Assisted suicide is the opposite of death with dignity

Sep 14, 2021 by Jill

by Simon Caldwell, TCW:

Warning: Some of this material may be distressing.

LORD Carey of Clifton, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, has popped up in the debate on assisted suicide, writing in the British Medical Journal that the practice should be legalised because there is ‘nothing holy about agony’. The timing of his intervention is deliberate: a crucial British Medical Association vote today is due on whether to drop opposition to assisted suicide in favour of neutrality, a move campaigners know will be hailed in the media as support for physician-assisted death.

Carey is peddling the myth that only a lethal cocktail of drugs or a deadly jab can deliver a beautiful and serene death. It is a romantic fantasy, the stuff of movies.

Who could forget Hilary Swank as the paralysed Maggie Fitzgerald in the 2004 film Million Dollar Baby? A single tear rolls down her face as Clint Eastwood disconnects her breathing tubes and injects her with a lethal dose of adrenaline. Sentiments of heroism and compassion rise irresistibly as she slips away. The performance won Swank an Oscar.

Disabled rights activists hated it. They said it fuelled the prejudice that the quality of life of disabled people is ‘unquestionably not worth living’. Eastwood, the director, responded that the story was a work of fiction as fantastically over the top as ‘Dirty Harry’ Callahan wreaking frontier-style justice from the barrel of a .44 Magnum. In other words, it wasn’t to be taken seriously.

In fairness, it was make-believe: deaths of this kind are seldom like that at all. They are much worse.

Read here

BMA votes narrowly to end opposition to assisted suicide, The Christian Institute

Disappointment as British Medical Association adopts neutral position on assisted suicide, Christian Today

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