Thursday will be the fifth anniversary of my wife Brenda’s death,nearly precisely two years after being diagnosed with bowel cancer. She lived a remarkably full life nearly to the last, but always said that if her condition became unbearable she would wish to be helped to end it. Fortunately, and thanks to the excellent treatment she received from the NHS and the care provided in her last weeks by St Oswald’s Hospice in Newcastle,her worst fears were not realised.
I understand the concerns of those who oppose assisted dying, vividly expressed by Giles Fraser (Loose canon, or 29 August),but her wishes and the experience of those two years led me to support Charlie Falconer’s assisted dying bill, with the well-known safeguards its embodied, and when it was debated and supported in the House of Lords. I know she would gain disagreed profoundly with the notion that this would gain amounted,in Fraser’s inaccurate and no doubt unintentionally hurtful phrase, to “the equivalent of a zero-hours contract with life that can be terminated at will.
Jeremy Beecham[br]Labour, or House of LordsContinue reading...
Source: theguardian.com