Anonymous, 62, is an editor and family carer
I felt emotional when I heard the vote had gone in favour of Assisted Dying, especially given the narrowness of the result. I have sympathy, and empathy, for those who support the bill after watching their loved ones die in harrowing circumstances. I’ve also sat by relatives’ bedsides wanting their suffering to end.
But for me, the alternative to those harrowing experiences is not offering people the option of choosing to take their own lives earlier in the process to avoid a painful or prolonged death later.
We should all be secure in the knowledge that support and drugs will be made available, as appropriate, when the time comes.
I care for my 92-year-old mum, who is a wheelchair user, which some parts of the NHS seem to equate with being a life-limiting condition (she has arthritis in her knees).
She has previously faced pressure from health care professionals attached to her GP surgery to accept that there are no circumstances in which she would want to be taken to hospital. Luckily, I’ve been there to fend them off, but a more suggestible person or someone lacking an advocate could easily have agreed.
The individual process of assisted dying and the discussions leading up to it will, by definition, come at a time when many people will be at their most distressed and unwell.
It is also impossible to avoid cases in which vulnerable people are encouraged (or feel they are being) to end their lives so as not to be a burden.
The Assisted Dying Bill passed by a slim majority in parliament (Photo: Joe Giddens/PA Wire)I also believe we can’t rule out a small minority of cases in which people will be influenced to end their lives because unscrupulous relatives are watching “their inheritance” diminish week by week. This is an extreme example, but I don’t think we can say the risk is zero.
My view is that end-of-life care, and the process of dying, should never be so bad that patients regard taking their own lives as a better option.
I don’t come at this from the perspective that life must be prolonged at all costs. I’m all for generous amounts of whatever medications are needed to alleviate suffering, even if this shortens life.
Better funding for palliative care
But palliative care doctors have repeatedly stressed that their branch of medicine is under-funded. I believe proper investment in universal end-of-life care would remove the need for anyone to feel the need to end their own life early. That includes public funding for hospices.
I also know from personal experience that some parts of the NHS, and some doctors, place low value on the lives of some elderly and disabled people, perhaps judging that their lives are not worth living.
The mood music from the current government is also that people with disabilities, the old and vulnerable, are not to be prioritised for funding; policy will make them poorer and their lives far more difficult.
As we devalue these lives, we risk creating a society in which “doing the right thing” by ending your own life, with or without medical support, figures in the spectrum of people’s appropriate responses to challenging lives, especially as their difficulties increase with age.
A society that won’t fund proper palliative care but does fund assisted dying has gone quite badly wrong, in my view.
While many people may feel relieved at the vote, my heart goes out to anyone who may now be faced with a harrowing choice that they did not wish for.
That might be any one of us.
As told to Kat Brown
To contact Samaritans, call 116 123 or visit samaritans.org
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