Pensioner’s bid to crowdfund his own assisted suicide fails after website gets cold feet

I am absolutely disgusted that people still have to travel to Switzerland for assisted suicide. I feel very strongly that it should be a basic human right that we should be allowed to chose to end our life if we want.

This man is suffering from prostate cancer and I was with my Dad when he died from it. He was a shell of the man he was and could no longer speak and cancer had spread to a lot of his internal organs and his brain. It was incredibly upsetting to see him like that although he had led a relatively healthy life battling the disease for 12 years. It was only in the last 6 months of his life that he really deteriorated but that is 6 months of suffering that could've been avoided.

I totally agree with you ( particularly as I have cancer ) however there is the legal issue about who and how the assisting occurs. Doctors understandably don't want to do it and the police don't know where to stand on the issue. As currently it would be murder / manslaughter.

And yet, as we have probably observed many times before, if one of my cats gets something like that, I can ask a vet end his or her suffering. I don’t like to think about it, but I know that my cats may well get a more dignified end than I may.

Yes completely ridiculous isn't it.

Scott Adams (of Dilbert Fame) has been running an interesting discussion on assisted suicide/dying on his Blog - the conclusion page can be found here
Even that is a weighty piece of discussion and there is a lot more that preceded it. He's also updating things as additional comment comes in.

While, overall speaking I think I'm in favour of assisted suicide, some of the counter arguments in there really made me stop and reflect. Certainly less sure about it than I used to be.

In fact, if you didn't put your cat down if it was terminally ill, you would probably get prosecuted for cruelty to animals... Why isn't it cruelty to humans when we make them suffer the same way?

I agree with Caz.