Sisters Face Questions After Sending Their Mother to a Euthanasia Clinic to Kill Her

International   |   Micaiah Bilger   |   Nov 10, 2015   |   5:17PM   |   Zurich, Switzerland

Police are questioning two sisters in the UK after they held a fundraiser to pay for their mother’s assisted suicide.

The sisters, Tara O’Reilly and Rose Baker from West Wales, raised about $12,000 (8,000 British pounds) to send their mother to an assisted suicide clinic in Switzerland this month, according to the Daily Mail.

In February, their mother, Jackie Baker, 59, was diagnosed with an aggressive motor neurone disease that her daughters said left her “trapped in her own body.” Baker, who watched her mother die from the same condition, requested assisted suicide, her daughters said.

“She is in a wheelchair and has no life at the moment,” O’Reilly told the news outlet previously. “We don’t want her to suffer any more. It’s not ideal but at the end of the day, we thought it would be a kind thing to do for somebody we love.”

The sisters appear to have no shame in raising money to fund their mother’s suicide and travel expenses.

“It was our mother’s choice not our choice, so I know it sounds crazy, but I am really happy,” O’Reilly told the news outlet. “We wouldn’t change it.”

The sisters used part of the money to travel with their mother to the Dignitas assisted suicide clinic. On Wednesday, they stood by her bedside and watched her die, according to the report. She died at 10:30 a.m. after pushing a button with her foot that injected the poison into her mouth.

The sisters had a run in with the police when they first began fundraising for their mother’s assisted suicide. They originally organized a raunchy party to raise money but cancelled it after police told them they could be charged with assisting the suicide of their mother, according to the report.

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Care Not Killing, a group opposed to assisted suicide and euthanasia, was the group that discovered the sisters’ fundraiser and reported it to the police, the report states. The organization believes that assisted suicide and euthanasia put pressure on vulnerable people to end their lives. People who are disabled, elderly, sick or depressed often fear that they will be a financial, emotional or care burden to their families, according to the organization.

Police are seeking to question the sisters again now that their mother is dead, according to the report. The sisters said they are staying “out of Britain for a while” as they come to terms with their mother’s death.

Assisted suicide is illegal in the UK, but the sisters are campaigning to change that. They said their mother should not have had to travel to Switzerland to end her life.

Alistair Thompson, a spokesman for Care Not Killing, previously responded to the troubling situation involving the sisters’ fundraising efforts.

Thompson told the Daily Mail, “With modern drugs people should not be suffering, and if they are we should be challenging the care package – what is being offered and what can we do better.”

In an email to LifeNews.com, Bobby Schindler, whose sister was killed in a euthanasia bid by her estranged husband, said some people find it hard to accept that every human life has worth and dignity.

“Perhaps for some it’s difficult to accept that every life, regardless of circumstance, has fundamental dignity. What should be easy to accept is that any law that forces doctors to cause death is not just law at all. Advocates of assisted death seem to pretend that “Do no harm” is a medical principle that can somehow be reconciled with imposed death. So this isn’t a serious debate about personal choice. After all, suicide is already easily achievable, even though it’s illegal. Really, this is a debate about whether the rest of us should be forced by law to participate in the deaths of people we might love.”

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