Dying well, not by interfering prime ministers

Britain's Telegraph is not a paper that I normally read, but a recent edition included an article by the current British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, in which he directly addresses a controversial issue that a couple of people in our class wrote on last term. The issue is euthanasia, which Brown is strongly against legalizing.

In his opinion piece first published in the Telegraph on February 24, and subsequently republished around the world, including by Australia's Sydney Morning Herald, where it came to my notice, Brown strongly urges against any change in current laws to legalize euthanasia. His main argument is that the worries that lead people to choose assisted suicide are unfounded, and that improved palliative care and control over medical treatments at the end of a person's life are enough to settle those worries. He further argues that to make such changes to the law "would fundamentally change the way we think about mortality" (¶ 13).

Although I agree with the Prime Minister that what is at stake here is indeed a fundamental "change [in] the way we think about mortality", about our death and dying, I am less sure that this is a bad thing. Where Brown sees this as devaluing human life, I disagree. It seems, on the contrary, to increase the value that we attach to a person's life by acknowledging that that life is truly the most precious thing that the person has, and that they, and they alone have the right to determine when and how that life should be brought to end, whether to die at a time and place of their choosing, surrounded by loved ones, or alone in a hospital bed after possibly months of undignified and dehumanizing illness and treatment. The hugely successful writer Terry Pratchett, for example, has clearly stated that when the Alzheimer's disease from which he will die begins to destroy his mind, his preferred choice of how to "end my life will be to sit on my lawn at my home in Wiltshire with a bottle of brandy and Thomas Tallis playing on my iPod" (Walker, 2009). The prolific an hilariously erudite Sir Terry has more recently said that he will be happy to put British law to the test when it comes time for him to die (Sir Terry, 2010).

__________

References

Brown, G. (2010, February 24). Gordon Brown: We must resist the call to legalise assisted suicide. Telegraph. Retrieved March 3, 2010 from http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/politics/gordon-brown/7304308/Gordon-Brown-We-must-resist-the-call-to-legalise-assisted-suicide.html

Sir Terry Pratchett ready to be suicide law 'test case'. (2010, February 1). BBC News. Retrieved March 3, 2010 from http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/8490062.stm

Walker, T. (2009, July 7). Sir Terry Pratchett sets out a dignified way to go. Telegraph. Retrieved March 3, 2010 from http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/mandrake/5770474/Sir-Terry-Pratchett-sets-out-a-dignified-way-to-go.html

Note:
This post took me more than 20 minutes because as I was writing it, I remembered having recently read Sir Terry's comments about brandy on the lawn with his loved ones, so I spent 5 - 10 minutes quickly looking up that source. When I Googled it, I found that although it was on the BBC, where I remembered having seen it, that it had been published about six months earlier in the Telegraph, which is the reason for the second appearance by that paper in my list of references despite the fact that I do not normally read it.