Kevin Yuill writes:
It has
been reported that an 83-year-old British man suffering from the early stages
of dementia will travel to the Dignitas clinic in Switzerland, the first Briton
suffering from dementia to do so. The unnamed individual will join an estimated
150 Britons who have died at the clinic. Like the 23-year-old Daniel James,
paralysed in a rugby accident, and the musician, Sir Edward Downes, the
gentleman in question is not in the final stages of a terminal disease.
In itself a tragic case, the fact that the man is
not suffering from a terminal illness gives us a glance into the future of a
society in which assisted suicide (aka assisted dying) is institutionalised. It
indicates the misanthropy hiding behind the skirts of ‘respectable’
organisations like Dignity in Dying and its American counterpart, Compassion
and Choices. Rather than simply involving a very few cases, legalising assisted
suicide may usher in the sort of world that Michael Irwin would like to see.
Who is Michael Irwin? He is a right-to-die
activist, a former president of the World Federation of Right to Die Societies
and chair of the Voluntary Euthanasia Society before it changed its name to
Dignity in Dying. It was he who brought the case of the 83-year-old dementia
sufferer to light.
He is also a founder member of the Society for
Old Age Rational Suicide (SOARS). SOARS campaigns for the provision of
doctor-assisted suicides for the elderly (its website is coy about exactly how
old), whether they are suffering from a disease or not. In other words, Britain
should provide suicide with safeguards for all elderly people.
Legalised suicide for the elderly is distinct
from what Dignity in Dying and other organisations campaign for. They advocate
legalisation of assisted suicides only for those suffering from a
terminal illness with less than a year to live. In Oregon, where assisted
suicide is legal, only those with a terminal illness and less than six months
to live qualify.
Irwin, despite being an outlier for his
willingness to say the unsayable, indicates the logic and the future of a
society in which assisted suicide is accepted. The backbone of the campaign is
not really autonomy (or else they would treat all suicide requests equally),
but rather a misanthropic disdain for the elderly.
SOARS, it is true, has limited support in this
country. But what about the Netherlands, where assisted suicide and euthanasia
are legal and have been accepted practice for decades? Rather than standing
down after legalisation, Dutch organisations remain active. The stated aims of
the Nederlandse Vereniging Voor Een Vrijwillig Levenseinde (NVVE), an
organisation that claims 135,000 members, suggest that this is not simply a
movement that automatically disappears once the legislation is in place.
Instead, it calls
for ‘as broad as possible use and social acceptance’ of assisted suicide ‘as a
human right’.
More revealing is the recent Dutch initiative to
provide assisted suicides to all Dutch people over 70 who feel tired of life.
This is the demand of a citizens’ initiative in the Netherlands called Uit
Vrije Wil (Out of Free Will) and it is supported by the relatively
mainstream NVVE, the Dutch Green and D66 parties, former government
ministers, artists, doctors and legal scholars.
According to its website, the initiative
attracted 117,000 letters of support from Dutch people between January and May
2010. This group refers
to that ‘tired of life’ moment as the time ‘life is completed, when a lack of
purpose befalls elderly people, when their family, friends and acquaintances
have all passed away, and when they feel left behind and unable to escape an
empty existence’.
The group does not advocate suicide for all,
insisting that helping young people commit suicide ‘cannot be justified’. When
a younger person kills himself, a spokesman said, ‘it is always a disaster’.
But for those over 70, suicide is apparently to be welcomed as a choice. The
initiative ultimately
failed in the Dutch parliament but continues as a possibility.
While campaigners for assisted suicide bridle at
the often hysterical Nazism analogies drawn by opponents, it is clear that the
elderly do represent a category of people whose very existence is regarded by
some as detrimental to the rest of us. Back in the 1930s, those favouring the
right to die were less coy about calling for the weeding out of the unfit.
Physician William Duncan McKim suggested a ‘gentle, painless death’ for
America’s drunkards, criminals and people with disabilities, calling for the
jettisoning of ‘the unreasonable dogma that all human life is intrinsically
sacred’.
So it is today with the elderly. Like racial and
ethnic groups in the past, they are held responsible for contributing nothing
to society and using up valuable resources. The movement for legalising
assisted suicide, despite its appealing language of ‘choice’ and ‘autonomy’
feeds upon and explicates this misanthropic trope. Advocating suicide for one
group and not others simply indicates the differential value we place on
peoples’ lives today.
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