Category: Uncategorized

***Updated 16 July, 2017***

While we empathise with Mr Conway in his attempts to avoid ang end-of-life suffering we do not agree that this is an inevitable experience of life and death. We also strongly maintain that changing the law to allow physician Assisted Suicide will endanger the lives of the UK’s many ill and disabled people who, with the right amount of appropriate care and support can and do achieve a peaceful passing. Palliative care is already seriously underfunded in the U.K. and we believe that legalising Assisted Suicide will negatively impact on an already unestimated service. More importantly, this type of support allows disabled and ill people to live full and enjoyable lives, with no fear of unnecessary death from coercion, error or human prejudice holding them back.

We also believe that legalising Assisted Suicide will negatively impact on how continuing illness and the lives of disabled people are viewed as a part of contemporary society. We know from our own extensive and varied experiences and research that the medical knowledge and facilities already exist to ensure a peaceful death for the majority of people who die as a result of illness and we campaign for those to become commonplace in all palliative care situations. We have seen no evidence to support the claim that the only way to ensure a so-called ‘good death’ is to utilise Assisted Suicide and instead choose to campaign for better end-of-life care through person centred palliative and medical support. While we acknowledge that mistakes are made during end-of-life we do not believe that potentially compounding those errors by adding serious risk to the rights and funding of those who choose to live is the best or safest way forward. Coupled with the fact that medical professionals often make errors when giving patients an accurate timescale with prognosis we believe that rather than ending suffering, the legalisation of physician Assisted Suicide will add to it.

We passionately challenge the notion of ‘dignity’ as used by Mr Conway and his supporters at Dignity in Dying. As disabled people and their allies, many who rely on daily practical, physical and medical assistance to survive we suggest instead that dignity is simply a perception in the eye of the beholder and is therefore as changeable and unique as each individual person. It is not illness and disability that effect a person’s perceived ‘dignity’ but the way that society values or devalues their existence as opposed to those with no impairment. It is not a real state. It is also too often wrongly associated with the loss of physical ability. As long as disability, continuing & terminal illness alone are considered enough reason to want to die then we are certain that there will be no equality to protect us in death.

These beliefs have compelled us to launch a legal intervention to Mr Conway’s attempts to change the law. We do not seek to punish him nor do we want anyone to suffer during their life or death. But we do not accept that the only way to guarantee a ‘good death’ is to risk the lives of others and instead will continue to campaign for truly equal rights for all ill and disabled people so that living with impairment is no longer perceived as ‘undignified’ and death by illness is not uniquely viewed as a ‘bad death’.

We support people everywhere who continue to fight for access to appropriate care and support in life as well as effective and appropriate palliative care and support in death.

16 July, 2016

Juliet Marlow
Not Dead Yet UK

Many of you will remember that earlier in the year at a short hearing in London, Nikki and Merv Kenward were granted permission to proceed with the judicial review of the DPP’s new policy on the grounds that she had made the law more liberal and that the legality of the change should be scrutinised.  We have heard the hearing is to take place at the Royal Courts of Justice in London on the 16th of November from 9 am

Nikki and Merv are calling for people to show support by attending a rally on the day. Dignity in Dying are expected to have a presence, the Humanist Society may also turn up.

If you can help in any way or want more details please contact Nikki or Merv 07780 476 714 or email mervkenward@gmail.com

MPs have rejected plans for a right to die in England and Wales in their first vote on the issue in almost 20 years. In a free vote in the Commons, 118 MPs were in favour and 330 against plans to allow some terminally ill adults to end their lives with medical supervision.

After a passionate debate, MP’s overwhelmingly voted against with many saying that vulnerable people would have no protection and would be put at great risk.

Under the proposed legislation people with fewer than six months to live could have been prescribed a lethal dose of drugs, which they had to be able to take themselves. Two doctors and a High Court judge would have needed to approve each case.

Not Dead Yet UK wants to place on record its grateful thanks to all those who supported our campaign. We are a tiny organisation with very limited resources but we have determination, passion and commitment and these won the day.

We can now reflect on a job well done and think about the future in a much more positive way.

