USS Clueless              Voyages of a restless mind

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Stardate 20010831.0830 (On Screen): Anti-euthanasia activists deliberately insulate themselves from the reality of individual cases of suffering that their policies would create. It is comforting to make pious statements about "there being the opportunity for joy in any life", but you need to actually see such people to understand how it could be that every day for them has become torture. This case represents an extreme example of that: a woman in the UK suffers from motor neurone disease. It's a degenerative disorder which progressively causes its victim to lose the ability to control her muscles; there is no treatment, no cure, and it is invariably fatal. But the process of dying from it is horrible in the extreme as a once-vital person progressively is more and more crippled, to the point of not being able to voluntarily move at all. They become a prisoner in their own body, waiting for their bodies to stop breathing (which is the ultimate cause of death). It's like living in a cage which gets smaller and smaller each day, until it is so small that you cannot move -- and that is literally true. She doesn't want to live that way, and I can't blame her. For others to say "There could be joy in her life" is no argument against her frank statement of fact that there is no joy in her life, only pain and terror, and grief and horror at what she's doing to her loved ones.

So she wants to end her life, but British law doesn't permit that. However, she's making a novel appeal based on human rights law: that the law preventing her from dying forces her to live in conditions that human rights law doesn't permit. I hope she is successful.

But I'm concerned about something else: she wants her husband to help her die. I don't know how that will affect him. Will he see it as a loving act, something he won't regret? Or will it gnaw at him for the rest of his life? I hope that she's talked it over with him (as much as she is able, since she can no longer talk and has to use a computer to communicate). Were I in such a circumstance, I'd want the assistance of a doctor so as to not impose that memory on someone close to me. They could be present or absent, at their own decision; once I'm dead my experience no longer matters, but they will have to live with their decision either way, so that's paramount. (Remember that I don't believe in an afterlife.) But if he's comfortable with the prospect, then it would be the final act of love in a long and successful marriage.

The activists will point to Stephen Hawking, who is about as crippled as this woman is, and point out how his life is an asset to him and to everyone else. Yes, that's true. It's also irrelevant. The fact that he can live with his condition and chooses to do so doesn't imply that everyone else in that condition should be forced to do so even if they do not want to. It should not be mandatory to kill someone in that condition, needless to say, but that is all that Hawking's case proves. But it equally should not be mandatory for those people to live even if they don't want to. A person whose situation is as hopeless as this woman's is, who actually does want to die before it gets even worse, should be permitted to do so. There are fates worse than death. Letting this woman die will be an act of mercy and love. Forcing her to live is an act of unbelievable cruelty.

Paul Tully, general secretary of the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children, said: "Although we always have compassion for suffering patients like Mrs Pretty, establishing a `right to die' would undermine the fundamental right to life, by creating categories of people whose lives are deemed not worth living."That is a horseshit argument; the only category of people whose lives are not deemed worth living is those who decide for themselves that they are not worth living. Tully's "compassion" is empty rhetoric; it's clear he doesn't really have any. I don't think Tully would be as certain of his position if he actually had to live with this woman for a week and witness the torture her life has become, and to listen to the synthesized voice of her computer as she uses it to plead for release. There is no compassion in forcing this woman to live. (discuss)

Another anti-euthanasia activist says "Diane Pretty feels there is no value to her life and that she's better off dead. Well, that was the argument the Nazis used about people. But every life is valuable." He's having a conceptual breakdown here; does he really equate murder with suicide? The Nazis used that as justification for killing other people who themselves didn't want to die. That is not even remotely the same. And I will decide for myself when my life has ceased to be valuable, thank you very much. (Anyway, he just violated Godwin's Law.)