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salwitcher.bsky.social
Photo 6/6. Thank you for reading. I hope this is a helpful contribution to a highly complex debate. Please be assured that, whatever your views, that is my sincere intention.
For goodness sake! Even before it’s debated there’s pressure to make eligibility criteria more ‘generous’. They won’t stop. As with Assisted Suicide Bills in different guises, they’ll keep hammering away until one day they batter down the door. How then can we ensure that attacks on #AssistanceToLive support for desperate & unprofitable people & thus deflect the blows onto them, never culminate in an #AssistedDeathPenalty? All this is why this Bill is relevant not just to people nearing the end of life but many others. At root it’s about what kind of society we want to live in. Is it one that sees the purpose of profit as being to improve lives or the purpose of lives as being to improve profit? We should judge a society not just by how it treats its most vulnerable but by how many people it renders vulnerable when it has the wealth & resources, the knowledge, skills & technology, not to do so. The stakes are high. No wonder it’s become a polarised, emotionally charged debate. If, as I hope & believe, there are good well-meaning people on all sides we must unite to call a halt to this Bill. The opportunities it offers to people who are not good or well-meaning are huge. If you want choice to end genuinely unavoidable suffering and also don’t want death to be the only choice when genuinely avoidable suffering is imposed, this is not the way. It cannot be resolved in 5 hours of heated parliamentary debate & Committee fiddling with clauses. Surely no good well-meaning person would ever risk opening the door to eugenics by stealth, as this Bill would regrettably do? I don’t have all the answers. Not even all the questions! Maybe good answers don’t exist. But surely we need to do all we can to try to find them
November 28, 2024 at 3:07 PM
salwitcher.bsky.social
Photo 3/6 #EconomicCoercion #MedicalCoercion #PoliticalCoercion #AssistanceToLive #ConstructedCoercion #AssistedDying
It can be #EconomicCoercion - normalising the idea that sick/ older/ disabled people are nothing but an impediment to economic growth (a view voiced in the UK Covid Inquiry); that the value of human lives is solely measured by how much profit powerful people can extract from them It can be #MedicalCoercion: the progressive destruction of our NHS so what you get depends on ability to pay, not need; by epic long-term underfunding; by making healthcare settings unsafe; dumbing down expertise with Physician Associates & neutralising regulators. It’s about destroying trust in medics (see CV & Long Covid groups surveys) while giving even more power to them. The issuing of DNARs we saw in the early days of the pandemic, defining clinical need by budgetary restrictions & often ill-informed judgements on quality of life. All underpinned by #PoliticalCoercion (or that of multinational masters/ oligarchal overlords?): leaving sick/older/disabled people in deprivation without #AssistanceToLive; bullying sick/ disabled people to work on the fictional basis that if they made more effort they could. Only yesterday our Government threatened that if disabled people & people with a health condition don’t want to be written off they would be offered a ’pathway to work’. No pathway can lead to work people too sick or disabled to work. And no! They don’t want to be ‘written off’. Coercion can be generated by withdrawing support to live a good life. This is #ConstructedCoercion: political choice to generate conditions that render lives intolerable, removing all possibilities of choice to live well &dignity in life, & offer it only in choice to end it.
November 28, 2024 at 3:07 PM
paulapeters19.bsky.social
#AssistanceToLive

This video is from Anne via Disability Arts Online

Anne has a speech impairment The video is in text format in Anne’s own words

Link to video here

disabilityarts.online/blog/anne-te...
Assisted Suicide Bill – five hours of debate to step back from the edge - Disability Arts Online
I’ve made this video in response to the proposed assisted suicide bill. I am using text because I have a vocal disability and I want to make sure I am clearly understood. https://youtu.be/QzSOSbWZYV0 ...
disabilityarts.online
November 25, 2024 at 10:27 AM