Don’t replace a tough law with safeguards and which protects vulnerable people with one which will endanger their lives.
Please oppose Baroness Meacher’s Assisted Dying Bill on Friday 22 October, and speak against the terrible choices it would force ill people and their families to make.
I would like to share my story about how our current law preventing assisted suicide saved my father’s life when he was suffering in hospital.
When he was getting on in years, my father had a TIA (very minor stroke). When he was lying on a trolley in A & E, he begged me to ease his suffering by giving him an overdose.
It was a great relief that I could remind him that it was illegal and a serious offense. After his medication was fixed and he was stable, he lived a reasonable life for another 2 + years and never again considered ending his life.
I was saved from a terrible dilemma and the guilt of ending my father’s life, because of the protection of the law.
For this very personal reason, I am deeply opposed to legalising assisted suicide. Please do not introduce a law that would put people like my father and I in such dreadful situations of having to choose who lives and who dies.
Also, please read this Spectator article about how assisted suicide drugs can actually cause pain rather than reducing it: https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/last-rights-assisted-suicide-is-neither-painless-nor-dignified.
Thank you for reading my story and I hope that you will agree to oppose assisted suicide