We will keep you informed of any new developments on this subject and will be discussing the future of Not Dead Yet UK. If you have any thoughts regarding our future direction please let us know.

09:00 – 2:30pm, Friday 11th September.

Old Palace Yard (Opposite the House of Lords), Parliament, Westminster, London SW1A 0AA.

JOIN THE FIGHT TO PROTECT OUR LIVES!

Not Dead Yet UK supported by many other Disabled People’s Organisations will protest against Rob Marris’ MP Assisted Suicide Bill while it is being debated in the House of Commons. We need to stop the Bill now – it will be much more difficult at a later stage.

We need EVERYONE WHO CAN to support us in responding peacefully, in large numbers, to this campaign so that Parliament is left in no doubt that assisted suicide is not the answer.

Many people who are also personally affected by the Assisted Suicide Bill’s contents cannot join us outside the house of Commons. There are other ways you can help. Contact you MP now and share your concern.

WHY PROTEST AGAINST THE ASSISTED SUICIDE BILL?

Many ‘terminally ill’  and disabled people are deeply concerned about the proposed changes to the law on assisted suicide. We will not gain rights, we will lose rights! If the Assisted Suicide Bill becomes law, our lives will be less protected, and our sense of vulnerability will be increased. Disabled People’s Organisations the BMA and many others are opposed to this Bill and are agreed that what disabled people need is the resources to live as independently as possible and the best palliative care possible when we need it.

We shall be gathering between 9:00 and 9:30am ready for the MP’s arrival at 10am.

The vote is due to take place at 2:30pm and and we will remain until we know the result.

Remember you will be outside all day so come prepared! We can provide T Shirts, placards unless you have your own!

Please share this notice, join us on 11th Sept.

In ‘Real disability activists and masquerades’ (still available here on Not Dead Yet UK’s website) I countered the spurious claim that 75% of disabled people support assisted suicide/euthanasia. The so-called ‘poll’ from which that nonsense figure ‘appeared’ was the British Social Attitudes (BSA) Survey 2007. That survey yielded no information of the kind, and did not even mention: assisted suicide or euthanasia or ‘dignity’. So the claim, based on that work, had to be simple propaganda.

A follow-up poll, commissioned by promoters of euthanasia/assisted suicide law in Britain, asked four questions, three of which were simplistic one-liners. But ‘Question’ 1 was a long rehearsal of the proposals of the Falconer Bill. It could and should have been divided into at least 7 different questions. So to ask ‘Do you agree with assisted dying?’ at the end of that  much detail was also sheer nonsense – no-one could be clear what they were answering – and especially when the word ‘suicide’ was replaced by ‘dying’ to confuse matters.

This continues to beg the question ‘What is the real motive of people making spurious claims about disabled people’s support for euthanasia/assisted suicide?’ The pro-euthanasia/assisted suicide lobby continue to claim (now 80%) support amongst disabled people, but consistently ignore the majority opinion as expressed through Disabled People’s Organisations (DPOs), that such laws are not just dangerous, they threaten disabled people most of all.|

The other rather stupid claim they make is that a press to legalise euthanasia/assisted suicide has nothing to do with disability matters – yet they constantly play on the most severely disabled people as ‘piteous’ throughout their use of the media to promote their aims. This contradicts their every protest that disabled people will be safe, especially now when the most recent publicly shared deaths are not of terminally ill people, nor of disabled people but those people who declare they are so afraid of becoming disabled they would rather die. We who have lived disabled lives for many years can only watch as those with virtually no experience of being disabled reinforce the worst of these false messages ‘Being disabled is a fate worse than death’. We wonder who has been advising these people, leading them to believe this is, or must be true, and to take their lives?

Constantly portraying disabled people, and severely disabled people, as the most ‘pitiful’ examples of people who need such a law is more than false – it is a morally abhorrent when it leads people to kill themselves based on the fear of being disabled.

