Assisted-suicide campaigner criticised for starvation death A grandmother who starved herself to death has been criticised for using “emotional blackmail” to try to change the law on assisted suicide. Jean Davies, 86, a former maths teacher from Oxford, died on October 1 five weeks after she stopped eating and two weeks after refusing fluids. Mrs Davies, who suffered from chronic back pain and fainting episodes but did not have a terminal illness, had spent much of her life campaigning for a change in the law to allow doctors to administer lethal medication to patients who wanted to die. However Peter Saunders, campaign director of Care Not Killing, which opposes a change in the law, told The Sunday Times: “It is not illegal to starve and dehydrate oneself to death but neither is it right. However we might sympathise with this woman’s condition, by deliberately choosing to go public with it she is adopting a campaigning stance, if you like, a subtle form of emotional blackmail aimed at softening opposition to a change in the law.” Mrs Davies said that she had resorted to a protracted death because the government had failed to reform the law on assisted suicide and she wanted to die in her own home. She described her self-imposed fast as hell and intolerable, but said that her ordeal was better than staying alive, because her fainting attacks were so frightening. thetimes.co.uk/tto/news/uk/article4241458.ece
Posted on: Mon, 20 Oct 2014 08:56:36 +0000
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