‘If I know I could die, I would live. My life, my death, my choice’

Terry Pratchett gave last week’s Richard Dimblely lecture. Or should I say his friend, the actor Tony Robinson, did.

He couldn’t deliver it because the rare form of Alzheimer’s disease that Terry Pratchett suffers from has left him unable to concentrate on reading. This for a man who has spent his life writing novels that other people love to read.

His speech was titled “Shaking Hands with Death” and in it he called for euthanasia tribunals to be set up. The tribunals would help people suffering from terminal illnesses to have legal medical assistance to help them end their own lives.

He offered himself as the test-case for one of these tribunals, saying “if I knew that I could die at any time I wanted, then suddenly every day would be as precious as a million pounds. If I knew that I could die, I would live. My life, my death, my choice.”

He just wants the right to die in a way he chooses, he wants to die with his dignity still intact. It is his choice or at least it should be. Why should people who are already suffering and who know that death is coming sooner then they imagined be forced to convince or ask permission from anybody in order to end their own life?

Why do we have such diverse and differing opinions when it comes to what individuals can do with their own lives? Especially when it comes to the topic of assisted suicide. Why is it any of our business?

Two cases that went through the courts in England in the last few weeks have shown how differently the law views people who have carried out the wishes of their loves ones or at least thought they were.

Kay Gilderdale helped her daughter Lynn, an ME sufferer, to die and was found not guilty when brought to court. Frances Inglis on the other hand, helped her son, Tom, who suffered severe brain damage after a fall, to end his life and she was found guilty of murder and sent to prison. Both mothers felt they were doing the right thing for their children, so why the difference in legal opinion?

The Inglis family fully supported her actions. They knew that Tom would not want to live like that. The only legal option open to them was to apply to end his life legally by depriving him of food and water and letting him waste away.

Is that humane? Is that the only option we give people stuck in a horror situation like they were in? The legal argument is that there is no such thing as a compassionate killing.

But maybe the law is an ass. These issues are never black and white - a massive grey area sits right over this topic. Maybe looking at these things through clinical legal terms is not the way to deal with the human beings involved. Where is our compassion as a society?

We don’t want to deal with this issue because supposedly it would pave the way for families who want to kill off their elderly relatives early to get to their cash, or would help bring on line some Nazi-style policy of clearing out the weakest in society because they are a burden by killing them off. But this is all rubbish. And anyway as a society do we really deal with the human beings in our care in such a humane way?

Just look at the way we treat the weakest in our society currently. A report in the Irish Times told of how, the “State continues to preside over a care system which places some of the most vulnerable in society – people with intellectual disabilities – at a similar risk of abuse” - a similar risk as the people who suffered through the years of abuse perpetrated in the religious run institutes of this country. This is now in 2010 in Ireland.

Maybe it is time to open the debate up on legalising assisted death.Maybe it’s just time to let people who want to end their own lives just do it. Maybe it’s time for us to just mind our own business.