If You Thought Assisted Suicide Would Guarantee a Quick, Painless Death, Data from Oregon Will Make You Think Again
by Nick Rendell, Daily Sceptic:
Suicide is a bit of a hit and miss affair. I can think of six cases of people I’ve known who’ve taken their own lives. One, a very successful business executive, threw himself out an office window; he survived the fall, only to hang himself a couple of years later. The girlfriend of a lodger survived throwing herself in front of an underground train: she left it too late and got blown back onto the platform, breaking a hip. She too, some while later completed the job by jumping off Beachy Head. A business acquaintance, having been diagnosed with Parkinson’s blew his brains out with a shot gun, literally, leaving his wife to clear up the mess. The girlfriend of another acquaintance killed herself when her boyfriend went off to university, only for the boyfriend, my acquaintance, to follow suit on the anniversary of her death. Finally, a university fresher I knew, depressed and alone in his halls of residence, killed himself during the first lockdown. Apparently a grim and drawn-out death. I blame Ferguson, Whitty, Boris and the other nutters for that one.
Of the six, two failed the first time. Two had access to shotguns and made a good job of it. Two others used a drug cocktail, which while fatal, was neither quick nor, so I’m told, painless. While jumping off Beachy Head shows a level of determination beyond my imagining. Half were in their late teens or early 20s. Each one a tragedy in its own way, leaving behind misery, heartache and untold complications.
To my mind only one of these deaths made any sense. I suspect a psychiatrist would concur. However, as we’re seeing in Canada, and who knows perhaps all too soon in the U.K., it won’t be doctors making the decision, it will be ‘human rights lawyers’ should proponents succeed in following Canada’s lead and making state assisted suicide a human right, opening the floodgates to those who, with help, could get their lives back on track.
Given that two of the suicide attempts I detailed resulted in failure but significant injury, I can see that there is an argument for getting the state and a doctor involved – the argument based on ‘utility’. Surely, if a doctor were to be involved, while the suicide may still be, in the eyes of the rest of us, a mistake, then, to quote Macbeth:
If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well it were done quickly.
Surely, the involvement of a doctor would at least make it all cleaner, more efficient.
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