Posts tagged with Life and Death (ethics)

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...

‘All social engineering is preceded by verbal engineering’

–William B. Smith, Verbal Engineering, 2002

Patricia Blewitt, the former Labour cabinet minister, now famous for more gaffs than a gap-toothed moose, has been spotted creeping around Westminster at a late hour by the ever vigilant Witch Doctor. Blewitt – who numbers amongst her affiliations patronage of the pro-terminator pressure-group Dignity in Dying – was busy urging her hon. Friends to gee-up and set about a Royal Commission on Assisted Dying; anything of a lesser stature simply would not do, she said. Her game – to sneak in a Royal Commission in the twilight hours of this Government, since she is due to stand down at the forthcoming election – was spotted by her hon. Pals and thrown out.

For many of its long and illustrious years, the Orient Express travelled across Europe from Calais via Zurich to exotic Eastern destinations. Were it still running today, it might well have found itself doing a brisk trade in one-way tickets to Switzerland, following the DPPs final guidance on prosecuting cases of assisted suicide issued today.

The final guidance has shifted its position significantly from that found in the interim guidance issued last year. The focus has moved away from factors associated with the suicidee (the best term Dr No can come up with to describe the ‘victim’) towards the motivation of the assister. If the assister can show that he or she was acting wholly out of compassion – that they acted with ‘love in their heart’ – then he or she is unlikely to be prosecuted.

We shall probably never know whether Ray Gosling was an inspired stage name, or the portentous real name for a lad who, after a TV life rich in sauce and stuffing, would spend much of his later life stuffed and trussed, before – in a final defiant gesture – spatchcocking himself on camera in a lonely graveyard.

Last Monday, early evening BBC viewers in the East Midlands region were greeted by Gosling, decked out in a fetching overcoat, ambling through the tombstones. Speaking in his best bus driver documentary voice, he mused: ‘Maybe this is the time to share a secret that I’ve kept for quite a long time’. Viewers expecting a homely confession that he rigged a past documentary were in for a shock.

Unless, that is, you happen to be one of Ray Gosling’s unidentified lovers who happens to be seriously ill. Then you are very likely to find not only that you are an island, but a very small island; in fact a mere clod, about to be washed away by the sea – or, since it is more practical, smothered, while an obliging and obsequious doctor – would you Adam and Eve it - steps outside for a gasper.

The trouble with love is that it can cover a multitude of sins.

No doubt a number of the catholic priests who abuse little boys believe they have ‘love in their heart’. Those that do not have cynically used the love of the Mother Church to mask their obscene acts. Where better for those with sin in their heart to hide than under the cloak of the priesthood?

And as in priesthood, so in parenthood. Not all parents will have the best interests of their children at heart. Some will be misguided, others more sinister in their intent. And what better mask for such a parent than a plea of ‘love in the heart’?