https://www.thetimes.com/uk/scotland/article/iain-macwhirter-assisted-dying-slippery-slope-pdf6lwwmt
.............................I think the crisis in the NHS and the failure of the National Care Service may help explain why minds are changing on the right to die. With old people being frozen in their beds by avoidable poverty, not least the withdrawal of winter fuel payments, we have to ask whether this is a wise moment to take this momentous step. It is not hard to conjure a dystopian future in which assisted dying becomes, without anyone intending it, a kind of default social care for the poor and the disabled. A final solution, perhaps, to bed blocking. McArthur will be horrified by that and insist that such fears are alarmist nonsense. There will be no death pods here, like the hideous device used, unlawfully, last month in the home of legal suicide, Switzerland — a kind of Sinclair C5 to the afterlife. Under McArthur’s bill, only the terminally ill will be eligible, and then only with the approval of two doctors. Candidates for the big sleep would also have to be proven to be mentally sound before being allowed to use an “approved substance” to end their lives. That all seems pretty watertight. Yet we know from experience that it isn’t. Once this genie is out of the bottle, legislation cannot control its afterlife. In the Netherlands, where assisted dying has been in place since 2002, even healthy young women such as Zoraya ter Beek, 29, are being given the freedom to end their lives — in her case because of depression. I’m sure McArthur is appalled by that and similar stories in Canada, where disabled people have been allowed to euthanise themselves essentially on grounds of economic hardship. He’ll insist it couldn’t happen here.
Supporters of assisted dying say that the “slippery slope” argument is a bogus trope of the Christian right. (Actually, it would help if people would stop trying to locate this complex moral issue on some left-right spectrum). But I am afraid the slippery slope is all too real and all but unavoidable. This is because of our human rights culture, which has largely replaced religion as the moral foundation of public policy..............................................
https://archive.ph/3arvi
HebrideanUltraTerfHecate /
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2024-10-07 18:15:16
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2024-10-07 18:15:16Event JSON
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"content": "https://www.thetimes.com/uk/scotland/article/iain-macwhirter-assisted-dying-slippery-slope-pdf6lwwmt\n\n.............................I think the crisis in the NHS and the failure of the National Care Service may help explain why minds are changing on the right to die. With old people being frozen in their beds by avoidable poverty, not least the withdrawal of winter fuel payments, we have to ask whether this is a wise moment to take this momentous step. It is not hard to conjure a dystopian future in which assisted dying becomes, without anyone intending it, a kind of default social care for the poor and the disabled. A final solution, perhaps, to bed blocking. McArthur will be horrified by that and insist that such fears are alarmist nonsense. There will be no death pods here, like the hideous device used, unlawfully, last month in the home of legal suicide, Switzerland — a kind of Sinclair C5 to the afterlife. Under McArthur’s bill, only the terminally ill will be eligible, and then only with the approval of two doctors. Candidates for the big sleep would also have to be proven to be mentally sound before being allowed to use an “approved substance” to end their lives. That all seems pretty watertight. Yet we know from experience that it isn’t. Once this genie is out of the bottle, legislation cannot control its afterlife. In the Netherlands, where assisted dying has been in place since 2002, even healthy young women such as Zoraya ter Beek, 29, are being given the freedom to end their lives — in her case because of depression. I’m sure McArthur is appalled by that and similar stories in Canada, where disabled people have been allowed to euthanise themselves essentially on grounds of economic hardship. He’ll insist it couldn’t happen here.\n\nSupporters of assisted dying say that the “slippery slope” argument is a bogus trope of the Christian right. (Actually, it would help if people would stop trying to locate this complex moral issue on some left-right spectrum). But I am afraid the slippery slope is all too real and all but unavoidable. This is because of our human rights culture, which has largely replaced religion as the moral foundation of public policy..............................................\n\nhttps://archive.ph/3arvi",
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