The Last Ditch by Tom Paine

Charlotte Raven: Should I take my own life? | Society | The Guardian.

The linked article in The Guardian is a very sad piece. The author has Huntington's, an incurable degenerative disease perhaps best know for afflicting the character Dr Remy "Thirteen" Hadley in the wonderful American TV drama "House". The symptoms might, as she writes, have been devised by an evil genius in a comic strip:

What
could be more testing than an illness that impairs quickly but takes
decades to kill – or more cruel than one that robs you of your ability
to communicate while leaving your capacity to understand intact?

She speculates as to how things might go wrong for her and her family as the disease takes its terrible course and discusses, very rationally, the pros and cons of suicide. My religious readers may be shocked by her reasoning. I confess that am not.

The Left in Britain are very big on the right to die. On occasion, they have even floated the idea of a duty to die. So it's not surprising to find a piece like this in their house journal. I was startled however by two bullet points that could surely never appear in that statist rag in any other context;

• Without autonomy and the capacity for self-­determination, life is meaningless. Merely ­existing isn't enough.
• Dependency is degrading.

I could not agree more. However, if The Guardian truly agreed, how different would its editorial policy have to be?