Source: Bigstock

Honesty at last from the medical profession and Big Pharma as a new law proposed in Britain will allow doctors to prescribe a pill specifically to kill you.

Up until now you might feel it’s just been experimental Covid vaccines that might give you a heart attack or stroke or turbo cancer, or weight loss drugs that might kill you if you’re unlucky—we just got reports of the first death linked to them—or if you’re “lucky” they will just hollow you out and make you look like a shriveled extraterrestrial being found at Roswell.

But now there is an assisted-dying bill going through Parliament that, if it succeeds and becomes law, will mean that anyone in England and Wales can go to their doctor and ask him or her to prescribe them “an approved substance”—that’s what they’re calling it—to kill them.

Two doctors must approve you getting this prescription for death, mind you, and a judge. The patient won’t be able to discuss it with anyone else other than doctors, or the laws preventing relatives from helping their loved ones to die will still kick in. But the doctor can help them and have immunity from prosecution.

God, if you like, will become whichever random works at your local GP clinic.

I feel some doctors will take to this like a duck to water, because so many of them have been prescribing death in all but name for quite some time now.

Whether by mistake, or by some awful design by people higher up the chain, either for big profit or for some Deep State plot or whatever the conspiracy theorists may believe, doctors dole out lethal stuff all the time, but it’s not talked about or acknowledged.

And doctors and nurses help old sick people on their way with double morphine doses in hospitals—of course they do. Anyone who has sat beside a dying relative knows that.

Call it palliative care or call it helping a dying person on their way. And I’m not necessarily arguing with hospital staff being compassionate in that way, if it’s done in the death throes.

That’s different from giving someone who might be perfectly able-bodied, and who is not in that moment anywhere near dying, a pill to go home and kill themselves.

The bill is called the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill and would make it legal for over-18s who are terminally ill to be given assistance to end their own life.

But I can easily see that leading to the Terminally Ill Children (End of Life) Bill.

Because once you let the principle through, the same people will start pressuring for it to be extended to under-18s, arguing that terminally ill kids and maybe horribly depressed teenagers deserve this “right” even more.

The bill stipulates the proposed die-ee (my phraseology, of course) must be a “resident of England and Wales and be registered with a GP for at least 12 months.” Well, whoop-de-doo. That surely puts iron safeguards in place.

“They must have the mental capacity to make the choice and be deemed to have expressed a clear, settled and informed wish, free from coercion or pressure.” Settled? Calling suicide a settled wish is a stupid mistake. We’d have to talk to the dead and gone to ask if they were really happy with their choice.

And what about those who think they’re doing the right thing, for all the wrong reasons? Appalling reasons.

Obviously, we can see the situation coming where a daughter eager for her inheritance tells her old mother to maybe consider it, in the interests of her family, and the poor old lady decides that yes, she should move on and be less trouble for everyone…

To qualify, they must “be expected to die within six months.” My goodness, that’s ambiguous. Anyone with almost any serious illness could make a case that they might die in six months. How many people who got given a year made five years, or ten, and would not have missed those for the world?

A High Court judge can also question the dying person, or anyone else they consider appropriate. There must be a further fourteen days after the judge has made the ruling.

Under the bill, a doctor would prepare the substance, but the person themselves must take it.

No doctor or anyone else would be allowed to administer the medication to the terminally ill person.

What is this medication, pray? I know it’s just a little detail, but I’m quite interested. You would think someone would maybe mention what it was, but anyway, I’m sure they have “a substance” in mind.

And I’m sure the drug companies will make it to order. You know, make sure they’re producing plenty of it, depending on demand.

It’s dark, this death pill business.

The final solution. Will it be big business?

And why, really, does any first-world government want to let people put themselves down like dogs?

Ask yourself, is it convenience and relief for us, or them? Is the state so tired of terminal illness, and all the expense that entails, that it has decided to encourage us, or at least facilitate us, to clear off quicker?

All those currently very sick with turbo cancers and terrible neurological conditions, heart conditions, and so on…do they now need to get used to, maybe look forward to, the idea of not hanging around?

It’s wicked if so.

Human beings will assume the status of sick pets.

“Oh no, I can’t do Wednesday. I’m taking my grandmother to the doctors to have her put herself to sleep…”

Listen, I know some people are in terrible, terrible pain. I’ve been in chronic pain for years with an old injury involving titanium plates in my face, and there is nothing any surgeon can do. I have at times been what I call “almost suicidal” with it—I’m careful never to use the s-word in case it makes me feel it.

I’m not underestimating or minimizing what it’s like to be so worn down with an unresolvable physical issue that you just want a way out, to make it stop. And while mine is not an illness, in that it won’t kill me, it still torments me, and there is no pain relief that works on it, as every specialist I have seen has confirmed, and no surgery is possible. There is no escape.

But maybe life wasn’t meant to involve an escape hatch.

Exit, like entry, is not on our terms—it doesn’t work that way.

We come into this world as the fates allow and we go out the same. The way we pass is determined by luck, fate, God—call it what you will—and maybe that is the journey our soul is meant to be on.

If you believe in God, then you certainly shouldn’t be encouraged to commit what you consider a sin. But if others of an atheistic bent begin doing it, it puts pressure on all of us. How long before we overhear our neighbors saying of a sick person: “I can’t believe she’s still hanging in there. Wouldn’t you think she’d get a pill, for the sake of her poor husband, so he can move on?”

Suffering gets bad press in this world nowadays, but we used to believe it was part of life, and not to be rejected utterly, even if one understandably tries to avoid it.

But aside from the spiritual, which I realize doesn’t appeal to many increasingly, what of the potential for mistakes if we’re all just offing ourselves toward the end now?

And how does that make us feel, really? If we know we will know and plan the end, because it will be a pill at the doctor’s when the diagnosis is deemed hopeless, does that feel better or worse?

I feel worse expecting that rather than something painful and random and even drawn-out and horrible.

Planning it in the cold light of day is too much like Logan’s Run for me.

Oh, but people are living longer, they say, so they’re getting into terrible states. I disagree.

People aren’t living longer anymore. They’ve never been so prone to health issues since Covid.

But I do think it’s interesting that as the rate of serious illness and excess death goes up, so comes a renewed impetus to provide a “painless way out” for the dying.

Will that keep the complaints down, as terminal diagnoses are made?

Will it stop the questioning about how we all got so sick in the first place if the departure lounge is made a bit nicer?

What do They know that we don’t, these leaders of ours, with their assisted-dying laws?

Do they know, for example, that the rate of incurable illness is going to continue to climb, and that more and more people are going to want a way out?

After a couple of very bad years of nerve pain from the nuts and bolts and screws in my long-ago injured face, and telling my partner I couldn’t bear it any longer, I began to say I couldn’t go on, which didn’t even mean I wanted to “you know what.” It just meant I wasn’t coping.

One day, I just gave up trying to cope. I gave in to it.

I never took another pain pill. I prepared myself to be miserable forever.

And then, after months of what I can only call white-knuckling endurance, I suddenly woke up one day and realized I was living with the pain. I could bear it.

If the state gives people in pain the idea they should give in and die before their time, then it is no better than a pimp for death.