Monday 9 February 2015

Liverpool Care Pathway - A 'Right' To Die?

Once a right becomes a human right, the list starts to become endless.




This is The Independent -

Canada’s Supreme Court has struck down the country’s 1993 ban on assisted suicide, meaning doctors there can now help mentally competent patients with severe and incurable medical conditions to die. The ruling puts Canada among the few Western countries to permit the practice.

In a unanimous judgement, the court decided that clearly consenting adults who are suffering intolerably could choose to die, though their illness would not have to be terminal to qualify. 
The Canadian Government has been given a year to ‘make it so’...

...the court suspended its ruling for 12 months while Parliament and Canada’s medical establishment draft new legislation to address assisted suicide. The ban will then be lifted next year.

A culture of death has cast its net worldwide to capture and ensnare in a torrent of verbal spume the unwitting and the erudite, the former in the confirmation of another's sophistication, the latter of their own.

A dark shadow is stalking our hospitals and care homes: the right to death is becoming paramount over the right to life. The arrogant and self-righteous, confident and secure in their own self-righteous belief, not at all tempered by humility, proud and haughty stamp their deadly mark, and a frightening thing they are to contemplate.

It is a policy. The policy is a global policy.

According to Yonhap News Agency, the ‘right to die’ is a right to 'self-determination'. It may be asked, why is not the right to live?
Liverpool Care Pathway - Horrific And Costly In Lives
Assisted dying/euthanasia respects neither the person nor life. It devalues the person; it devalues life. Death does not liberate life; it demands that life be surrendered. When care is responsive care, responsive to the circumstances of the individual, there is no conflict between the law and the primacy of duty of care. Responsive care is always by measure and respects life, the patient and duty of care.

It is putting the cart before the horse to say that to oppose euthanasia is to deny others the 'right' to terminate their lives. An Assisted Dying Bill places an onus on others to accept such a possibility as an option for themselves, obliged by group pressure and social disapproval and denunciation that they are acting selfishly to place the burden of care for themselves onto others and make themselves a drain on finite resources.

Once Assisted Dying/euthanasia becomes the norm in Canada - as it will should a Bill be passed to enact it - the pressure to act selflessly and to do the 'right thing' and die will follow in its wake, sure and true. No safeguard or measure put in place will prevent this for such is the stuff of human nature so to do. Thus does the 'right' to die become the 'duty' to die.

When is a murder not a murder?

Give them a centimetre and they'll take a kilometre.

Veronique...?
Liverpool Care Pathway - Semantics, Semantics, Semantics 
Liverpool Care Pathway - So Readily Do Perceptions Change...
The 1950 European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) is a binding international agreement that the UK helped draft and has sought to comply with for over half a century.

In regard to the Death Pathways, the intentional withholding of medical treatment designed to preserve life clearly contravenes Article 2 of the ECHR.

As for euthanasia, the European Convention on Human rights was drafted in the wake of the horrors of the Second World War. Foremost in the minds of those who compiled it was to enshrine some legal protection for the right of citizens to life and liberty. It is doubtful that it was ever envisaged that the convention would be used to demand the 'right' to die.

Physicians, politicians, do not surrender so easily the right to life to charter or enactment of law, for life is always precious and living matters -
"If I should ever seek death - there are several times when my progressive condition challenges me - I want to guarantee that you are there supporting my continued life and its value. The last thing I want is for you to give up on me, especially when I need you most."
Lady Jane Campbell
The suicide walks to the ledge. Do those who are summoned attempt to talk the suicide down when that may be said to contravene their ‘right’ to die.



You have lifted the lid and peeped inside, but you have not seen nor dreamt of all the ills you shall let loose on the world.

This is Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. The Firemen do not come to put out the fire but to set the books ablaze.

The Suicide Squad are summoned...

not to talk them down...

but to tip them over the edge...

Additional reading -
Liverpool Care Pathway - And The Right To Life 
Liverpool Care Pathway - The Shadows That Precede 
Liverpool Care Pathway - What Have We Come To...? 
Liverpool Care Pathway - This Is The Way It Slides, With A Slither... 
Liverpool Care Pathway - 'Newthanasia' 
Liverpool Care Pathway - A New Hope...?


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