Oh, you are kidding me!!! Right To Kill Us Bill, take 2.

[davidgillon]

I found out last night that a Labour MP, Rob Marris, won the ballot to bring forward a Private Member's Bill - basically a non-government sponsored piece of legislation on any topic they like, they get a limited amount of Parliamentary time, but some of them do succeed in becoming law.

He was invited to sponsor the Disabled People (Community Inclusion) Bill, aka the Laughing Boy Bill (#LBBill, named after Connor Sparrowhawk, aka Laughing Boy, a young autistic man who drowned in a local authority assessment unit when he was left unsupervised in the bath despite his epilepsy), but turned it down saying he had an idea of his own - and it turns out that idea was to resurrect Lord Falconer's Assisted Dying Bill, or as I prefer to call it, the Right to Kill Us Bill. What kind of man given a choice between a bill to protect disabled people, and one to open the way to killing them, picks the second?

So here we go again, with 11 weeks to lobby our MPs and try to convince them that killing disabled people is a bad idea*, that if they offered us appropriate support then even those who want to avail themselves of suicide probably wouldn't, and that a society that believes 'I'd rather be dead than in a wheelchair' isn't an appropriate one to hold the right of life or death over any disabled person.

To make matters worse, the Shadow Minister for Disabled People supports the bill.

*Headdesk* *Headdesk* *Headdesk*


* I'm actually in favour of a right to assisted dying, I just don't believe it can be safely offered in contemporary society, where people have been programmed, Manchurian Candidate style, to hold a negative attitude towards disability and 'becoming a burden' since birth. We shouldn't be a society that encourages the disabled, sick and elderly to think of themselves as a burden, but we are, and until that changes a right to assisted dying will cause more harm than good. Despite promises that they would only affect terminal patients we've already seen a drift away from that in the Belgian and Dutch laws, and the pro-camp was already suggesting extending the coverage of Falconer's bill while it was in the Lords.

Comments

[alexseanchai]

eeyaaagh. :(

[davidgillon]

Good response from Inclusion Scotland:
'Inclusion Scotland believes that the Assisted Suicide Bill will begin a journey that ends in an accepted culture of "mercy killing" of disabled people. Legalising premature death of disabled people undermines their right to support to live with dignity and the State's responsibility to ensure their access to support and care services. If this Bill succeeds, despair at disabling conditions will be endorsed as a reasonable expectation for which early state-sanctioned death is an effective remedy.'

[slashmarks]

Also makes it easier for doctors to murder patients outright and claim consent, or that they were just issuing "euthanasia without consent," as in the cases of some stuff I read about Belgium. *shudders* These bills aren't meant to legalize suicide, they're meant as step one on the path to murder.

Lots of serial killers already target us because nobody cares. We don't need to make it a state-sanctioned program.