Once in a while, footsoldiers of the House of Commons, you are able to make history by leaving your own indelible footprints on the social fabric. Eras with a Labour majority always leave a legacy of progressive freedoms – whether on abortion, capital punishment, divorce, gay rights, racial discrimination, gender equality or, last time, civil partnerships. But tomorrow is your final chance to bequeath one of the last freedoms over our bodies: the freedom of the dying to choose when to depart them.
The terminally ill adults (end of life) bill, which goes for a second reading vote in the Commons tomorrow, gives anyone who is dying the right to request and be provided assistance with ending their lives. If it fails to pass, that’s the end of it for the rest of this parliament: future parliaments may be less progressive. So please, MPs: turn up and vote on Lauren Edwards’s bill, to ensure this Labour era leaves its own great social-reforming milestone.
Understand the horror: on the day you read this, as on every other, an average of 17 people will die in unspeakable pain, disgust and terror that nothing can relieve. Some will vomit their own faeces. Some will suffocate, slowly, inexorably, over several days.” This is recorded in The Inescapable Truth, a report by Dignity in Dying, in which palliative care staff reveal what is usually kept hidden from us: the shocking last months for the unluckiest, which any of us might be forced to endure, or watch a loved one suffer through.
That amounts to thousands of us a year, as reported by the Office of Health Economics, which counted the cases of unrelieved pain even among dying people who had the best palliative care. Opponents of assisted dying say that we should focus on improving access to and provision of palliative care, but even then many will die in agony. Even the best care will not always prevent suffering.
And why condemn those who are suffering today to wait for palliative care improvements that they may not see in their lifetimes, when we could help end their pain now? Any MP not voting for the bill tomorrow must be honest: their personal decision will force thousands of people a year to exit life through a torture chamber. None of us can know if we will be among them when our turn comes, but all of us will live with the fear of it.
Over the decades that I have been writing about the right to die, I have encountered all kinds of tragic cases. I think of the man in severe pain who drove his electric wheelchair through fields towards a river to throw himself in: his battery ran out and he was found weeping in despair. Or the suffering, bedridden grandmother I interviewed who was carefully planning her own rational death.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
