Euthanasia

Wednesday

Stephen Daisley

Can doctors be ‘neutral’ on assisted dying?

From our UK edition

The British Medical Association (BMA) has dropped its opposition to assisted dying after a landmark vote. In doing so, it marks a journey from professional principle onto the ethical fence. This is not the first time the BMA has declared itself neutral on the termination of post-natal human life. In 2005, the organisation voted to switch from opposition to neutrality on physician-assisted suicide but that position was overturned the following year amid charges that the policy shift had been achieved through an ‘extraordinary manoeuvre’ and ‘procedural tactics’. A decade later, in 2016, the body again rejected adoption of a neutral stance following a consultation with 500 association members and the general public.

Thursday

Amanda Craig

The burden of guilt: The Living Sea of Waking Dreams, by Richard Flanagan, reviewed

From our UK edition

Thanks to the Booker Prize, Richard Flanagan is probably the only Tasmanian novelist British readers are likely to have heard of. His reworking of the life of the Australian hero ‘Weary’ Dunlop, a doctor who became a prisoner of war on the notorious Burma Death Railway, in The Narrow Road to the Deep North was a winner of a traditional kind of literary storyteller that has recently become extinct. It seems appropriate that his eighth novel, The Living Sea of Waking Dreams, is also about extinction, both personal and environmental. Tasmania is burning, and as its cornucopia of flora and fauna is wiped out, three children gather to decide whether to let their exhausted 86-year-old mother Francie die, or demand intervention by modern medicine.

Thursday

Frances Wilson

Euthanasia sitcom: What Are You Going Through, by Sigrid Nunez, reviewed

From our UK edition

What Are You Going Through is both brilliant and mercifully brief. Weighing in at 200-odd pages, it can be read in five hours flat and will leave you staring into endless night. ‘Make the audience suffer as much as possible,’ advised Alfred Hitchcock, and Sigrid Nunez, whose subject is emotional extremity, follows suit. The suffering begins at the start when the narrator, a woman of a certain age whose name we never learn, goes to a talk by a writer, whose name we also never learn. His lecture, given in a polished, emotionless voice, is about the death of the planet: It was over, he said. It was too late, we had dithered too long. Our society had become too fragmented and dysfunctional for us to fix, in time, the calamitous mistakes we had made.

Thursday

The Spectator

Letters | 25 April 2019

From our UK edition

Not an island Sir: I and those with whom I live and work are all within coughing distance of Sam Leith’s ‘threshold of death’ and we need no reminders that your body is your own, because we wish to God it wasn’t (‘Last rights’, 20 April). But as it is, we owe it to that body to see the process through. My ‘going hence’ is not a private matter. I am not an island but a piece of the continent and that connection is the key to the human genius of social literacy. We demented dodderers are an eighth age, a new demographic, practically a new species, and we bring with us new ethical dilemmas.

Wednesday

Douglas Murray

Last rights | 17 April 2019

From our UK edition

Four years ago, the Assisted Dying Bill was overwhelmingly defeated in parliament. The euthanasia debate hasn’t disappeared, however. One recent poll showed that 90 per cent of the UK’s population now support assisted dying for the terminally ill. So is a relaxation of the law inevitable? Would it represent progress? Or is it very dangerous? Our literary editor Sam Leith joined our associate editor Douglas Murray to discuss.   Sam: I find myself, possibly in accordance with my position as one of The Spectator’s hand-wringing liberals, in favour of assisted dying but I want to be clear on the narrowness of that position. The Assisted Dying Bill would not have allowed us to euthanise the incapable.

Thursday

Kate Chisholm

Points of view | 28 February 2019

From our UK edition

Is it me or are we now faced (or perhaps I should say fazed?) much more often by stories in the news that test our moral and ethical principles to the limit, forcing us to question ourselves and what we think to such an extent that it becomes impossible to be sure of what is right? I can never understand the high-minded righteousness and full-blown convictions of the panellists on Radio 4’s Moral Maze, who each week are given a topical issue and who then spend 45 minutes tossing it about, testing the pros and cons and questioning a group of often baffled witnesses who are invited on to the programme to provide evidence for differing points of view.

Thursday

Laura K. Jones

Get me out of here

From our UK edition

‘If your time ain’t come, not even a doctor can kill you’ — so goes the proverb that best echoes the dilemma of an ageing humankind as we glimpse the harrowing vista of decrepitude to come: a panorama that first takes in the custard-stained wingback chairs of a soul-extinguishing care home, then yaws off nauseatingly to a vision of the demented and the drooling as they hobble into that good night. How can you swerve incarceration and indignity when you just won’t die — and, more pertinently, when no one is allowed to kill you? How to be the auteur of your own death when ‘self-euthanasia’ proves so tricky you need the help of a loved one, thus implicating them in a criminal act?

Thursday

Matthew Parris

A dementia tax would be a euthanasia bonus

From our UK edition

Had Theresa May not on Monday summarily abandoned her manifesto threat to raid the savings of those who end up senile in care homes, I had planned to defend the idea here in terms that might have added to her woes.  I’ll do so regardless. The so-called dementia tax would, over time, have become a euthanasia bonus. And that would be a good thing. As I argued on this page two weeks ago, morality is the father of religion, and not the other way around. Secular morality can be largely explained by social Darwinism.

Thursday

Tim Martin

The cryonics game

From our UK edition

Cults, the desert, natural disasters. Artists, bankers, terrorists. Cash machines, food packaging, secret installations. Mediaspeak and scientific jargon. Crowds and capital. Language and death. Just as it used to be possible to play Ballard Bingo with the work of the late 20th century’s other great literary monomaniac, so Don DeLillo’s themes have remained astonishingly consistent in the 45 years since Americana, his first novel, appeared.

