by Bel Mooney, Daily Mail
Her stance… it degrades us all
It’s rare that a book for review directly challenges one of my convictions, but the subtitle to Kathleen Stock’s latest threw down the gauntlet before I read one page.
The Case Against Assisted Dying is a crisply argued polemic by a philosopher and writer who is one of our foremost public intellectuals. My admiration for her work is considerable.
At the same time (full disclosure), I support the pressure group, Dignity In Dying, and recently signed its petition to stop the House of Lords blocking the Assisted Dying Bill, previously supported by the Commons. MP Kim Leadbeater’s Private Members’ Bill proposes giving terminally ill, mentally competent adults the option to control the manner and timing of their death.
Polls show that 75 per cent of the public want such a change. Stock is courageous to argue against the majority and most of the liberal establishment, too. Her intent is to change minds.
She takes her title from the famous poem by Dylan Thomas, Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night – urging his sick father to cling to life as long as possible and ‘rage against the dying of the light’.
She is very careful to emphasise that she is not against the wish for an assisted death – ‘in some rare situations where physical suffering is genuinely intense enough and cannot be remedied any other way’.
The subject of her argument is what she calls ‘organised death… formal structures dedicated to helping consenting people to die with the aid of clinicians’.
So, in principle, a terminally ill individual in unbearable pain might choose suicide as an end to suffering and may even obtain the clandestine assistance of a loved one to do so.
See also: The sinister truth about assisted death with Kathleen Stock and Brendan O’Neill