Page 4393 - Week 15 - Tuesday, 19 November 1991
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As the Chief Minister rightly says, there is a considerable spectrum there; I am paraphrasing what she said. There is a very great gap between the ends of that spectrum. Discontinuing a process which is clearly useless as someone is dying or refraining from adding one more procedure - more oxygen, another drip - if it would only uselessly prolong life is very different indeed from, at the other end, active participation in the bringing of a life to an end.
I certainly recognise the complexities of so-called euthanasia, whether passive or active, whether a refusal to continue a life sustaining process or a deliberate injection of some sort which leads to death. So, I wish to note what the Society of Friends has to say about such complexities at the moment. I do not do this just to put that view forward but to suggest that perhaps this is a situation we may all be in. I stress here that I do not see some crystal clear advice in this handbook. This is the comment:
... there are ... issues which rightly exercise the Christian conscience, but upon which the Society of Friends has formed no corporate judgment.
I leap to another paragraph:
Confronting all such perplexities we should beware of putting forward our corporate findings too dogmatically. It is our faith that, with changing circumstances and the fresh insights that new experience may make possible, light will be given us to see together the will of God more clearly.
If I could paraphrase that in my own terms, it is that we are in 1991, not 1591 or 1091. Having visited a number of hospitals in the past week, including St Vincent's, and having seen their hospice from the window, I am well aware that we are in technical situations which are very different indeed from the situations of other centuries. I do not believe that that changes the moral or ethical choice, but I do recognise that the circumstances have changed.
Now I want to put a personal view, partly in relation to something that Mr Humphries said. I thought he spoke most eloquently and to the point. Here I want to pick up a point that he made. I do not really agree that suicide is unrelated to the question of euthanasia, because it is a decision made by someone who wishes to have a euthanasia procedure to end his or her own life. I do not want to put some kind of huge moral blanket around the word "suicide". I am trying to use it in a non-contentious way, but surely the words do have connections.
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