Commission's sins of omission

Why has the Falconer Commission into assisted suicide failed to deliver satisfaction to all parts of the disability constituency, asks Peter White? Because it was limited by its own lack of scope

I hold the libertarian view that modern thinking on disability includes the right to decide and manage the point at which you want to give it up.

That goes hand in hand with the conviction that disability of itself is never a reason to regard life as not worth living, and that anything that encourages that view is bad and dangerous.

In other words, the issues of disability and the right to die should be disentangled at every point.

That said, I’m puzzled by the make-up and findings of the commission. Having packed itself, apparently, with people who’d already decided that they wanted to change the law, the commission has shown an obsession with terminal illness and the expected time of death, ignoring the idea that this should be about independent human beings making rational decisions about whether life is worth living and reducing it to a medical calculation about bowing to the inevitable.

Thinking like that brings me closer to understanding why some disabled people deeply fear any loosening in the law on assisted suicide. You can’t use a medical guess about when someone is likely to die as a criter­ion for whether the remainder of their life is worth living.

Under the commission’s proposals, the decision-making process could only be started by the person wish­ing to end his or her life, but this is offset by the fear that the value of life is too easily measured by medical and scientific factors and not by more complex human issues.

The commissioners seem not to understand this, because before any of them were appointed, people not agree­ing that there was a need for change were said to have “a closed mind” by Demos, the think-tank that administered the commission.  

It has also been said that the fact that almost nobody gets what they wanted from these proposals is evidence of the commission’s impartiality. I don’t see it that way. It seems to me that the commission hasn’t grasped the idea that decisions on assisted suicide should not rest on your medical state of health but on your freedom to make a decision based on your own estimate of the value of your life to you.

I suspect that those, like me, who want more freedom for people who are ready, for quite logical reasons, to end their lives, will have to work more actively to address the fears of those who want more safeguards against medics used to deciding what is and what isn’t a worthwhile life.

Disabled people are understandably fearful of anything that suggests that a disabled life is a lesser life. This should have been recognised here.