Friday 18 June 2010

Woman wins "right to die".

The SA Supreme Court has ruled that a woman has the "right to die" and the nursing home that she lives in will not face charges for assisting suicide.

The latter was the reason for the case, the home did not know if they would be allowed to fulfil her wishes without being charged. So now they will fulfil her wishes, and not feed her or give her insulin.

This follows a similar ruling in WA, where a quadriplegic man was permitted to do the same thing.

Now I may not be the most up to date person when it comes to the whole "right to die" issue, but I think I'm pretty sure that this is not what is meant by groups that support voluntary euthanasia.

In fact I think this is pretty much the complete opposite of what they want. I have trouble seeing this as a woman winning the right to die, but more as the woman winning the right to kill herself slowly. The man from WA, Christian Rossiter died from a chest infection in September 2009.

They don't say how long he was starving himself, this article suggests that it would have taken him about 2 weeks.

Is this really the option that people in horrible pain can choose if they want to end their life? About 2 weeks of not eating, possibly causing more pain? Frankly we treat animals better then that, and they don't get to choose.

If we are going to be a society that allows people the right to die, perhaps there should be a better option then this.

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