8 March 2015

Assisted suicide: a fundamental question of liberty and power

As the great American physician Dr. Horrible once observed, "the status is not quo." That is the premise of my column this morning in the Scotland on Sunday. 

Poor Andrew Wilson is still labouring under the pernicious lurgy, and filling in, I took Margo's assisted suicide proposals as my theme, putting the boot in to the intolerably vague character of the law currently on the books. Our parliamentarians may not agree with Patrick Harvie, and may reject the the general principles of the Bill, but they cannot now be under any illusions that the status quo is fine and dandy.  An excerpt:

"DANIEL James was a rugby player, a rugby fanatic. Capped by the English juniors squad, the engineering student lived the physical life, active, robust, embodied. On 12 March 2007, at a training session at his Nuneaton club, a scrum buckled on top of the young hooker, dislocating two of Daniel’s vertebrae and compressing his spinal cord. He awoke tetraplegic, paralysed from the chest down. He could not move his hands, or feel his fingers."


1 comment :

  1. In circumstances like the young rugby player I would think of assisted suicide,but base it on how I felt I was able to be useful and perhaps re-train my mind to philosophy so that I felt useful,but I would also like to have the option of some one to help me end my life if I was in misery.

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