Right to Choose
I agreed with this article by Melanie Reid in The Times in which she argues that the debate on assisted dying, on the No side at least, is dominated by people who approach the issue from a religious standpoint - that human life is sacred and sanctified by God.
Which is fair enough if you want to believe in such things, but why should the rest of us be subject to religious views that we don't share?
It’s a woman’s right to choose – to live or die
By Melanie Reid - The Times
No minority of older, religious men should be able to tell me how I can leave this world
The debate on assisted dying is conventionally framed by men, often older men, and usually religious leaders or believers. The majority are wedded to the sanctity of life. What is not in dispute is that this afternoon’s second reading of Lord Falconer of Thoroton’s bill in the House of Lords will be dominated by that demographic.
Which is precisely why, I suggest, the debate will be unrepresentative, because the vast majority of ordinary women have an entirely different view on issues of self-determination. End-of-life decisions involve many delicate considerations, but they have always been, for me and many like me, primarily a feminist issue. The right to die, quite simply, is an extension of the right, which I’ve fought for all my life as a woman and recently as a disabled woman, to decide what happens to my body.
For women of my generation, who came of age in the 1970s and 1980s, paternalism has been our constant enemy. Since we were children we have had to battle the belief, then imprinted in society, that men should decide what was best for us.
Hence our visceral reaction to traditional male hierarchies who still consider that power lies with them and not with the individual. It is 2014 and nobody, but nobody, tells a woman what she can and can’t do with her body any more. In this sense, end-of-life choice, towards which assisted dying is the first cautious, humane step, is a logical extension of the ground that has been hard fought over throughout the last century.
In my lifetime women have won the right to control their fertility, to terminate unwanted pregnancies, to give birth how and where they want, to combine work and motherhood.
They have established a right to control their lives: to have cosmetic surgery, to seek divorce, to grow old unconventionally, to behave badly. And the next step, it follows, is the right to leave this world at a point and in a manner of their own choosing. Logic decrees that no one, and certainly no minority of older, religious men, can deny them that.
Does anyone seriously think that the generation of women aged 45 and upward, feisty, empowered, financially independent, will accept that they must live out their final ten to fifteen years of life suffering from dementia in care homes? It is unthinkable. They are far too pragmatic and assertive for that.
This generation of women see their own parents failing; many, like me, will have mourned mothers demented and incarcerated, their lives prolonged in a distressing way. We are all too well aware of the odds: that dementia is a terminal illness; that most of us will get it; that old ladies linger longest with it.
My mother, denied the opportunity to die as she wished while she could still express it, had to be put in a care home, from which she promptly escaped in the night and lay down and died in the garden. Her courage and steely determination won out; but at what personal cost? And what of other old women who would do the same but cannot get out of bed and are destined to lie and stare at the walls for months, sometimes for years?
No, change must come. Whatever happens this afternoon in parliament, my generation of women will not allow the same to happen to us. We will choose. Put in place safeguards, of course, but supply us with pills before we lose our marbles, allow us to pass on to our children the money that would otherwise be wasted in care homes, and thereby release another generation from the misery of seeing their mothers, unknowing and unknown, empty shells sustained by modern medicine, sitting waiting for death.
The young should benefit from the funds being lavished trying to keep the old alive past their time. Even organised religion is coming round to this view. As Desmond Tutu put it: why is a life that is ending being prolonged when the young need organ transplants? Or the rabbi Jonathan Romain: “I see no sanctity in suffering, nothing holy about agony.”
What I hope we will witness today is a necessary beginning: the start of a transfer of power from state to the individual. In this, the change of mind by George Carey, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, acknowledging that mercy should be enshrined in law, is hugely significant.
But women’s voices should be heard too. About three years ago a Times reader with spinal injuries wrote to me to say she was heading for Dignitas in Switzerland.
“I worked all my life and was looking forward to an active retirement, hill walking, travelling,” she told me. “My body is now a prison from which I must escape while I have the choice. I have made my decision. I am merely sad I have to leave the country to implement it.”
No minority of older, religious men should be able to tell me how I can leave this world
The debate on assisted dying is conventionally framed by men, often older men, and usually religious leaders or believers. The majority are wedded to the sanctity of life. What is not in dispute is that this afternoon’s second reading of Lord Falconer of Thoroton’s bill in the House of Lords will be dominated by that demographic.
Which is precisely why, I suggest, the debate will be unrepresentative, because the vast majority of ordinary women have an entirely different view on issues of self-determination. End-of-life decisions involve many delicate considerations, but they have always been, for me and many like me, primarily a feminist issue. The right to die, quite simply, is an extension of the right, which I’ve fought for all my life as a woman and recently as a disabled woman, to decide what happens to my body.
For women of my generation, who came of age in the 1970s and 1980s, paternalism has been our constant enemy. Since we were children we have had to battle the belief, then imprinted in society, that men should decide what was best for us.
Hence our visceral reaction to traditional male hierarchies who still consider that power lies with them and not with the individual. It is 2014 and nobody, but nobody, tells a woman what she can and can’t do with her body any more. In this sense, end-of-life choice, towards which assisted dying is the first cautious, humane step, is a logical extension of the ground that has been hard fought over throughout the last century.
In my lifetime women have won the right to control their fertility, to terminate unwanted pregnancies, to give birth how and where they want, to combine work and motherhood.
They have established a right to control their lives: to have cosmetic surgery, to seek divorce, to grow old unconventionally, to behave badly. And the next step, it follows, is the right to leave this world at a point and in a manner of their own choosing. Logic decrees that no one, and certainly no minority of older, religious men, can deny them that.
Does anyone seriously think that the generation of women aged 45 and upward, feisty, empowered, financially independent, will accept that they must live out their final ten to fifteen years of life suffering from dementia in care homes? It is unthinkable. They are far too pragmatic and assertive for that.
This generation of women see their own parents failing; many, like me, will have mourned mothers demented and incarcerated, their lives prolonged in a distressing way. We are all too well aware of the odds: that dementia is a terminal illness; that most of us will get it; that old ladies linger longest with it.
My mother, denied the opportunity to die as she wished while she could still express it, had to be put in a care home, from which she promptly escaped in the night and lay down and died in the garden. Her courage and steely determination won out; but at what personal cost? And what of other old women who would do the same but cannot get out of bed and are destined to lie and stare at the walls for months, sometimes for years?
No, change must come. Whatever happens this afternoon in parliament, my generation of women will not allow the same to happen to us. We will choose. Put in place safeguards, of course, but supply us with pills before we lose our marbles, allow us to pass on to our children the money that would otherwise be wasted in care homes, and thereby release another generation from the misery of seeing their mothers, unknowing and unknown, empty shells sustained by modern medicine, sitting waiting for death.
The young should benefit from the funds being lavished trying to keep the old alive past their time. Even organised religion is coming round to this view. As Desmond Tutu put it: why is a life that is ending being prolonged when the young need organ transplants? Or the rabbi Jonathan Romain: “I see no sanctity in suffering, nothing holy about agony.”
What I hope we will witness today is a necessary beginning: the start of a transfer of power from state to the individual. In this, the change of mind by George Carey, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, acknowledging that mercy should be enshrined in law, is hugely significant.
But women’s voices should be heard too. About three years ago a Times reader with spinal injuries wrote to me to say she was heading for Dignitas in Switzerland.
“I worked all my life and was looking forward to an active retirement, hill walking, travelling,” she told me. “My body is now a prison from which I must escape while I have the choice. I have made my decision. I am merely sad I have to leave the country to implement it.”
