September 2013 – Not Dead Yet UK

Stephen Hawking is living proof that people with MND can live long and incredibly influential lives. Even after the period during which his then wife, Jane Hawking refused to let doctors switch off his life-support. All these years later, I have often cited him as an example completely contrary to the idea that MND automatically renders the life of the person as something ‘not worth living’. His longevity has also defied medical prediction, again pointing up just how vague and inaccurate such predictions can be. We never really know when someone will actually die.

Yet these are stalwart arguments of a wealthy and aggressive lobby for legislation permitting assisted suicide/euthanasia. Quite they they have never devoted energy or resources to fight for the right of every citizen to have the very best palliative care at the end of their lives, remains a mystery.

It is particularly disappointing that Hawking has changed his earlier stance, but even worse that he has betrayed naive, and really rather stupid thinking in his pronouncements. Great scientists are not immune from lazy moral thinking.

The one, in particular, which upsets me is ‘you wouldn’t do it to a dog’, which is the most over-used and ill-informed ‘argument’ in the general public response.

The idea is: we are not so cruel to our pets, ‘putting them down’ when they are at the end of their lives and/or in intolerable pain. It seems a simple equation: we treat our pets this way, why on earth would we not do as much for our human companions? Should we not do more for them, go further in our efforts to ease human suffering?

But repeating ‘you wouldn’t do it to a dog’ in a debate about euthanasia is perhaps the most unreflective, merely emotional response: it misses entirely the vast differences between the lives of animals and the lives of human beings.

Not only does it entirely ignore these differences, it also misses the very opposite point to the one that it is supposed to make. It is because of the vast differences between humans and animals that it cannot ever be so simple a matter to end the life of a human being as euthanasing a dog, even the much loved family pet.

Pointing to how (easily?) we euthanase the family dog for example, does nothing to allow us to move straight to euthanasing the family grandmother, on exactly the same grounds. Therein lies the stupidity of the remark: whether my grandmother’s suffering is terrible and terrible to witness, whatever I might think about how to help her, cannot be just like my thinking about taking an ailing, aging springer spaniel to the vet.

In fact, as one who did, it is not even such a simple matter to end the life of the family dog. Just because some people find it easy and obvious does not make it so.

But the big and stupid mistake is to equate the two – the dog and my grandmother – and saying so spectacularly fails to explore the categorical differences between human lives and those of other animals. It does not come close to considering specific questions, for example, about the life my grandmother has led, the things she has achieved, her place in the family, her work, her relationships – or even the rôle that pain and suffering plays in human life. Her life stands opposed to the life of my dog, regardless of my part in his life, his in mine.

One ironic twist in this is that those who cry ‘you wouldn’t do it to a dog’, generally accuse those of us who oppose legalising euthanasia, of cruelty.

But I think it is more prudent to be extremely wary of someone who thinks that putting down his grandmother involves simply and exactly the same considerations as putting down his dog. Arguing cogently about the dangers of legalising euthanasia, about the evidence from Holland and Belgium etc, is surely more humane.

It also partly ironic because disabled people and disabled people’s organisations, by their very nature, include much more experience of impairment and sometimes of suffering, than in the general population. Not many non-disabled people suffer the rank discrimination that disabled people face every day.

Disabled people are also just as likely to have witnessed the deaths of family members, or friends, who might have suffered. That our voices are disparaged in this debate, our fears dismissed (despite the most cruel of lessons in history) is equally stupid, and insulting. But this is one detail of a bigger canvas in which disabled lives are believed not to be worth living. Too many non-disabled people view a disabled life too difficult to contemplate, as though it must always involve relentless and unremitted suffering.

This crass view is all too easily expressed directly to disabled people in forms such as ‘I don’t know how you do it’ and ‘I couldn’t live like that’ extending all too easily to ‘I wouldn’t want to live like that’ and for too many, even great scientists are not immune into ‘I wouldn’t let my dog suffer like that’.

But the extension does not stop there. For others the thought quickly leads to ‘I couldn’t, so you shouldn’t want to live like that’ and on to ‘Well, I perfectly understand if you don’t want to live like that, so I’ll fight for your right to die. Indeed I’ll help you do it’

The very next step is to: ‘You shouldn’t want to live like that, so whether I can discuss it with you or not, I will ease your suffering’ and worse, ‘I will take your life because you are an abomination.’

And here we have moved from helping someone to commit suicide, which is after all voluntary euthanasia, to non-voluntary euthanasia and to involuntary euthanasia which is after all, murder.