Andrew Lloyd Weber might not still be here if assisted suicide had been legal. He wanted to die and almost was set to go to Switzerland.
Now, he’s glad he didn’t.
Lord Lloyd-Webber, the West End impresario, was so convinced he wanted to die last year that he took steps to join Dignitas, the Swiss assisted suicide clinic, he has disclosed. The composer said he now believes that taking such a step would have been “stupid and ridiculous” but that it was all he could think of amid a bout of deep depression triggered by the pain from a series of operations.
In an interview with The Telegraph, Lord Lloyd-Webber disclosed how he was tempted to end his own life last summer as he struggled with pain after 14 operations. “I went through a moment of deep depression — that awful moment when you think that you must find a way out,” he said. “I actually got the forms for Dignitas.”
“With hindsight, it was stupid and ridiculous, but I couldn’t think what to do.”
He said he later threw the forms away as his symptoms alleviated and expects to oppose the bill but remains torn on the issue.
“What concerns me, and I suspect many others, is what floodgates would [this measure] open?
“Does it create a culture where older people are a burden … I am totally unsure.”
He is among members of the Lords likely to oppose the bill tabled by Lord Falconer, the former Lord Chancellor, to legalise “assisted dying”, which will have its first parliamentary airing today. It came as Dominic Grieve, who until this week’s reshuffle was the Government’s chief law officer, said the proposals could open the door to a form of “legalised execution”. “It is not something that a civilised society should do,” he told The Daily Telegraph.
Indeed.
And don’t tell me he didn’t die so what’s the big deal. If it had been legal he might have. Indeed, I have no doubt Dignitas would have helped poison him and happily garnered the publicity.
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And don’t tell me he isn’t terminally ill, so he couldn’t have obtained assisted suicide. That limitation is just a way station on the way to death on demand.
Moreover, many of the Swiss assisted suicides by Brits have been by people who were not terminally ill. Dying isn’t driving this agenda, despair and fear are.
Way to go ALW! That’s beautiful music to my ears.
LifeNews.com Note: Wesley J. Smith, J.D., is a special consultant to the Center for Bioethics and Culture and a bioethics attorney who blogs at Human Exeptionalism.
