Terry Pratchett and voluntary euthanasia
The amazing science fiction and fantasy writer Terry Pratchett was recently invited to give the Richard Dimbleby Lecture in England, which is given each year by an influential public figure. Pratchett, well known for his ferocious wit, sharp tongue and, more recently, for his diagnosis with a rare form of early-onset alzheimer’s disease, chose to speak on the right to die. His speech is powerful – all the more so because he himself was not able to read it, and had to rely on friend Tony Robinson to read it on his behalf.
Pratchett promotes the idea of a euthanasia tribunal, comprised of medical practicioners, legal experts and social workers, which could assess whether a person with an incurable illness is fully able to give consent to choose to die.
Unforunately, you cannot watch Pratchett’s speech in its entirety unless you are in the UK (use BBC iplayer), but you can read and watch most of it in this Guardian article and Youtube video:
Here is one of my favourite passages:
Let us consider me as a test case. As I have said, I would like to die peacefully with Thomas Tallis on my iPod before the disease takes me over and I hope that will not be for quite some time to come, because if I knew that I could die at any time I wanted, then suddenly every day would be as precious as a million pounds. If I knew that I could die, I would live. My life, my death, my choice.
Here are some wonderful quotes from Pratchett’s Discworld series. If you haven’t read these books already, now is the time to start!
“The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it” (Diggers)
“God does not play dice with the universe; He plays an ineffable game of his own devising, which might be compared, from the perspective of any of the other players, to being involved in an obscure and complex version of poker in a pitch dark room, with blank cards, for infinite stakes, with a dealer who won’t tell you the rules, and who smiles all the time.” (Good Omens).
“Give a man a fire and he’s warm for the day. But set fire to him and he’s warm for the rest of his life” (Discworld).
”For animals, the entire universe has been neatly divided into things to (a) mate with, (b) eat, (c) run away from, and (d) rocks.”
”An education was a bit like a communicable sexual disease. It made you unsuitable for a lot of jobs and then you had the urge to pass it on” (Hogfather)
“It was so much easier to blame it on Them. It was bleakly depressing to think that They were Us. If it was Them, then nothing was anyone’s fault. If it was us, what did that make Me? After all, I’m one of Us. I must be. I’ve certainly never thought of myself as one of Them. No one ever thinks of themselves as one of Them. We’re always one of Us. It’s Them that do the bad things” (Jingo).
