Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Epigraph
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Overture: Reflections of a Metaphysical Flâneur
- PART 1 BRAINS, PERSONS AND BEASTS
- PART II PHILOSOPHY AND PHYSICS
- PART III PHILOSOPHY AND PHYSIC
- 12 Medical Ethics in the Real Mess of the Real World
- 13 On Caring and Not Caring
- 14 Coinages of the Mind: Hallucinations
- 15 Becoming the Prisoners of Our Free Choices
- 16 The Right to an Assisted Death
- Epilogue: And So to Bed: Notes towards a Philosophy of Sleep from A to Zzzzzzz
- Bibliography
- Index
16 - The Right to an Assisted Death
from PART III - PHILOSOPHY AND PHYSIC
- Frontmatter
- Epigraph
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Overture: Reflections of a Metaphysical Flâneur
- PART 1 BRAINS, PERSONS AND BEASTS
- PART II PHILOSOPHY AND PHYSICS
- PART III PHILOSOPHY AND PHYSIC
- 12 Medical Ethics in the Real Mess of the Real World
- 13 On Caring and Not Caring
- 14 Coinages of the Mind: Hallucinations
- 15 Becoming the Prisoners of Our Free Choices
- 16 The Right to an Assisted Death
- Epilogue: And So to Bed: Notes towards a Philosophy of Sleep from A to Zzzzzzz
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
I have been preoccupied for nearly a decade by the need for a change in the law to legalize the choice of physician-assisted dying for mentally competent people with terminal illness who have expressed a settled wish to die. In summer 2011, I was elected chair of a new group – Healthcare Professionals for Assisted Dying (HPAD) – whose immediate aim is to represent the views of doctors, nurses and other healthcare professionals who favour a change in the law. I took over this role from Dr Ann McPherson.
I was privileged to know Ann, sadly only for a short time, before she died in June 2011. By a bitter irony she had a hideous death, which her daughter – a consultant dermatologist – described in harrowing detail in a “Personal View” in the British Medical Journal (2012). Despite her unbearable symptoms, which had resisted the best possible palliative care, any physician assisting her to die (by, for example, writing a prescription for life-ending medication) would have been prosecuted for manslaughter, and been liable to a fourteen-year gaol sentence.
That anyone could oppose such a humane ambition as decriminalization of assisted dying may seem astonishing. But there has been highly organized opposition to a change in the law. Some opponents have appealed to religious principles such as “the sanctity of life”, but more often than not wrap up their opposition in a cloak of pragmatic concerns intended to instil fear.
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- Reflections of a Metaphysical FlâneurAnd Other Essays, pp. 247 - 275Publisher: Acumen PublishingPrint publication year: 2013