A Person or a problem

The following is the text of a letter which Sr Tamsin sent to a number of members of the the House of Lords in response to the news that they are contemplating an 'assisted dying' bill:

Dear Lord X

I have heard with grave concern that an ‘assisted dying’ bill is proposed.

I have seen both of my parents in their declining years, and witnessed both of their deaths. I also have a sister who has spent the last twenty years in a nursing home following an operation for a brain tumour. Also, as a religious sister in community with many aging members I have accompanied many people in their declining years, and have been at the death-bed of several. I might then be said to have an above normal experience of what the weakness of age and disability and the fact of death look like.

First of all I would like to stress that I do not believe that it is necessary to keep people alive as long as this is theoretically possible when they have already entered into the process of dying, and the question is only whether it shall be hours or a few days before they die.

What is being proposed in this bill however has nothing to do with desisting from intrusive medical interventions in the last hours of life; the problem with the people with whom this bill concerns itself is not that they are dying, but they are living longer than the proposers of the bill think they should. There is a particular emphasis on types of people whose lives are deemed unworthy of living, the elderly and those with disabilities either physical or mental.

One day you will be such a person, unless you die first. The question I have to ask you is this: When you approach the end of life, do you wish to be regarded by the medical profession and others as a person or as a problem? It is no good saying that the medical profession will only kill or wish to kill those who express a preference for being killed. It is the universal experience of those countries which have embarked upon the social experiment of killing its citizens at their own request that the boundaries are then stretched again and again to encompass all whom the state, the medical profession or the close relatives of a person regard as unnecessary, without serious regard for their personal views.

In any case, the fact that someone is suicidal is not usually regarded as a reason to kill them. To do so only in the case of the elderly and those with disabilities is to send those people a message that they are of less value than other human beings. My own sister, while she never asked us to kill her, did go through periods of very considerable unhappiness when without a doubt she would have been very glad to die: but had she done so, she would never have seen her daughter married, never have known her grandchildren and never have seen them baptised, and the fact that she did so is a matter of joy for her. They in their turn would never have known her, and never learnt those lessons of kindness and compassion which they have learnt, and without which a society swiftly descends into criminality and disorder.

You have a choice either to vote for a barbarism in which the weakest are destroyed in the interests of the strong, or to vote for a society in which you will feel safe to grow old.

I ask you in the name of God to make the right choice for the sake of your country, your family and yourself.

With every good wish

Yours Sincerely

Sr. Tamsin Geach