The pro-euthanasia/assisted suicide lobby wilfully ignore any evidence that does not suit their aim. Anyone involved in survey work will say tell you that the answers you get in polls depends on how you word your questions. The evidence of the Com Res Poll published in the Telegraph July 19 2014 showed categorically that the slight change to more honest language results in a massive drop in those supporting assisted suicide down immediately to 43%. The poll conducted by SCOPE around the same time reflected much more accurately the fears disabled people really do have about such legislation.

Therefore, it remains somewhat beyond belief that a lobby for assisted suicide can claim any view on behalf of all disabled people, never mind a massive majority in favour of their proposed law.

NDY UK on the other hand, like NDY US, is a network of disabled people working largely pro bono who have been mandated to represent the views of many disabled people. And still to-date, the majority of DPOs (UK, US, Australia, New Zealand, as well as others) – are either entirely against or have huge reservations about such a law.

Those involved with Not Dead Yet UK have a long and collective history of representing large numbers of disabled people’s rights through democratic structures and processes, and continue to seek the views of those numbers of disabled people. The world of legitimate disability activism is required to do this: it is called democracy.

But the promoters of euthanasia/assisted suicide have a clear strategy: keep repeating the lie that a majority (disabled people or otherwise) want this law, and the public will begin to believe it is so. But where is the evidence? The real evidence?

There actually isn’t any.

And the evidence we do have goes against their claims, even in their preferred model operating in Oregon and Washington State, where most people say they want to die because they do not want ‘to be a burden on others’ (40% in Oregon, 61% in Washington State).

At the tip of reality, people with dementia are dying in Belgium as are people with mental health issues – people on medication known to bring suicidal ideation or a 24 year old woman with no other health issues, as we saw just recently. Disabled new-born babies in Groningen Holland are being euthanised, and all those in the USA who ‘feel’ themselves to be a burden.

They pro-euthanasia/assisted suicide lobby know full-well that any such law in Britain will mean that innocent people will die, and first among equal candidates are disabled people.

I have repeated over some years now that any law must, by its nature, be general, covering every citizen. Which is also why it makes no sense for the pro-lobby to make a special case for disabled people. The law will be there for not just the fewer than one thousand, but each and every one out of the six hundred thousand who die in the UK every year.

But then where are the voices of the majority who do not wish to commit suicide? Where do they find justice – democracy? And the families of the five thousand, mostly younger men who commit suicide every year? How are their voices heard in this moral scrum for supposed individual choice? Despair is the end of all choice: when someone says, for whatever reason – disability or financial ruin or one of the thousand other things that drive people to despair – ‘I cannot go on’ that is not a choice – that is the end of all choices and sometimes life itself.

Oscar Wilde famously said public opinion was ‘the attempt to organise the ignorance of the community, and to elevate it to the dignity of physical force’; Russell said that ‘One should respect public opinion in so far as is necessary to avoid starvation and to keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny’; Churchill thought there was no such thing as public opinion; only published opinion.

Relying on polls for any opinion but especially on such a grave subject is not only dangerous but downright foolish.

In ‘Real disability activists and masquerades’ (still available here on Not Dead Yet UK’s website) I countered the spurious claim that 75% of disabled people support assisted suicide/euthanasia. The so-called ‘poll’ from which that nonsense figure ‘appeared’ was the British Social Attitudes (BSA) Survey 2007. That survey yielded no information of the kind, and did not even mention: assisted suicide or euthanasia or ‘dignity’. So the claim, based on that work, had to be simple propaganda.

A follow-up poll, commissioned by promoters of euthanasia/assisted suicide law in Britain, asked four questions, three of which were simplistic one-liners. But ‘Question’ 1 was a long rehearsal of the proposals of the Falconer Bill. It could and should have been divided into at least 7 different questions. So to ask ‘Do you agree with assisted dying?’ at the end of that  much detail was also sheer nonsense – no-one could be clear what they were answering – and especially when the word ‘suicide’ was replaced by ‘dying’ to confuse matters.

