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UK assisted suicide campaigner commits suicide at Swiss ‘clinic’

The decision of an 84-year-old euthanasia campaigner to take her own life at the infamous suicide “clinic” in Zurich Switzerland, is likely to add fuel to the efforts of assisted suicide campaigners in Britain who want the current law overturned, reports LifeSiteNews.com.

Nan Maitland, a retired occupational therapist and founder of the campaign group Society for Old Age Rational Suicide (SOARS), was not terminally ill but suffered from arthritis. Most of all, she said, she feared the physical consequences of old age and intractable pain. As a member of the movement to legalize assisted suicide in Britain, Maitland was described by the group Friends at the End (FATE), as “very active.”

FATE admitted that Maitland had actively assisted suicides, saying she had “advised many individuals, in the UK, on how to travel to Switzerland for a physician-assisted suicide (actually, accompanying one person there in 2005).”

In preparation for her suicide in Switzerland, she wrote a letter to assisted suicide supporters: “I have a great feeling of relief that I will have no further need to struggle through each day in dread of what further horrors may lie in wait. For many years, I have feared the long period of decline, sometimes called ‘prolonged dwindling,’ that so many people unfortunately experience before they die.”

Former GP Dr. Michael Irwin, a co-founder of SOARS, admitted to the BBC that he had accompanied Maitland to the Dignitas facility in Zurich, and said that he hoped the police would “get in touch” with him in order to re-open the legal debate. He confirmed that although Maitland was not suffering from any illness other than arthritis, a Swiss doctor had approved her suicide.

Irwin admitted to having “helped” other people commit suicide, saying, “[I]f they have good, sensible reasons and they are mentally competent and at an age where they cannot expect to live many more years, I think it should be their personal individual choice.”

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TAGS: United Kingdom Switzerland assisted suicide euthanasia Nan Maitland terminally ill arthritis

[04/10/2011]

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