Ten Myths About Assisted Suicide

From Spiked Online:

We all have the right to die, with or without its sanction in law. All the ‘patients’ of Dr Jack Kevorkian, currently in prison in America for having gone a little too far in assisting the suicide of Thomas Youk (which was videotaped and shown on CBS’s 60 Minutes), were physically capable of bringing about their own deaths.

Anyone, with a little forward planning and much determination, can kill themselves. The Assisted Dying bill will instead place an onus on doctors and carers to help individuals to commit suicide. One of the most ugly arguments to come from the Voluntary Euthanasia Society is that disabled people should have the right to die, too. We must be clear that we are being obligated to give the proverbial man on the bridge a push (or perhaps to make the bridge wheelchair accessible). …

It is true that many religious groups vehemently oppose the Joffe Bill, but they are not the only ones. They unite with medical representatives and disabled groups, who fear that doctors’ judgements about ‘quality of life’ may imply that their own lives are not worth living. …

In fact, it is those calling for legalisation of assisted suicide who tend to espouse New Age religious values. ‘Self-deliverance’ is the term favoured by Derek Humphry, former Sunday Times journalist and author of the best-selling suicide bible, Final Exit. Delivery to where, Mr. Humphry? Dr Timothy Quill, who admitted in an article in the New England Journal of Medicine that he had helped a patient die, has written a book called A Midwife through the Dying Process. To an atheist (like myself), death is not an ‘experience’ but the end of all experiences. Do assisted suicide advocates wish simply to replace rituals formerly carried out by priests?

Finally, you need not be Christian to agree with the Archbishop of Canterbury that ‘the respect for human life in all its stages is the foundation of a civilised society’. …

More.