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Terry Pratchett Considers Assisted Suicide
cHALiTO writes "Beloved science fiction and fantasy writer Terry Pratchett has terminal early-onset Alzheimer's. He's determined to have the option of choosing the time and place of his death, rather than enduring the potentially horrific drawn-out death that Alzheimer's sometimes brings. But Britain bans assisted suicide, and Pratchett is campaigning to have the law changed. As part of this, he has visited Switzerland's Dignitas clinic, an assisted suicide facility, with a BBC camera crew, as part of a documentary that will include Britain's first televised suicide. Pratchett took home Dignitas's assisted suicide consent forms."
Well shit that sucks.
It is every person's right to decide how they die. Not the governments.
If I were in his situation, I'd do about the same thing. I'd fill out the forms to be carried out in a few months. That way if he stopped progressing he could just do whatever, but if he kept progressing he may not be lucid so they could do their thing.
We'll miss you, Terry, but you have the power over your own life and I respect that.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
I was deeply saddened by the news last year when i heard of his illness. Terry Pratchett is still one of my favorite authors and i wish him a lot of time left.
But i have to confess that i understand his reactions 100%. Rotting away with Alzheimer is my personal worst nightmare. Though i am not allowed to vote in the UK, i will give his initiative my full support whereever i can.
I believe that, if you have don't have the right to end your own life, you are not free at all. My life belongs to me, but to no goverment, to no society and to no god.
Yours, Martin
Speaking as a libertarian:
Unless the government is claiming ownership of your body (which apparently the UK government is), you should be able to terminate yourself any time you want - especially if you're faced with a terminal illness. By not allowing him to commit suicide the government is basically making Mr. Pratchett the property of the queen. What year is this? 1772?
"The state of slavery is of such a nature, that it is incapable of being introduced on any reasons, moral or political; but only positive law, which preserves its force long after the reasons, occasion, and time itself from whence it was created, is erased from memory: it's so odious, that nothing can be suffered to support it, but positive law." - Judge Mansfield, Queen's Bench.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
http://catholicexchange.com/2011/06/14/154594/
For those that don't want to read it, this is the argument:
"If we adopt a law holding that a person has the right to kill himself, soon we will also adopt euthanasia; because if the individual has the right to say when his life is no longer worth living, soon society will claim this right as well."
The rest just bashes the media, liberalism, and socialism.
Suicide is mans attempt to keep control of what he never had any control of. Himself.
I'm not sure I see any factual statement in that. Wanting to die with dignity and sparing the lives of others around him is not related to lacking control throughout life.
Legal suicide is an invitation for the 'state' to decide who is worthy to live and die because it immediately puts law makers in the position of deciding who's life is worthy of being required to live.
Many states already do that with the death penalty, but yet we are still not allowed to chose to legally commit suicide. In fact, it's illegal in many states to even attempt to commit suicide and you can be charged criminally if you attempt (and fail) to do so. Allowing someone to voluntarily commit assisted suicide does not put the government in control of that person's life, it puts the individual in charge.
As has always happened in the past legal suicide will not be fully voluntary for long , because it will be used as an excuse to not take care of those people who choose not to use the 'option' when they are no longer 'worthy' of support.
Again, we're talking about voluntary assisted suicide, which means that the individual chooses, not the government or care-taker. While it's entirely possible that the Power of Attorney could invoke assisted suicide on another individual, there could be laws placed against that if assisted suicide were to be made legal.
Point being, if someone wants to die, it should be their choice. My father's life-long best friend committed suicide in his back yard the day after getting a terminal cancer diagnosis; while in his case it was a little selfish, he spared his family many years of grueling stress and granted them a positive feeling that he is in a better place now.
Personally, I'd prefer it if the stem cell researchers could find a way to reverse the damage and bring him up to full health. It's not an either-or situation. Every day TP is alive and well, there is a chance (however microscopic) of a breakthrough. However, I also respect the fact that you've got to draw the line somewhere and I respect where he's drawn his. The only question that remains is whether the US (the country capable of funding R&D at the necessary rate) will actually back stem cell research enough to save him and countless others. Not just from Alzheimers but from any death that results from a relatively small number of cells that cannot be repaired by the body unaided.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
1. Allow terminally ill people to die (relatively) painlessly in a sterile, comfortable environment.
2. ????
3. Logan's Run.
and that's plain silly.
"Beloved science fiction and fantasy writer Terry Pratchett has terminal early-onset Alzheimer's. He's determined to have the option of choosing the time and place of his death, rather than enduring the potentially horrific drawn-out death that Alzheimer's sometimes brings. But Britain bans assisted suicide, and Pratchett is campaigning to have the law changed.
THANK YOU FOR YOUR SUGGESTIONS. PLEASE UNDERSTAND HAVE A VERY BUSY SCHEDULE. I'LL GET BACK TO YOU WHEN I FIND THE TIME. BUT REST ASSURED I _WILL_ GET TO YOU.
Which is to say we already have socialized medicine in the US, it's just very badly managed. Putting in a proper system of socialized medicine would be much better and cheaper. The only other choice is letting people die in the streets.
The starting point for these evils is the liberal and materialistic view that man is the owner of his life; that he is free to choose the moment and manner of his death. Those who hold this view define suicide as “the last liberty of life.”
Free will my friend. Your religion my decide that my suicide is a sin; that does NOT deprive me of the right to commit that final sin. That right and decision is mine alone. Even if you prove correct, and i have indeed stolen that life from your God, judgment is his. It is not yours, not the Church's and most certainly not the State's.
