Disability Arts Online

I have a friend who is disabled and lives in Germany. Her family has incurred extensive expenses to give her the life she needs to live fully. They are heavily in debt. She was approached by a "friend" who has a long term medical problem but would be greatly assisted by a transplant. She suggested they take a trip to Switzerland together imagining the possibility of a quick assisted suicide followed by her getting her heart. In return this friend was going to wipe her family's debts clean.

It never went further than discussion because my friend values her disabled life. But what of others? How many people might consider this proposition?

In Michigan/USA, Jack Kevorkian believed assisted suicide would be an ethical means of doing medical research and organ donation. He was stymied by a law that refused to see it as ethical to offer a person committed to life in prison or would most like die an early death from disability the opportunity to offer their lives to others for payment.

Since he couldn't do this, he invented a suicide machine and offered his services to people who wanted to die. He presented himself as a doctor, but he was trained as a medical examiner and never actually treated live patients. The majority of people he helped to die where not terminally ill or in physical pain, but instead were severely depressed by the situation (disability) they found them self in.

In Oregon/USA, where physician assisted suicide has been legalized, "Physicians have consistently reported that concerns about loss of autonomy, loss of dignity, and decreased ability to participate in activities that make life enjoyable as important motivating factors in patient requests for lethal medication across all eight years." http://euthanasia.procon.org/view.answers.php?questionID=000199

When a nondisabled, healthy person wants to commit suicide we think it is wrong and go to great lengths to provide them services and get them back on track to valuing their life again.

Why is it seemingly OK with so many nondisabled people that it is OK to let a disabled person sink into depression and help them to die? Why aren't they afforded the same response?

Crass?! I don't think that Crippen could be crass if he tried. And what is it about the blog that you consider to be inconsidered Marian? Having reread it I can only agree with a lot of what he says.

Nothing like a bit of constructive criticism eh Mr C?!

I had a great aunt that I was caring for with my little cousin and she requested me to give her tablets for pain as she could not talk, move and only gestured with her eyes for me to give her the lot to end it all.

After a few weeks she came out of the stroke but had developed pneumonia so was in hospital.Her speech was back and she thanked me for NOT giving her the tablets.

I asked why had she changed her mind? She replied I can see my husband, mum and brother there in the corner waiting for me.

she did not see them that day and felt that she had no reassurance of life after death but now in her last dying days she saw the sign that she was to die soon.

I was in awe of this experience and from that day to this I have tried to stop people committing suicide.

I worked at the Samaritans for a few years and found that the impulse to kill yourself is momentary and after people talk for ours to volunteers, this impulse goes as a new outlook is found to their lives.

Many phone back and all the volunteers were reassured their work is worthwhile as people said they were glad they did not end it and only with the help of the Samaritans could they see a way out of their destructive thoughts.

I am not religious but spiritual and I believe your time is set by the higher entity and should be left to fate for death to happen.

No one should take their own life as in my opinion your transition to the other realm will be disrupted if you do kill yourself.

Isn't it in the bible that if you kill yourself before your allotted time, you will go to Purgatory?

Life is precious and for it to be taken by doctors, relatives is not the way to go.

Please everyone try and stop this euthanasia band wagon as it is just so wrong!

There have been numerous reports of death by sedation and dehydration in our own hospitals, notably in the Daily Telegraph. It's called the Liverpool Care Pathway. (Care, indeed!) Here's a link to just one of the many reports:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/6613732/Fighting-for-a-peaceful-pain-free-death.html

We're living in a culture in which old people, vulnerable people, people with impairmnents, are devalorised & regarded as disposable. And things will get worse with more government-sanctioned propaganda such as the BBC's recent programme.

reminds me of a time i wrote an humourous column for our newsletter on wheelchair users campaigning to make suicide bridge (archway bridge, archway road, london) accessible to all. the local paper didn't get the humour and repeated the story as if it were true. they failed to name me, quote me, credit me or pay me.

Seems to me there's a lot of people standing to profit from this, which we should encourage as a means to extending our true purpose on earth - enriching the grafters who have to have new options for profiting from us now that care homes are in such trouble. Poor dears.

If I become terminally ill, and unable to end my own life which has become intolerable, I cannot afford to fly to Switzerland, and would feel guilty pressing a family member to help me to die, do I have to linger in a hospital ward, gradually and painfully dying because there is no one professionally qualified or even allowed to assist me?

I am a coward I know, but would hope that something would be in place to end the pain, when I want it to stop, whilst I can still say goodbye to family and friends in a manner that they will recognise as being me.

Not a wholesale one size fits all, as Hazel has pointed out, because obviously it doesn't.

I watched the long drawn out process of my mother dying doped up with morphine when I was 15 years old, and my father's tortured life with emphysema and diabetes (I have both).

I understand also the concerns of many disabled people, who quite rightly worry about coercion not only only of disabled people, but people with dementia, and older people too.

I do not have any suggestions or answers with which to inform the debate, I can't speak for anybody else, only myself, but it is something I have worried about since being a young person, how not to die like my mother.

Thanks for the comments folks. Please keep them coming. Regarding Jenny's comment. I've also been reading about the similarities between pre-war Germany and what's happening in this country at the moment. Here's the link to an article about this if you're interested - http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m6875/is_1_18/ai_n25052599/

Was anyone else aware that dozens of disabled children having been killed under something called the Groningen Protocol in the Netherlands despite the fact that this is illegal. In 2005 two physicians practicing in the Netherlands published in The New England Journal of Medicine a set of guidelines for what they called infant ''euthanasia.'' The authors named their guidelines the Groningen protocol, after the city where they work. One of the physicians, Dr. Eduard Verhagen, has admitted to presiding over the killing of four disabled babies in the last three years, by means of a lethal intravenous drip of morphine and midazolam (a sleeping agent). While Verhagen's actions were illegal under Dutch law, he hasn't been prosecuted for them; and if his guidelines were to be accepted, they could establish a legal basis for his death-administering work. More information by cutting and pasting this url - http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/10/magazine/10WWLN.html

Whilst researching this blog I came across some alarming facts: Belgium is one of four countries in the EU where assisted suicide is legal. However, a recent study found that in the Flemish part of Belgium, 66 of 208 cases of ‘euthanasia’ (32%) occurred in the absence of request or consent. Also, nearly half of all cases of euthanasia are not reported to the Belgium Federal Control and Evaluation Committee.

Legal requirements were more frequently not met in unreported cases than in reported cases and a written request for euthanasia was absent in 88%. Use this link to read the full article - http://www.oregonlive.com/health/index.ssf/2009/09/assisted_suicide_rate_continue.html