Astute readers are no doubt already following the story of Debbie Purdy who is seeking to have the law of assisted suicide in the UK clarified, given that historically those who have traveled overseas and provided assistance have not been prosecuted in the past, despite it appearing that they are breaking the law. […]
Category: Life and Death
Coroners Bill Amendement thrown out.
Lord Falconer’s amendment to the Coroners Bill, which would have made specific legal provision for those helping others to travel to places like Dignitas, was rejected by the House of Lords last night. Oh, well. As Falconer admits, it’s not obvious that it’ll make all that much difference on the ground, because few, if any, […]
Letter on Dignitas and the Coroners Bill
Rowan Williams, Vincent Nichols and Jonathan Sacks wrote to the Telegraph on Tuesday to voice opposition to the Coroners and Justice Bill currently making its way through Parliament. They allege that the amendment dealing with assisted suicide introduced by Lord Falconer (and reproduced here, on the Dignity in Dying website) is a step on the […]
Purdy Tries Again…
Debbie Purdy goes to the House of Lords today to seek assurance that her husband won’t be prosecuted for assisting suicide should he accompany her to the Dignitas clinic. It’s hard not to sympathise with her request – but, speaking on the Today programme this morning, former DPP Sir Ken MacDonald said that he hoped her […]
Post Mortems by MRI?
The BBC is reporting that families may be able to request that post-mortems be carried out by MRI rather than invasively under new proposals. The qualification here is that [c]oroners [would] make the decision on a case-by-case basis as MRI scans may not always be the appropriate means to determining a cause of death, the […]
Irish Euthanasia Lecture Cancelled
A curious story from the Irish Times: a lecture by Len Doyal on euthanasia had to be cancelled after disruption from protesters: he’s now complained to the President. The protesters apparently shouted obscenities and, er, the Rosary. There are more details here. In the meantime, I just can’t help myself: Thanks to Richard Ashcroft and […]
An Easter Sperm Story: The Defeat of Death
This from the bioethics.net blog: A woman’s 21-year-old son dies in a Texas bar fight. The bereaved mom wants the son’s clearly virile and tenacious genes to live on in the next generation and fights to have his sperm collected and stored so that someone may carry his seed. She says, on the one hand, […]
Sperm Banks and Product Liability
The New Scientist is carrying this rather peculiar story: a sperm bank in New York is being sued under product liability law by a girl who claims that her conception was from “faulty” sperm. The 13-year-old girl named in the suit has Fragile X syndrome; apparently, she does not have to show that the sperm bank […]
Suicide Documentary on the BBC
In case you missed it, there’s a little under a week left to listen again to last night’s Radio 4 documentary on the Swiss assisted suicide movement: follow this link. For what it’s worth, I couldn’t help thinking that it was a little scare-mongering and tabloid. (So the mentally ill or non-terminal might be able to […]
Does it Matter when Life Begins?
PZ Meyers recently blogged about his response to one of the perennial claims of pro-life advocates: that life begins at conception. Predictably, he accuses pro-lifers of misunderstanding the question, and he does this by denying that life begins at conception because life began billions of years ago: everything else is just a part of a […]