How Should the End Come? - by Katharine Whitehorn
from BBC News Magazine - August 2008
Longer life spans and changing attitudes towards care and hospital treatment mean attitudes towards dying and euthanasia are complicated.
The Queen no longer sends telegrams to people on their 100th birthday - it's cards these days, and at the present rate it won't be long before she's just about keeping the Post Office in business.
Some of the people who reach that age - or even mere chicks of 80 and 90 - lead vigorous and fulfilling lives. But an awful lot don't, so it's small wonder that the question of how they should live comes up more and more.
Not surprising, either, that Mary Warnock, who had to wrestle with the issues of the start of life, embryos and all that, and Elizabeth Macdonald, a distinguished oncologist at Guy's Hospital in London, have turned their attention to how we should die. The question is how and if life should be brought to an end.
This summer they've been on the stump at literary festivals for their thoughtful and enlightened book Easeful Death, most recently at the Edinburgh Book Festival. There's been more than one bill defeated in Parliament that was designed to make it easier for a really awful life to be ended, but they think that, in spite of the difficulties, our views on human life generally have developed enough for one to succeed now.
It seems certain, anyway, since we can now thwart death in so many ways and live so long, that we're going to have to rethink the end of life the way we have, effectively, re-thought the beginning, what with contraceptives and abortions and IVF.
30-year sabbatical
We're only beginning to realise the implications of us all living so much longer. The Times letters page recently discussed whether Lloyd George's first old age pension in 1908 was or wasn't as generous in real terms as the state pension now, but the massive difference for the government bean-counters is, of course, the sheer length of time the thing has to be paid out.
Until relatively recently, people mostly only lived for a few years after stopping work - now they may easily hang on for another thirty or forty years. In the words of Dr Richard Nicholson, who edited a magazine called Medical Ethics, "a 30-year sabbatical is just not on".
If you're educated and have enough money, if you're obsessed by bridge or golf or grandchildren, if you're allowed to go on working, you may have a good time, at least until your health packs up.
And I suppose if you feel your life is utterly meaningless you can commit suicide - certainly more suicides among the old succeed, compared with the young, for whom it may sometimes be just a cry for help.