Wednesday

Kate Chisholm

Born again

From our UK edition

Six years ago, on Good Friday, the journalist Melanie Reid was thrown off her horse while on a cross-country ride in Stirlingshire where she lives. The accident broke her neck and back and left her tetraplegic, paralysed from the armpits downwards. On Easter Sunday on Radio 3 she’s Michael Berkeley’s guest on Private Passions, a timely guest, as he says, because she has recently written in her Sunday Times column about being ‘surprised by a small epiphany of happiness’, of experiencing a ‘rebirth’, if ‘rather cruel’. ‘You find joy in little things ...

Thursday

Jasper Rees

Touching the void | 18 February 2016

From our UK edition

Scholarly filmgoers may recall a movement that sprouted from Danish soil called Dogme 95. It worked to a Spartan set of rules and regs. In Dogme titles there could be no lighting and no soundtrack, no locations pretending to be other locations. Hell, there were probably no Portaloos on set and actors fixed their own herring smørrebrød. The director, in an ultimate gesture of klaxonning self-effacement, took no credit. Except that everyone knew Thomas Vinterburg shot Festen and Lars von Trier made The Idiots. The spirit of cinema’s Mennonites lives on in Chronic, a pitiless, hatchet-faced film set somewhere sunlit in the grassy American suburbs. It is written and shot by Mexican director Michel Franco.

Thursday

Carol Sarler

Down with slippery slopes!

From our UK edition

Well, of course the Assisted Dying Bill failed. It mattered not a jot that an overwhelming majority of public opinion urged its success; it was always going to fail and the only surprising thing is that anybody is surprised. I’ll bet my teeth on a few more certainties, too. Last week the required 200,000 people put down their spliffs long enough to sign a petition in favour of decriminalising cannabis and thus, in October, the matter will be debated by MPs. Proponents, however, really should not bother — they will lose, regardless.

Thursday

Charles Moore

The Spectator’s notes | 10 September 2015

From our UK edition

Presumably Britain has some sort of policy on immigration, asylum and refugees, but instead of struggling to understand it, you can save time by following its media presentation, since that is what seems to concern the government most. Essentially, the line is that Labour lets them all in and the Tories don’t and won’t (‘No ifs, no buts’). When, as at the last election, it turns out that net immigration has been rising under David Cameron, he apologises shyly and sounds tough again. He was sounding very tough until last week, when the photograph of the dead boy on the Turkish beach suddenly turned him all soft.

Simon Baron-Cohen

Hero or collaborator?

From our UK edition

Steve Silberman’s stunning new book looks across history, back to Henry Cavendish, the 18th-century natural scientist who discovered hydrogen, Hugo Gernsbach, the early-20th-century inventor and pioneer of amateur ‘wireless’ radio, and countless other technically brilliant but socially awkward, eccentric non-conformists, members of the ‘neurotribe’ we now call the autism spectrum. He argues passionately for the ‘neurodiversity’ model rather than the medical disease model, for society to stop trying to ‘cure’ or ‘normalise’ those with autism, but to recognise them as neurologically differently wired, to accept difference, and support their disabilities when these surface in certain environments.

Thursday

Douglas Murray

Death watch | 27 August 2015

From our UK edition

[audioplayer src="http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/thereturnofassisteddying/media.mp3" title="Lord Falconer and Douglas Murray debate 'assisted dying'" startat=42] Listen [/audioplayer]A couple of years ago I contacted Holland’s top pro-euthanasia organisation. Our House of Lords looks likely to approve a bill legalising euthanasia here, I told them. ‘Very exciting!’ came the reply. Next month Parliament will again be discussing ‘assisted dying’, and although the tone of the British debate is not yet quite like the Dutch one, a shift in tone has undoubtedly occurred. In the past few years euthanasia has been renamed ‘assisted dying’ and become part of the ‘progressive’ cause.

Thursday

Peter Jones

Assisted dying? Ancient religion was all for it

From our UK edition

There is something mildly unexpected about religious groups’ hostility to euthanasia. After all, in the ancient world one of the major differences between e.g. Christians and pagans was that Christians were renowned for welcoming, indeed rejoicing at, death. Pagans found this incomprehensible. Not that pagans feared the afterlife. Although, in the absence of sacred texts, there were no received views on the matter, Greeks reckoned that if the gods were displeased with you, they would demonstrate it in this life rather than the next.

Thursday

Charlotte Moore

Did Hurricane Katrina have an angel of mercy — or an angel of death? 

From our UK edition

On 28 August 2005 — Sheri Fink’s Day One — Hurricane Katrina reached New Orleans. The National Weather Service warned that ‘human suffering will be incrdible by modern standards’. Fink’s enormous book chronicles that suffering as experienced inside the Memorial Medical Centre, one of the city’s biggest hospitals. Traditionally, staff had sheltered from hurricanes in Memorial, bringing along kids, parents and grand-parents, dogs, cats and rabbits, and coolers and grocery bags packed with party chips, cheese dip and muffulettos. (With this book it helps if you can read American fluently.) About 2,000 people, sick and well, awaited rescue.

Thursday

James Mumford

The fight for your life is now raging

From our UK edition

Beneath your noses, a great change in this country is being planned. Secret polls have been taken, and a private member’s bill has been tabled. The euthanasia lobby is limbering up for the fight of its life: to change the law for once and for all. The Assisted Dying Bill, introduced by former Lord Chancellor Lord Falconer, is the fourth such to come before the House of Lords in the last decade. Since it is almost identical to the last bill, which sought to let doctors supply lethal drugs to terminally ill patients and which Parliament rejected in 2006, why is this one being introduced? The answer has largely to do with the changed composition of the Lords.