If we adopt a law holding that a person has the right to kill himself, soon we will also adopt euthanasia; because if the individual has the right to say when his life is no longer worth living, soon society will claim this right as well.
Wait what? This is a pretty egregious logic fail - even for a religious organization. Euthanasia and assisted suicide are nearly diametrically opposed. One leaves the final decision in my hands; the other in the hands of society. Stating that there is a connection between the two is not sufficient to prove that connection.
Sorry, I stopped reading once I realized that the remainder of that "article" is based on both conflating the two actions, and upon the false premise that under your religion I do not have free will to sin or not.
PTerry already does a huge amount for Alzheimers projects. He doesn't expect the fix to come in before it's too late for him, and so he's making his plans and raising a stink about the issues while he still can.
As for "he should look at these examples," he's already keeping abreast of everything that's going on in this field. In fact, right at the beginning of all this, he asked all the n-thousand people who would write to him going "have you tried X, Y or Z" option to please not do so, unless they were a neurosurgeon or brain expert, to keep the clutter down and the signal-to-noise ratio up.
Amusingly, a disproportionate number of top-flight experts in these areas are fans. He effectively has a whole bunch of experts who keep him aware of the state of play.
Put simply, he's doing everything he can in his position, including laying the ground work in the event it's not quick enough.
"How fine you look when dressed in rage."
THERE IS ONE CHARACTER THAT WOULD UNDERSTAND COMPLETELY.
(Note to the lameness filter: when discussing Terry Pratchett, all caps is not yelling.)
Redundancy is good And also good.
There is a funny fact about assisted suicide. If Alzheimer/cancer/similar incurable painful disease would be monitored by a veterinarian without putting the animal down, he would be sued for animal torture. And lose.
It's quite telling when our current "general" code of ethics is against torturing animals in this way, but not against torturing humans in the same way.
In more ways than the obvious ones. My mother has it, so I've had no choice but to learn about it. She can't really do chores any more though she still tries. She confuses clean and dirty dishes. She puts them in the wrong cupboards. She can't operate the washing machines any more, but she can and does still open the doors, stopping them. So we've had to either stand guard, or wash by hand, or use them at night when she is asleep. She's always thinking that people are coming over, or that we have to hurry up and go somewhere to meet people. She's beginning to have trouble remembering people. She really took to email, and was our family's big communicator. But about 2 years ago she stopped using it. Now she can't write anything but the most banal fluff. They say an early warning sign is difficulty with finances, and it was about 3 years ago we had to take over all the bill payments. The trigger was being 3 days late with a credit card payment. First time that ever happened, and the credit card company (Chase) wouldn't give an inch. I suppose the crisis made them hard ass. I paid the late fees and interest, and the entire bill, then I cancelled that credit card. A year later I finished cutting all ties with Chase, and closed my savings account with them.
How and when do you take the car keys away? We saw suspicious paint marks on the bumpers and doors, and knew we couldn't let her drive much longer. Dreaded having an ugly scene where we forcibly took her driver's license away. Making it harder was that her daily trips to the mall got her out of our hair so we could work. But we found a neat way around it. She was always misplacing her purse, with keys, credit cards, and all. In March last year, she got paranoid that thieves might break in, and hid her purse. Took us a week to find it that time. We used that to end her driving. Told her she couldn't drive until she found her license and car keys, and she didn't blow up and come down hard on us as it was obvious to her that it was her fault she'd lost her purse. We did not tell her when we finally found it.
Doctors, curse their greedy hides, are unable to do anything constructive about it. All they do is profit off our problems by selling us expensive prescriptions that may do nothing whatever. Aricept is a waste.
All that is pretty typical. It will get worse. I read that in the advanced stages, victims no longer have enough of a brain to coordinate walking, even if their bodies can still do it. So they have to use wheelchairs. We may ultimately have to put her in a nursing home. But I haven't yet told of a less obvious horror.
What I didn't know is how happy Alzheimer's victims are. She was always a moody person, prone to rampages over essentially trivial faults. She's a "sundowner", meaning that late afternoon is her triple witching hour so to speak. Her blood sugar bottoms out, and she becomes a hell of a grouch, more ready than usual to explode at any provocation whatever, and so ready to see provocation where there wasn't any. Got to feed her to calm her down and get her back to being just merely touchy and thin skinned. And then around 10 years ago, that changed. She became a much more pleasant, happy person. I took it as the wisdom of age. Thought she'd resolved to turn over a new leaf, and was succeeding. Everyone who met her told me how cool she was. And it gave me hope that people really can change, that genetics and formative events in our childhoods don't have to be our destinies. Now I understand that was the beginning of Alzheimer's. How can I express it? Horrifying to see that these improvements were thanks to irreversable brain damage, and that achieving happiness in life is perhaps not a worthy goal and not a real improvement.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
It basically shows that our laws are written by religions. Putting an animal down when its terminally ill is seen as merciful, because we don't want it to suffer needlessly.
However, people aren't allowed to commit suicide in the same circumstances to avoid needless suffering, and there's only one possible reason: religious proscriptions against suicide. And also because humans are seen as completely different from animals, a viewpoint which again is rooted in religion.
It would be nice if the first-world nations (and maybe others too) would pour some more funding into research to combat these diseases. You'd think that maybe some of these greedy leaders would be interested in more treatments and cures for old-age diseases, considering most of them aren't that far away from old age themselves and thus have a significant chance of acquiring these diseases themselves.