Right To Die Film Attacked And Defended

[MA-Caver]

LONDON (AP) — Writer Terry Pratchett said Tuesday that watching a man being helped to die had reaffirmed his support for assisted suicide, while anti-euthanasia groups criticized the televised death as propaganda that could encourage copycat suicides.
The suicide, filmed for a BBC documentary, has reopened debate on Britain's decades-old law against helping another person end their life.
Pratchett watched Peter Smedley, a 71-year-old British businessman with motor neuron disease, take a lethal dose of barbiturates at facility run by the Swiss group Dignitas.
Best-selling fantasy author Pratchett was diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer's disease in 2007 and is a vocal supporter of the right to die.

http://beta.news.yahoo.com/author-terry-pratchett-defends-die-film-114932253.html

Elsewhere here on MT there's talk about the "right to die with dignity". Here we see a person who created a documentary on the subject.

"The incongruity of the situation overtakes you. A man has died, that's a bad thing, but he wanted to die, that's a good thing."

Yet it's offended the anti-suicide groups who say the show was/is one sided.

 

[granfire]

I saw a similar documentary several years back.

A man had traveled to Switzerland to end his life (I think it was in a Dignitas facility, but I can't be sure).

He was old, single and of no particular religious believes. He had Parkinson's as far as I can remember, and decided to go forth with the suicide while he still was in control of his faculties.

It was touching. Part of me wanted to prevent his death, on the other hand, having seen to strong people deteriorate into shadows of their former selves...


We give our animals dignified endings when their lives no longer hold any quality, yet we deny that to what we deem to be the higher life form. There are worse things than death.

(I think anti-suicide is a justification for the weak minded who can't bring themselves to accept that life is finite in the end. At one point you have to let go)