A very, very sad end to a life, but it's what she wanted I suppose.
Quote:
British grandmother poses for a happy snapshot with her children. Hours later she ended her life at Dignitas- Jackie Meacock suffered from dystonia - an incurable nerve condition
- Life had become unbearable - driving was impossible and even a shopping trip ended in her giving up in tears after half an hour
- The grandmother of nine paid £10,000 to end her life at the Swiss clinic
Surrounded by her four grown-up children, Jackie Meacock poses for the sort of snapshot seen in countless family photo albums.They had all just been out for dinner together and enjoyed an evening filled with laughter, jokes and treasured memories.
Yet hours after this picture was taken, Mrs Meacock, her children again by her side, ended her own life in a Dignitas clinic in Switzerland.
It's well worth noting that:
a) Dignitas is not the only assisted suicide charity in CH: the other one is a firm called EXIT International. The difference between Dignitas and EXIT will only take on people that are residents of Switzerland as clients.
b) All cases have to go through the Swiss courts. People cannot simply be killed willy-nilly.
c) Assisted suicide is (obviously) legal in Switzerland. The Swiss public generally see it as very much a private matter to decide if one wishes to commit suicide or not, and believe that those people who are very ill should be aided in that goal. In 2011, there was an initiative in the Canton of Zürich, proposed by the Christian democratic and centrist CVP and a small right-wing and religiously conservative party called the EDU that had two points to it - the first point was to make assisted suicide illegal, and the second point of it was to make it illegal for organisations like Dignitas to treat non-Swiss citizens. This was rejected by all the other major Swiss parties that have a presence in the Canton (i.e. the national conservative and anti-immigration SVP, the socialist and pro-EU SP, the classical liberal FDP and so on) and the "make assisted suicide illegal altogether" part of it was rejected by 85% of voters and the second part, which proposed outlawing "assisted suicide for all foreigners" was voted against by 78% of those polled.
10 Feb 2013, 8:44 pm
