Britain cannot make up its mind. It’s either suicidal or it’s not. September 10 is a national suicide prevention day there, and tomorrow Parliament votes on the assisted-suicide push that’s been afoot, as Ramesh noted.
Charles Collins, an American journalist living there whom I’ve known for some time, had a close call in recent years and has some very personal insights into the dangers of assisted suicide. We talked about the pending vote and his experience recently here:
A patient feels devoid of dignity, and doctors are going to offer, if not outright pressure, patients to avail themselves of legal suicide?
We know from where it has been implemented that legal assisted suicide encourages plain old traditional suicide. Why on earth are we doing this to ourselves — and to one another? Even without intense physical and mental suffering, we are burdened with more doom on an hourly basis in the West — more dark information that we have no control over. We are doing no one any favors by making it easier than ever to take an off-ramp — and in the name of proper medicine.
Pray they do the right thing across the pond. Mercifully the politics over there is colorful enough that they have a shot at aborting unnatural death.
By the way, a federal judge today rejected an attempt to block a new assisted-suicide law going into effect in Illinois this weekend, following New York’s recent lead.