Press reports that world renown 85-year old British orchestra conductor Sir Edward Downes died last week with his terminally ill 74-year old wife in a legal assisted-suicde clinic in Switzerland is disturbing. This is believed to be one of a handful of cases of a person dying in an assisted suicide who is not terminally ill. There will of course be plenty of moral, ethical and religious issues involved.
The typical marriage vow is for life, for better or for worse, until death do they part. That’s fine. But the late Sir Edward didn’t want to part with his wife. Lady Downes was reportedly in the final terminal stage of cancer. But Sir Edward was not known to be suffering from terminal illness.
What made Sir Edward to voluntarily take his life? According to his children, “after 54 happy years together, they decided to end their own lives rather than continue to struggle with serious health problems.” So what serious health problems did Sir Edward have? Again according to the children, he was “almost blind and increasingly deaf”.
But these are problems faced by an ageing population. Does that mean we are going to see more suicides, whether assisted or not? British laws say it is illegal to take one’s life, or to assist in another person doing so. Yet 117 other Britons did travel to this same assisted-suicide clinic in Switizerland to die.
In the case of Sir Edward and Lady Downes, a lethal cocktail of barbiturates is all it took to end their lives. The big question is why do some medical professionals think nothing of assisting their clients (yes, not patients) in commiting suicide? Has the value of life become so commercialized that some medical professionals have no qualms about ending it through assisted suicides?
Think about it. Is your life yours to do what you want? If so, why does the law prohibit the taking of your own life, or the assisting of another to do likewise? Is suicide the way out of problems in life? And is death the end of every problem – or is it the start of some other more serious problem in another world?
Related posts:
Recent Comments