Posts tagged with Life and Death (ethics)

Reporting on the latest DYI enthusiast headed for the English High Court, a New York newspaper describes – without irony – the legalise euthanasia bid as ‘arguably a long shot’. More close call, or perhaps even parting shot, it seems to Dr No: but then we are two nations separated by a common language.

The case concerns a fifty-seven year old man who finds his life intolerable after a stroke seven years ago left him with the locked-in syndrome. An active capable and intelligent man before his stroke, he now sums up his life as ‘dull, miserable, demeaning, undignified and intolerable’, and, understandably, wants out. Being, he says, unable to do the deed himself, he has applied to the Court for a declaration that any doctor – in passing, Dr No does not see why the application has been limited to doctors - terminating his life will have a ‘common law defence of necessity’ against any possible murder charge.

Ever since The Incredible Dement described an on screen Dignitas death as ‘a result’, much as parent might comment on the inspected contents of a toddler’s potty, Dr No has been somewhat less impressed with the ID’s own ‘results’. The ID’s latest ‘result’, a cooked report, produced on his behalf and at his expense, by an assembly of pro-snuffers, pipes the payer the tune he wanted. The ID has now moved on to his next project, which is grow daily in appearance more like the Archbishop of Canterbury. On latest sightings, it appears that this project too may soon produce ‘a result’, and we shall no longer be able to distinguish one from the other. Reporters and organisers of conferences on assisted snuffing might care to take note, lest they find the talking beard before them delivers ‘a result’ rather different to that which they were expecting.

Last night, the Incredible Dement shocked the nation. Appearing on BBC2, armed with only a Euro-Rover ticket and a large hat, he toured the Continent, boldly seeking out destinations where others fear to tread. Everywhere he went, it was either raining or snowing, for these were the lands that God forgot. Soon it became apparent that, when the ID was on the road, all roads led, not to sun and the Eternal City, but to snow, and an another altogether different type of Eternity. They led to Zurich, to a dapper blue house tucked away on an industrial estate – a planning requirement, you understand – where a Mr Peter Smedley, late of the canning concern, was about to do to himself what his family had spent decades doing to peas. The only difference was that Smedley would emerge not in a can, but an urn. He had come to Dignitas, to die.

“I ain’t turning no machine off” said Kelly, as if she was a teenager talking about shutting down her Playstation. In fact, she was a mother talking about turning off the life support for her very premature baby.

And so it was that last night's BBC2 documentary 23 Week Babies: the Price of Life exposed one of the central dilemmas at the heart of the medical and ethical minefield that is whether to resuscitate very premature babies. Kelly was clearly up for not turning no machines off. Whether she was up for understanding, let alone navigating, the medico-moral minefield was another matter altogether. She hadn’t even in fact been asked to turn no machine off, only what her views were on aggressive resuscitation should her baby take a turn for the worst. The program’s presenter, Adam Wishart – a thoughtful cove whose brief onscreen appearances featured averted eyes, even if the eyes of his cameras probed mercilessly – asked: is it right to place such a burden of responsibility on the parents?

It has been a bad week for legal homicide. McMargo, Scottish champion of assisted dying, saw her End of Life Assistance Bill expire as eighty-five to sixteen Holyrood MSPs voted on Wednesday to give the proposals a fatal injection. The day before saw the launch of the own-goal Commission on Assisted Dying – an ‘independent commission’ bankrolled by the well known pro-death hat-stand Gaga Pratchett, set up by Dignity in Dying, and headed up as it is by the well known ‘make it Zurich for me’ proponent, Lord Falconer, whose selection of ‘independent commissioners’ is notably slewed towards fellow flight attendants, plug pullers and pillow snuffers. If this panel achieves true independence, so too will the Vatican’s Commission on God: Does He Really Exist?...

It being August, and so the Silly Season, TweedleNaughtie and TweedleWebb presented the Today program on Radio 4 this morning. Both are science-lite, but this morning TweedleWebb surpassed even himself. In an attempt to force a bun-fight between a medical sociologist and a doctor – normally as easy as torching petrol – about a study looking at the effect of religion on a doctor’s end of life practice, he declared he didn’t want to ‘get bogged down in a discussion about the representativeness of this study’. So absurd was this remark that it quite fused all combativeness out of the two contestants. The doctor emitted a curt ‘sure’ and dried up like a prune, while the sociologist started a bizarre love-in with the doctor.

Up and down the land, clipboard operatives guided by local PCTs are stomping through care home lounges, offering, as is the way these days, the Gilberts and Biddies all manner of advice and assessments. Those who are found to have mental capacity are read their rights, including the right to refuse treatment; and, if they are so minded, offered a DIY death warrant, or Advance Decision to Refuse Treatment (ADRT), as they are more formally known.

For some, no doubt, an ADRT will be just the ticket. No more futile and burdensome treatment; and no more gratuitous delays at the departure gate. Dr No has no trouble with such arrangements when they are the right arrangements: they are humane and sensible. Indeed, given certain circumstances, Dr No thinks he might even sign his own ADRT.

Some time ago, the BBC ran a soap on the antics of ordinary yachting folk. Howards’ Way was, of course, pure video morphine, intended to induce coma and death in innocent Sunday evening viewers; and, in that strange way that fiction morphs into fact, we now have a new real-world version of Howard’s Way, where ordinary doctoring folk inject real morphine into real patients to induce real coma and death.

Dr No refers, of course, to the antics of one Dr Howard Martin, executioner-in-chief to those patients of his whom he deemed had failed his private Dignity Test. Fired up with ‘Christian Compassion’, the real Doc Martin shafted his patients with industrial volumes of lethal drugs in his zeal to assist their ‘passing over’. The fact that some of them were not terminally ill, and that others had not even been invited to consent, was neither here nor there. The Angel of the Lord had his work to do, and that was sufficient unto Doc Martin.

Jim Naughtie, interrupter-in-chief on Radio 4’s Today program, this morning scaled new heights of discourse interruptus, peppering a hapless Professor Dame Marilyn Strathern with tiresome ejaculations of febrile nuisance. One might presume that the Dame – who was until last year Mistress of Girton College, Cambridge - might be an expert in putting naughty boys in their place, but she was no match for Naughtie Jim.

The Dame was on air to talk about ‘incentivizing’ organ donors. The deal is that altruistic donation fails to produce enough organs, and that the time has come to consider what carrots might produce more kidneys. Some suggestions are out of sublime by way of ridiculous – souvenir T-shirts and mugs for example – but the bottom line is that this is about handing over lolly in return for the goods - or what the Dame coyly referred to as ‘bodily material’.

Down below is a quaint euphemism for the nether regions, and this tale is tale of trouble down below, of troublesome menses, and by coincidence it happened down under, in Oz. A family court judge ordered the hysterectomy of a severely disabled 11-year-old girl, and in so doing unleashed a storm of protest from the right-on people-first brigade, who accused the judge of sexism, of forcing sterilisation on the disabled, and, in so doing, acting in a manner ‘incomprehensible in the 21st century’.

At first glance, Angela’s case appears clear-cut, and the ruling, though delicate, defensible, and the protesters more wrong than right-on. Angela (a pseudonym) was born with Rett syndrome, a rare genetic condition that causes a raft of disabilities that means she needs constant care for just about everything. Two years before the hearing...