On Wednesday 27th July disability rights campaigners staged a mock execution of a wheelchair user outside Parliament.
The group, Distant Voices, is trying to publicise and reverse what it sees as the drift towards involuntary euthanasia.
The protest will start at 1pm at Old Palace Yard from where campaigners wearing surgical masks will process by drumbeat to a scaffold where one wheelchair user will be doused in ‘blood.’
The event will be led by Nikki Kenward, a woman who experienced being ‘locked in’ after contracting Guillian Barre Syndrome, which left her totally paralysed for five months except for the ability to wink an eye.
Mrs Kenward is among those who fear that pressure is mounting on Parliament and in the Courts to allow the killings of seriously sick, disabled or minimally conscious patients, particularly the 6,000 mentally-incapacitated patients in the British health care system.
She said: “Everybody is going to get old, everybody is going to be disabled. If we don’t want to value difference what differences will be acceptable in the end? Very few.”
The Royal College of Physicians is funding a working party which is to undertake a review of the care of mentally-incapacitated patients. This is likely to 'lead to fundamental changes in medical practice' according to the media.
One member of the working party, Professor Lynne Turner-Stokes, a brain injury expert at King’s College, London, has called for a "centrally-funded register of the large number of half-forgotten vegetative patients." She told The Sunday Times: “We need to take a deep breath and consider whether doctors are striving to keep people alive in inappropriate circumstances.”
The Distant Voices demonstration has been planned in advance of the judgement in the Court case of ‘M,’ a woman who suffered severe brain damage as a result of encephalitis in 2003.
The Judge has been asked by the family to instruct the hospital to withdraw nutrition and fluids so that she is starved and dehydrated to death. The Official Solicitor is opposing them.
The judgement will have enormous implications for others as this would be the first time that someone in only a minimally conscious state would have food and fluids withdrawn in this way.
Andrea Williams commented:
“There has been a concerted push to legalise assisted dying and Distant Voices are right to raise the alarm over the spectre of involuntary euthanasia.
“Legislation is often made with assurances that adequate protections are in place, only for these assurances to be shown to be empty promises.
“Those who are vulnerable need to be protected by the law. The concerns of this group must be heeded by all of us.”
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