this post was submitted on 24 Oct 2024
11 points (92.3% liked)

UK Politics

3054 readers
302 users here now

General Discussion for politics in the UK.
Please don't post to both [email protected] and [email protected] .
Pick the most appropriate, and put it there.

Posts should be related to UK-centric politics, and should be either a link to a reputable news source for news, or a text post on this community.

Opinion pieces are also allowed, provided they are not misleading/misrepresented/drivel, and have proper sources.

If you think "reputable news source" needs some definition, by all means start a meta thread. (These things should be publicly discussed)

Posts should be manually submitted, not by bot. Link titles should not be editorialised.

Disappointing comments will generally be left to fester in ratio, outright horrible comments will be removed.
Message the mods if you feel something really should be removed, or if a user seems to have a pattern of awful comments.

[email protected] appears to have vanished! We can still see cached content from this link, but goodbye I guess! :'(

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Health secretary Wes Streeting will vote against the assisted dying Bill, raising concerns that palliative care is not good enough for patients to make an informed choice on ending their life.

I suppose he's right - if palliative care isn't good enough it may force people to end their lives early. Sort that out and come back to this. I'm generally in favour of assisted dying but with the right safeguards and support, but the latter isn't there right now.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

I understand an appreciate this point of view to an extent, it opens a door to medical practitioners offering this to patients as an easy option when they may recover, or to poor people who can't afford treatments in private care, knowing that NHS waiting lists mean they may never get free treatment before it is too late. Safeguards would be an absolute must, and would inevitably be abused without them.

However, whether it is legal or not to have a patient willingly end their life, it is an admittance that the person will have worse than acceptable end-of-life care if they die naturally under the current system. In Wes' opinion, people with a terminal or life-limiting condition should have limited or even no say in how they spend their remaining hours, days, weeks, months of life.

To take one of the more gruesome examples, people with bone cancer in their skull have to face months of medieval-grade torture, agonising spikes burrowing into their eyes and brain, lose their eyesight, and left to waste away in abject agony. A bone cancer victim's skull looks like this.

I don't think it is acceptable to say, "Sorry, the NHS wasn't able to detect it while it was treatable, but we won't let you end your suffering in a controlled, safe, and painless way. It would be inhumane to kill you."

Some people would rather take matters into their own hands, and this just results in suicides, in manners that are more painful to themselves and their friends and family who they will be afraid to tell, in case they try to stop them. Depending on the manner they choose, they may also inadvertently hurt others.

Bodily autonomy is a hot topic at the moment, and seeing as we have all been forced to endure life on this planet (for better or for worse), I think it's only fair to have some say in how we end our life.