The Deputy Leader of the Plaid Cymru political party in Wales gave a speech prior to the Senedd’s recent symbolic vote opposing the legalization of assisted suicide throughout the United Kingdom.
As Live Action News previously reported, Right to Life UK claimed that the Welsh Senedd’s vote sends a message to Parliament “showing that the Welsh Assembly firmly rejects the imposition of an assisted suicide regime on Wales.” The group added that “There was opposition from Senedd members from all major parties including Labour, Liberal Democrats, Plaid Cymru and the Conservatives.”
Deputy Leader Delyth Jewell spoke with both passion and compassion about the issue of assisted suicide. Right to Life UK posted video of Jewell’s full speech to Facebook. Watch below:
This is a debate, I know, prompted by compassion. The desire not to see someone we love suffer. It’s an instinct I understand utterly and I empathize with those proposing it, but I will be voting against the motion. Because nearly everyone who approaches this debate will do so through the lens of the last moments of someone they love. Someone they’ve seen suffer, someone whose pain they’ve wanted desperately to lessen…
My contention, though, is that we must also look at this through the lens of those not surrounded by people they love. Those marginalized, pushed to the sidelines by society, those people who could be placed under pressure in a future that is horrifyingly near at hand, to end their lives, because the necessary palliative care is not available or because they feel themselves to be a burden.
My fear with this motion — well, my terror, really — is not so much with how it will begin as with how it will end.
There are safeguards in what is being proposed in Westminster… but every precedent we see internationally shows that no safeguard is sacrosanct. The experience of Canada, the Netherlands, Belgium and some states in the US show what can so easily, so inevitably happen…. Bit by bit, the safeguards have been eroded so that now people with depression, with anorexia, and many other nonterminal disorders can qualify — disorders from which people can recover. Lives that will have been ended that might have got better. But more worryingly than that normalization is how quickly the vulnerable in those societies felt and were at risk.
In the US state of Oregon, over 47% of people who ended their lives cited as a reason the fact that they didn’t want to be a burden on their families or caregivers….
The debate… is often presented… as a way of offering people a choice, but for many disabled people or people who are not close to their families… it would lead to them feeling that they have no choice but to end their life….
I do not mean this as scaremongering. It is a reflection of what has happened in other parts of the world that have opened the door a crack and have had it blown open never to be able to close it….
In a debate of this nature… we have to think not just of its intentions but likely effects…. This is probably the most difficult debate I’ve had to speak in… I can understand so utterly why so many people want this change… but the terror I feel about this is not some trifling thing.
It is a future that I see not as merely a worst-case scenario but the only final scenario. A future where few safeguards remain, where there is investment that is lessened in palliative care… and where desperate people feel obliged to take a step they can never take back….