This continues to beg the question ‘What is the real motive of people making spurious claims about disabled people’s support for euthanasia/assisted suicide?’ The pro-euthanasia/assisted suicide lobby continue to claim (now 80%) support amongst disabled people, but consistently ignore the majority opinion as expressed through Disabled People’s Organisations (DPOs), that such laws are not just dangerous, they threaten disabled people most of all.|

The other rather stupid claim they make is that a press to legalise euthanasia/assisted suicide has nothing to do with disability matters – yet they constantly play on the most severely disabled people as ‘piteous’ throughout their use of the media to promote their aims. This contradicts their every protest that disabled people will be safe, especially now when the most recent publicly shared deaths are not of terminally ill people, nor of disabled people but those people who declare they are so afraid of becoming disabled they would rather die. We who have lived disabled lives for many years can only watch as those with virtually no experience of being disabled reinforce the worst of these false messages ‘Being disabled is a fate worse than death’. We wonder who has been advising these people, leading them to believe this is, or must be true, and to take their lives?

Constantly portraying disabled people, and severely disabled people, as the most ‘pitiful’ examples of people who need such a law is more than false – it is a morally abhorrent when it leads people to kill themselves based on the fear of being disabled.

The pro-euthanasia/assisted suicide lobby wilfully ignore any evidence that does not suit their aim. Anyone involved in survey work will say tell you that the answers you get in polls depends on how you word your questions. The evidence of the Com Res Poll published in the Telegraph July 19 2014 showed categorically that the slight change to more honest language results in a massive drop in those supporting assisted suicide down immediately to 43%. The poll conducted by SCOPE around the same time reflected much more accurately the fears disabled people really do have about such legislation.

Therefore, it remains somewhat beyond belief that a lobby for assisted suicide can claim any view on behalf of all disabled people, never mind a massive majority in favour of their proposed law.

NDY UK on the other hand, like NDY US, is a network of disabled people working largely pro bono who have been mandated to represent the views of many disabled people. And still to-date, the majority of DPOs (UK, US, Australia, New Zealand, as well as others) – are either entirely against or have huge reservations about such a law.

Those involved with Not Dead Yet UK have a long and collective history of representing large numbers of disabled people’s rights through democratic structures and processes, and continue to seek the views of those numbers of disabled people. The world of legitimate disability activism is required to do this: it is called democracy.

But the promoters of euthanasia/assisted suicide have a clear strategy: keep repeating the lie that a majority (disabled people or otherwise) want this law, and the public will begin to believe it is so. But where is the evidence? The real evidence?

There actually isn’t any.

And the evidence we do have goes against their claims, even in their preferred model operating in Oregon and Washington State, where most people say they want to die because they do not want ‘to be a burden on others’ (40% in Oregon, 61% in Washington State).

At the tip of reality, people with dementia are dying in Belgium as are people with mental health issues – people on medication known to bring suicidal ideation or a 24 year old woman with no other health issues, as we saw just recently. Disabled new-born babies in Groningen Holland are being euthanised, and all those in the USA who ‘feel’ themselves to be a burden.

They pro-euthanasia/assisted suicide lobby know full-well that any such law in Britain will mean that innocent people will die, and first among equal candidates are disabled people.

I have repeated over some years now that any law must, by its nature, be general, covering every citizen. Which is also why it makes no sense for the pro-lobby to make a special case for disabled people. The law will be there for not just the fewer than one thousand, but each and every one out of the six hundred thousand who die in the UK every year.

But then where are the voices of the majority who do not wish to commit suicide? Where do they find justice – democracy? And the families of the five thousand, mostly younger men who commit suicide every year? How are their voices heard in this moral scrum for supposed individual choice? Despair is the end of all choice: when someone says, for whatever reason – disability or financial ruin or one of the thousand other things that drive people to despair – ‘I cannot go on’ that is not a choice – that is the end of all choices and sometimes life itself.

Oscar Wilde famously said public opinion was ‘the attempt to organise the ignorance of the community, and to elevate it to the dignity of physical force’; Russell said that ‘One should respect public opinion in so far as is necessary to avoid starvation and to keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny’; Churchill thought there was no such thing as public opinion; only published opinion.

Relying on polls for any opinion but especially on such a grave subject is not only dangerous but downright foolish.