“Her so called Living Will was invalid, a travesty, made in the setting of a long standing mental disorder.”

Yes noble baroness there is the world of difference between the two, and no heads should be beaten about, to highlight the one at the expense of the other.

I wonder what precisely her living will said, and radically at what point they declared her dead.

If they accepted the living will, did they also accept that her organs would be ‘harvested’ if they possibly could?

At precisely what point of ingestion was she declared officially dead?

Did they allow the kidney failure to progress
whilst giving her pain killers, or did they remove the kidneys before the anti freeze got anywhere near them to prevent their failing?

That may be the nub of the matter. I am not sure.

Whatever happened, she succeeded in her ambition, but how?

Perhaps I am alone here, but I will at least put my X in the “yes, it certainly seems that way” box.

I don’t dispute that the young lady in question sounds disturbed, but I don’t see how one can say she sounds so disturbed as to not be capable of forming judgements. If we assume that the right to suicide is to be accepted, then presumably we have to accept that the right will encompass people who feel mental distress and inability to cope with life, as well as those suffering from merely physical pain.

It is easy to say that the doctors are to blame for enabling this person to end her own life, but fundamentally if society in general cannot comfort these people enough then placing the burden on them to make the up or down call is hardly fair. The problem needs to be solved well before it ever reaches the emergency room.

Indeed, I would say the call was [i]arguably[/i] correct here (although not necessarily so). Ms Wooltorton intended to commit suicide, and picked a painful way of doing so. She asked the doctors to manage her self-inflicted pain, but not to save her life, apparently safe in the knowledge that the law gave her the right to do that. Had the doctors kept her alive, what guarantees would they have that she would not repeat the attempt but, next time, without the call to 999? Lives saved nil, human suffering significantly increased.

Whether this was the right call or not, I am not possibly qualified to say. But I will not by any means condemn the doctors for making a reasonable judgement call in a difficult case at the end of a young girl’s troubled life. It was not their job to prevent her suicide.

Merely that people making these decisions have a bit of an understanding that greater freedom of choice for the individual may carry some greater risks. So one should proceed with care when legislating so that the inevitable downsides can be assessed before any further legislative decisions.

Just because ‘assisted dying’ carries some unwelcome problems is not necessarily reason not to do it if the benefits to society as a whole hugely outweigh the risks – merely that we might need to get to know our new town, far out from the London ‘status quo’ before venturing even further and finding it is not to our liking to be so far from the ‘comfort zone’ of the metropolis.

Since as with life, once one has left the capital it may not be the easiest thing to return.

“Assisted dying! Assisted dying! No extra charge! All on the NHS!”

and you look down to Llanelly and Pembrokeshire and see,

“Leave us alone! Leave us alone!We know when it’s time to go!”

and you become so hopelessly confused by London,Heaven, that when you see St Peter with his hand extended in welcome,and a smile on his face, you decide not to take advantage of this petty exercise in heavenly consumerism and you try to do it yourself.

The net effect is that you end up back in purgatory, on a section of the mental health act, all the more determined to make a better go of it next time.

You have forgotten all about the religious exhortation of West Wales, that it is best to wait in a queue until your number is up, and not make a fuss about it.

This is the whole purpose of the line out in Rugby football. You form a queue; (in fact you form two in case there has been a mistake of some sort) you wait for your number to be shouted, and you jump for joy,saying,

“It’s my number! It’s my number! My number is up.”

Then you catch a ball, quite by chance, and you know you are in….. Heaven.

In fact you can be quite certain that you are in heaven because there is an Irishman by the side of the pitch called Coach (or Baroness Murphy) saying how horrified she is at the handling of the laws. That Bedd Gelert, (and I know you are a fictitious Welshman) is how you know the coach is St.Peter,or Baroness Murphy, waiting at the gates, for you to be cheered home.

More clarity in the law would I think help everyone.