Clair Lewis: At the end of life’s tether (UK)

There has been a lot happening in the UK in the past couple of weeks and I’ll be writing on it in the days and weeks to come.  There have been a couple of court cases, and two famous authors promoting euthanasia and assisted suicide – all of this in the UK and in a very short span of time.  The media is making a party of it – and there isn’t much attempt to be evenhanded in the treatment of the issues.  There’s a steamroller going full time across the pond, and our brothers and sisters in the disability movement are beginning to feel the rumblings.

For right now, disability activist Clair Lewis has written a good overview of recent events and what she sees coming at her.  Regular readers of this blog might remember an earlier essay of hers that was shared here last year titled “My life is unbearable – Don’t fix it, just kill me.”

Writing once again at Heresy Corner, Clair Lewis has written another important essay that should be heard above the voices of the affluent “advocates” who dominate the discussion of assisted suicide and euthanasia in the UK.  Below is the intro to “At the end of life’s tether“:

Two weeks ago I was utterly at the end of my tether, a wobbling mess of a person who was waking up every day wishing I hadn’t. Disabled people do struggle – profoundly at times. I can’t deny that, my own life proves it to be true. There are three people in my family with additional needs. One of them badly needs but doesn’t have adequate social care provision, I can’t find a member of care staff to get me out of bed most mornings who is willing to work for the allocated money in these circumstances. Life has become permanently stressful, draining every last spoonful of my energy, so I am now in constant pain, have daily migranes and keep falling asleep by accident. Then one of my girlfriends broke up with me – now the second long term partner I have lost citing ‘my circumstances’ as the reason. By anyone’s standards I was having a pretty bad time. I felt like I was grasping hold of the last strand of my sanity.

So.. just like non disabled people do, I nipped down to my wonderful GP who said ‘Oh you look VERY tense’, I blubbed like a baby and came home with a fistful of antidepressants (again) having been told it’s only to be expected with a life as difficult as mine. Thank goodness for his sensible approach.

In the UK this week, affluent writers like Terry Pratchett and Martin Amis are swamping the press with calls for death clinics (again!) for those with nothing else to worry about except their impairments, while those of us in poverty and lacking the services and resources we need know that should assisted suicide become legal here, people will end up being killed because of things which could be fixed.

But dying, with, or without the assistance of a death clinic or my family would not make this situation better, neither would killing one of my children. It would also not help me if when I had popped down the GP, I left with a Dignitas leaflet.

Please read the rest of the essay here. –Stephen Drake