Terry Pratchett Considers Assisted Suicide 838
cHALiTO writes "Beloved science fiction and fantasy writer Terry Pratchett has terminal early-onset Alzheimer's. He's determined to have the option of choosing the time and place of his death, rather than enduring the potentially horrific drawn-out death that Alzheimer's sometimes brings. But Britain bans assisted suicide, and Pratchett is campaigning to have the law changed. As part of this, he has visited Switzerland's Dignitas clinic, an assisted suicide facility, with a BBC camera crew, as part of a documentary that will include Britain's first televised suicide. Pratchett took home Dignitas's assisted suicide consent forms."
Re:Hmmm (Score:3, Informative)
Cohen the Barbarian
Also see "PBS Frontline: The Suicide Tourist" (Score:4, Informative)
It may be "Britain's first televised suicide", but PBS made a documentary on this topic before:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/suicidetourist/ [pbs.org]
Note that it was widely slammed as being some manner of disguised snuff movie. Watch it and make up your own mind.
Personally I think such statements are more indicative of the taboo that still rests on euthanasia (and death in general) than that they have any basis in the film's content or presentation.
Re:Every person's right (Score:5, Informative)
Its the UK, a different culture. There they believe its the governments right to totally control how you live...
With respect, that's horse-shit.
Re:Not much else to say. (Score:5, Informative)
http://catholicexchange.com/2011/06/14/154594/ [catholicexchange.com]
For those that don't want to read it, this is the argument:
"If we adopt a law holding that a person has the right to kill himself, soon we will also adopt euthanasia; because if the individual has the right to say when his life is no longer worth living, soon society will claim this right as well."
The rest just bashes the media, liberalism, and socialism.
Re:Good for him (Score:4, Informative)
There's a woman in the US distributing instructions and selling partial kits [latimes.com] for doing much the same thing with a large plastic bag and a tank of helium from the party-supply store.
How effective is it? One of the reasons that Halon fire suppression systems were banned was that leaks resulted in odorless Halon pooling under raised floors, and techs working on the cabling passing out and suffocating when they stuck their head down into the pool. The Russian Navy still uses it in submarines; in 2008, 20 people died [bbc.co.uk] when the fire suppression system was accidentally activated (the article contains an error; the Russian Navy subsequently issued a clarification that the gas involved was Halon, not freon).
Re:Suicide (Score:4, Informative)
Suicide is mans attempt to keep control of what he never had any control of. Himself.
I'm not sure I see any factual statement in that. Wanting to die with dignity and sparing the lives of others around him is not related to lacking control throughout life.
Legal suicide is an invitation for the 'state' to decide who is worthy to live and die because it immediately puts law makers in the position of deciding who's life is worthy of being required to live.
Many states already do that with the death penalty, but yet we are still not allowed to chose to legally commit suicide. In fact, it's illegal in many states to even attempt to commit suicide and you can be charged criminally if you attempt (and fail) to do so. Allowing someone to voluntarily commit assisted suicide does not put the government in control of that person's life, it puts the individual in charge.
As has always happened in the past legal suicide will not be fully voluntary for long , because it will be used as an excuse to not take care of those people who choose not to use the 'option' when they are no longer 'worthy' of support.
Again, we're talking about voluntary assisted suicide, which means that the individual chooses, not the government or care-taker. While it's entirely possible that the Power of Attorney could invoke assisted suicide on another individual, there could be laws placed against that if assisted suicide were to be made legal.
Point being, if someone wants to die, it should be their choice. My father's life-long best friend committed suicide in his back yard the day after getting a terminal cancer diagnosis; while in his case it was a little selfish, he spared his family many years of grueling stress and granted them a positive feeling that he is in a better place now.
Re:Don't do it (Score:4, Informative)
When my grandfather was dying of a necrotized intestine, for which there is no cure or treatment, it took him a week to die. A week during which 'pain management' did nothing.
I asked the doctor if there was any way we could hasten the inevitable. He was shocked and outraged at my lack of humanity.
It was then that I realized that if I treated a dog the way they were treating my grandpa, keeping a dog alive when you knew for a damn fact he was going to die within a week, but that week would be full of horrid pain, you'd be up on charges of animal cruelty.
Modern society extends, even requires, courtesies to dogs that they deny to human beings.
Re:Every person's right (Score:5, Informative)
The government does NOT have the right to kill you. The death penalty is illegal within the European Union and considered a human rights violation.
Re:Terry should look at these treatments (Score:5, Informative)
PTerry already does a huge amount for Alzheimers projects. He doesn't expect the fix to come in before it's too late for him, and so he's making his plans and raising a stink about the issues while he still can.
As for "he should look at these examples," he's already keeping abreast of everything that's going on in this field. In fact, right at the beginning of all this, he asked all the n-thousand people who would write to him going "have you tried X, Y or Z" option to please not do so, unless they were a neurosurgeon or brain expert, to keep the clutter down and the signal-to-noise ratio up.
Amusingly, a disproportionate number of top-flight experts in these areas are fans. He effectively has a whole bunch of experts who keep him aware of the state of play.
Put simply, he's doing everything he can in his position, including laying the ground work in the event it's not quick enough.
Re:Every person's right (Score:5, Informative)
The charter of Human Rights states that the right to life is inalienable. The UK, like any EU member state, is bound to it. Adding exceptions to a basic human right is extremely dangerous.
"inalienable[in-eyl-yuh-nuh-buhl, -ey-lee-uh-]
–adjective
not alienable; not transferable to another or capable of being repudiated: inalienable rights."
In other words the right to life rest solely in the hands of the individual, which would extend to the right to end that life. No other can decide on that right. I'm lucky enough to life in a state with euthanasia laws, hopefully I won't ever have to use them but I'm glad to have the option.
Re:Well damn... (Score:4, Informative)
Adult stem cells aren't much use in research. It has been established that they are too limited and that all efforts to generalize them will render them incompatible with the original person - they're rejected as foreign bodies.
Re:pterry (Score:4, Informative)
Here are some of my worst nightmares:
Infecting other people with a terminal disease.
Dying slowly watching yourself drag down those around you watching them get more and more miserable as you gradually decline and there's nothing you can do about it.
Losing my mind slowly, waking up occasionally seeing how far I have fallen that brief moment of clarity of the state I have degraded to before knowing any second i will lose it again.
Living daily in agony unable to move unable to speak tormented by pain and disease.
There are many worse things than a quick death.