as good as it could possibly ever be, it does not fix the problem that for some people it is nothing but a prolonging of the worst part of life with the only guarantees being they will continue to worsen and it will change nothing.

Put the paranoia aside. This is about giving people dignity and choice about how their time comes to an end. We think nothing of letting people have autonomy throughout their entire adult lives because it is the right thing to do. We even extend that to children and young people where possible because we all recognise the rights of the individual - except, inexplicably and shamefully in death, where suddenly many people clutch at pearls and say we can’t possibly let anyone make their own decisions about their final moments and that must be left to others. Suddenly it’s not their right to say they want to spare their loved ones having to see them suffer a drawn out, painful decline. Nor their right to not have to go through that awful experience themselves. Instead, we let squeamishness and taboo dictate that, at the worst possible time for those unfortunate enough to be suffering an incurable and terminal condition, they must endure it for as long as medical science can sustain them for and their friends and loved ones must observe this.

This is an absolutely intolerable and inhumane practice, and it absolutely must end.

[Abernathy]

As ever, very eloquently put, Crabbers, and dead on the money.

[Tubby Isaacs]

A fair bit is being made of the fact that lots of people in places where they have had assisted death (eg Oregon) say that they don't want to be a burden on relatives. But this is being misrepresented, I think. This doesn't imply at all that there isn't terrible pain, or a painful prognosis. Nor does it mean relatives have been in their ear moaning about burdens. It's a perfectly natural thing for anybody to say. If I'm terminally ill and in awful pain, I don't think it's bad for me to think of the effect on my wife as well.

[Crabcakes]

Exactly this. My grandmother had a long slow decline from an incurable condition, had said for some time she was ready to go, but eventually ended up in hospital for an extended period when we could no longer care for her at home. The burden on my mum wasn’t physical or financial, but purely mental.

She unavoidably lived her life around hospital visits while trying to also care for me (I was primary age at the time) and my Grandad, and the worry that she wouldn’t be there when her mum’s time came. And regrettably, she wasn’t. A bus was late and she missed her mum passing away by 15 minutes. A nurse said she passed peacefully in her sleep, but to this day my mum is haunted by not knowing if that was said just to comfort her.

This is what having no control over your end is like. Being forced to put your loved ones through a daily wringer of guilt and helplessness.

[kreuzberger]

I'll add to this that I am not convinced that some people don't really understand what "palliative care" actually is.

It sure as hell isn't fairy-dust which makes our demise a breeze. And when pain decides to really have a go at you, morphine will be fighting a losing battle. Oxycodon is a case in point. That shit outperforms heroin by a country mile and post-op patients can expect to receive a 10mg pill or two in the immediate aftermath.

Mine are 20mg (without the Naloxone) which is approaching 50% of the overdose level for non-addicted people, and that dosage only begins to manage deep-seated spinal pain. It wouldn't even touch the sides of ailments that will actually kill you. Tumours and the like.

I am sure that late-stage palliative care is great insofar as it reassures the left-behinds that everything possible was done to alleviate an agonising death pockmarked by shitting yourself on the hour. The problem is that it doesn't and can't. It merely prolongs the misery and the humiliation.

[Crabcakes]

Similarly, when I badly broke my arm a few years back I was in overnight to have it pinned and operated on the next day. For that night - where it wasn’t set and just in a temp cast - I was told I could have as much morphine as I wanted. And I did. And all it did was get the pain down to a point where I could pass out for half a hour or so without immediately coming to again because it was so fucking bad. And morphine wouldn’t even touch the sides for most cancer patients.

[Abernathy]

Indeed. Nobody would really want to be a “burden” to their family or loved ones. A worry on the part of a terminally ill person that their care may be burdensome to loved ones is natural, and quite possibly unavoidable in the circumstances. Most loved ones or relatives giving care to a close relative in such circumstances would, one imagines, strongly reject any proffered suggestion, whether by their ailing relative or indeed from any other source, that looking after a parent, relative or other loved one was burdensome, even if it really was.

