Thread by me.
Karen Royle’s memories of the last precious hours with her cherished mother Rona are far from the serene, comforting images that she had hoped for.
Before arriving in Zurich, Karen, 51, had envisaged a pretty Swiss chalet, with perhaps a view of the Alps — ‘just like the pictures in the book Heidi, which I’d loved as a child’.
But the Dignitas ‘apartment’ at No 84 Gertrudestrasse, where 74-year-old Rona chose to end her life rather than succumb further to the ravages of Motor Neurone Disease (MND), bore no comparison to the picture-postcard tranquility her family had imagined.
The image Karen and her partner David Sweetman cannot erase from their minds is of a ‘blue tin shed’ on a barren industrial estate, with no views, just a scrubby patch of garden littered with cigarette butts.
Inside, the prefabricated structure was equally spartan, with no decorations apart from two roses, an angel-shaped candle and a silver-winged candle holder that the Royles, at Rona’s request, had brought with them.
‘That vision of what was little more than a blue tin shed will stay with me for the rest of my life,’ says David, a decorator.
‘It reminded me of a gas chamber. I felt like I was taking Rona to her execution.
‘When the taxi turned into that industrial estate, we were so horrified I just wanted to turn straight round and drive away. The only thing that stopped us was Rona’s determination to go through with it. I kept asking her: “Rona, are you sure about this?” But she never wavered. To this day, though, I can’t help but feel guilty for taking her there.’
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
Thread by presidio9.
According to the Radiance Foundation, abortion and slavery have a lot more in common than you might have thought. And to make sure you see the link between the two, the Alpharetta-based foundation has started a campaign to prop up nearly 50 billboards across metro Atlanta.
The billboards feature such slogans as "The 13th Amendment Freed us. Abortion Enslaved Us" and "Abortion makes three-fifths human seem overly generous." The billboards popped up across metro Atlanta on Juneteenth, which commemorates the end of slavery in the United States.
The billboards are part of a campaign targeted at persuading black women from resorting to abortions. Black women account for 30 percent of abortions but are only 12 percent of the population.
The campaign has raised many eyebrows from organizations like the NAACP who told the Huffington Post that likening slavery to abortion is slightly offensive:
"Comparing abortion to slavery certainly raises major concerns," Hilary Shelton, director of the Washington bureau of the NAACP, told HuffPost in an interview. "Women are not forced to have abortions the way they were in servitude. Slavery was about not having the right to make any decisions. Women were actually bred to produce children for the purposes of profit. This is so far removed from that, that if it weren't such a serious issue, it would almost be laughable." The foundation also launched other similar campaigns across the country in the past to target black women from contributing to the so called abortion "epidemic."