Posted on 06/06/2011 3:52:08 PM PDT by wagglebee
UNITED KINGDOM, June 6, 2011 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Hugh Grant has applauded the efforts of well-known British assisted suicide campaigner, Dr. Ann McPherson, who died last week.
“She was a tremendous force for good,” the British actor told The Independent.
Grant is a patron of HealthTalkOnline, a website and charity co-founded by McPherson to provide information to pancreatic cancer patients. He also supports her campaign group, called Healthcare Professionals for Assisted Dying, founded last year to work for change in Britain’s suicide law.
McPherson, 65, who herself suffered from severe pancreatic cancer, championed the “right” of terminally ill patients to a “dignified” death and used her own experience with cancer to promote a change in the law.
Although she underwent surgery, McPherson’s cancer reoccurred earlier this year and doctors told her she had only months to live. She died May 28th.
“She’s right on assisted dying,” said Grant. “That seems to me like the dignified option. I don’t know quite what she wanted in her last few weeks, but she was a great champion of the right to die in a dignified manner, which it seems she did.”
In her last days, McPherson expressed her frustration at her prolonged life in a letter to a close friend, The Telegraph reported. “I can’t understand why I have to carry on living like this - why can’t I just die?” she wrote. “I really feel furious at this. I think it’s cruel (to stay alive).”
Speaking at a public debate sponsored by the Royal Society of Medicine (RSM) last year, McPherson was one of a minority to support changing the law in Britain.
“I know recently a palliative care doctor has said that every suicide is a tragedy. I don’t agree with that,” said McPherson. “I think that assisted dying for someone who is terminally ill may be a celebration, it shouldn’t be seen as a tragedy.”
She added that she doesn’t “want to go somewhere like Switzerland, to Dignitas, to be able to die with dignity. I want to have the option of being able to be in my own home.”
Grant could not agree more. “If you are around someone who you love, who says they want to die, and they say enough’s enough, you would look on that with great sympathy,” the actor told The Independent after McPherson’s death. “A person who is compos mentis should be allowed to die rather than be kept alive and in pain, and without having to go off to Switzerland.”
Meanwhile, a recent survey conducted recently of disabled people in Britain, commissioned by the disability group Scope, found that 70 percent are “concerned about pressure being placed on other disabled people to end their lives prematurely,” “if there were a change in the law on assisted suicide.”
More than a third said they were worried they would personally experience such pressure and fifty-six percent of respondents believed any relaxation of the law would be “detrimental to the way that disabled people are viewed by society as a whole.”
Richard Hawkes, Chief Executive of Scope, said, “Our survey findings confirm that concerns about legalizing assisted suicide are not just held by a minority, but by a substantial majority of those this law would affect.”
That's because, regardless of ideology, most people do not want to one day be killed just for the sake of convenience.
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“Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!” (Isaiah 5:20)
I guess we know who Hugh's been getting his career advice from lately.
Grant aka whorebait is a patron of steet prostitutes as well.... Bust busy busy.....
An endorsement from Hugh Grant, who took up with a street walker when he had Elizabeth Hurley at home, is not exactly an endorsement.
Relatively young and healthy Hugh Grant is all for murdering old and sick people, but the sick and elderly people are against their being murdered.
Get a clue, Hugh. You’re an actor. Stop trying to govern when no one would elect you dog catcher.
Wow! This mean old broad and Kevorkian went out at the same time together! I can’t wait to hear reports from the pearly gates.
I will admit that I was once forced to sit through a Hugh Grant movie, and frankly, suicide did not seem an entirely unreasonable option at the time....
Mr Grant is paid to act rather than think. This is fortunate, because he does not give good value in the latter department.
I’m always concerned when we write a law for a very small group of people that could potentially affect a much larger group of people in a negative way.
I am sort of reminded of:
“God is dead” — Nietzsche, 1882.
“Nietzsche is dead” — God, 1900.
>>While I am no fan of assisted suicide, my father died of pancreatic cancer. His last few months were no picnic and I would not wish that on anyone. So I can understand it. But my main opposition does come from the slippery slope assisted suicide creates. How long will it be before “i can’t stand the pain” turns into “I can’t stand him, he is a pain””? <<
It is tough.
But in the long view, each of us owns our life and our duty to sustain it. That is not given to the State nor any other entity outside of our individual conscience.
But you knew that.
My mother died 6 months after a stroke left her incapacitated. My Dad refused to pull the plug; my brothers and their wives were going ballistic. I have gone back and forth on the issue in my mind ever since. M. Scott Peck, author of “The Road Less Travelled” makes a heck of a case against assisted suicide in his book “Denial of the Soul”. He believes that with proper palliative care during the end of life, a person should, for the sake of their soul, live out that life to its natural end. I am inclined to agree. Sometimes it is not pretty but he maintains that sometimes suffering is essential for spiritual growth. We all like everything to be made neat and pretty; especially those things (like illness and death). We don’t want to face the reality of suffering; we don’t want to have to wipe the faces (and other parts) of our loved ones and console them as they wait for the pain meds to kick in. I am guessing we are denying ourselves as much or more than we are denying them by “putting them out of their pain” with a shot of too much medicine. But who am I to say?
Or the former.
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