Of course, there will be a small minority of cases where relatives with terminally ill loved ones really are motivated by greed and/or malevolence to try to procure a decision to opt for assisted suicide early on via coercion of their relatives. But that small minority has always been there, and probably always will be. The Leadbeater Bill includes provision for countering such coercion, and goes further in prescribing a penalty of a 14 year gaol sentence for anyone found to have engaged in coercion.

Frankly, the worry around coercion is something of a red herring. .

[Nigredo]

Although it has a slight theological bent to it, Deadwood has an excellent scene covering this topic and it's of great influence upon the moral stance I take.

[Oboogie]

I've been avoiding this debate but I'm now sufficiently angry I need to vent. Feel free to scroll past if you wish.

I made up my mind about this issue over 50 years ago. I'd like to share some experiences with you.

1. I was probably about seven when my dad first told me about his friend who trod on an anti-personnel mine in the Western Desert in 1942. The blast ripped the man apart from the crotch upwards, his stomach and internal organs were hanging out of what was left of his uniform but he was still alive and begging for death. My dad shot him with his revolver. The single most traumatising thing he did in six years of war. Some would call that murder, I call it mercy and I decided then where I stood on assisted dying.

2. Twelve years ago my Mum got Alzheimer's. In any meaningful sense she was gone. She rapidly degenerated to a point where she needed 24 hour care. Incontinent, incapable of feeding herself, unable to recognise anyone unable to follow TV programmes let alone read. Long hours crying and wailing "There is no God" over and over again - like a mantra. Twenty years earlier she made me promise to "smother her with a pillow if she ever went gaga" - this was in reaction to an elderly neighbour whom she was friendly with getting dementia. It was her clear wish that she did not wish to live with that condition. Through cowardice, I didn't keep my promise - I didn't want to go to prison. So the law got it's wish and her suffering was dragged out for two years before she thankfully got some peace.

3. In September I watched my partner's Dad die. It was no great surprise, he was 84 had survived two heart attacks and had been on a pacemaker for at least ten years. His heartbeat fell to a point where his blood oxygen was about a fifth of what it should be. Not quite enough to kill him, but enough to reduce him to a bed ridden wreck whilst we waited to see how long it would take to kill him. Turned out it was five days. His wife and children and their partners took it in turns to go and sit with him. He didn't recognise us of course, most of the time he was out cold. Occasionally he'd manage to utter a few words, "I'm ready to go now" was an oft repeated phrase. The lack of oxygen to his brain caused hallucinations and he'd sometimes start screaming because he thought the hospital was on fire (he was a fireman for forty years). Luckily he only had to suffer for five days before he went to meet his maker - he was a practicing Christian.

In the days which followed, my partner and I talked a lot. Turned out we were both haunted by the memory of the vet who put the hard word on us for procrastinating over having our fifteen year old, cancer-riddled dog put down. The vet used words like "cruelty" and "selfishness" and she was right of course. But it's much easier to end the suffering of an animal, nobody's going to lock you up for that. It's only human pain and misery which must be dragged out as long as possible to please those who say they know what's best for us.

[Malcolm Armsteen]

This isn't filling me with confidence.

Leadbeater has made clear that it is the title of the bill that cannot be changed, and in that title lies the intent and scope of the legislation.

[Abernathy]

Anybody else watching the debate on TV?

Kim Leadbeater opened the debate with a surpassingly excellent speech introducing her bill. I'd like to reiterate my unabashed admiration for Kim, not only for her courage in bringing forward this bill, but for her conspicuous integrity, intelligence, and compassion. All qualities that she exhibited when agreeing to stand for election to parliament in the by-election in Batley & Spen after her sister, Jo Cox, was so brutally murdered, a by-election held in a poisonous atmosphere generated by the execrable George Galloway and his loathsome supporters. She has done excellent work in drafting this bill, and it deserves to succeed.

The opening speech against the bill was by Danny Kruger.

[Andy McDandy]

He seems to be going for the "devil in the details" approach.

This is beginning to remind me of the Irish abortion debate. Legalising a thing doesn't make it compulsory. Nothing is stopping people improving alternative options. If a thing remains illegal, people will still do it, albeit with fewer safeguards and/or recourse to the law if they get fucked over.