Is this where Obamacare will take us? That deep maternal urge . . . to kill your child
If a coma patient can be denied sustenance, why should the woman who injected her brain-damaged son be criminalised?
From The Times
January 23, 2010
Janice Turner
timesonline.co.uk
True love, I’ve grown to believe, is when you experience someone else’s pain as your own. There is no synaptic pause between their grave news and the summoning of empathy. Your reaction is visceral, involuntary: a winded blow when your wife loses her job, a sickened disappointment when your daughter is the sole girl not asked to the party. The proper seat of love is not the heart but the guts.
It would be a foolhardy woman who claimed a mother feels a child’s suffering more than its father. So I’ll let a man do it. Simon Carr, whose wife died, leaving him to raise his sons alone — and whose memoir The Boys Are Back in Town has been made into a film — said this week he believes a mother is more protective, less able to permit risky japes, because the child’s body came from her own body, flesh of her flesh, and will always be so. Certainly when my sons were small I found myself grasping my own knees after they fell.
And I’ve come to wonder how much of modern overweaning coddling of our kids, never letting them free to roam, is not motivated so much by fear of what might happen to them, but self-protection: a terror of the bereavement we know would obliterate our own lives. The mortality of one’s children, the notion that they will ever die at all — even years after your own death — is, as Martin Amis says in Experience, “immensely onerous to contemplate”.
So where does a child’s torment end and a mother’s begin? It is a question at the heart of the disturbing case of Frances Inglis, convicted of murder and sentenced to nine years for killing her brain-damaged son by injecting him with heroin. She “released him” from his pain, indignity and dependency, she claimed, “with love in her heart”. But was it his suffering she found unbearable, or her own at having to see her perfect, vibrant, 22-year-old boy ruined utterly by his accident: a chunk removed from his brain, unspeaking, kept alive with tubes and beeping boxes?
Certainly within weeks of Thomas’s accident Mrs Inglis — “frantic and crying and just in a crazy state”, as her younger son put it — was trying to procure heroin for her first (failed) attempt to bring about his death. Inglis’s face in the police photo looks exhausted and careworn, but in her eyes, beneath the sadness, is a light of high purpose: I’ll face the consequences, this is what I had to do.
Is it madness that drives a 57-year-old who taught adults with learning disabilities, described by colleagues as “loving, honourable and trustworthy”, to scour the street for heroin? She must have cut an odd figure in her matronly camel-hair coat, hanging around railway stations and needle exchanges, sidling up to dealers, accumulating ten little brown-filled bags before she calculated she’d have enough.
But all her elaborate premeditation — which made her conviction for murder so inevitable — had a fiery maternal logic. Leaving for the nursing home where her son lay, knowing she would be arrested, Inglis left detailed instructions for paying the bills, caring for her younger son, even feeding the dog.
That killing a child can be the last, tender act of parenthood, underpinned the case of Daniel James, a young rugby player rendered paraplegic in a training accident. His parents fulfilled his wish not to live a “second-class life” and accompanied him to a Dignitas clinic in Switzerland to die, aged 23. “What right does any human being have to tell any other that they have to live such a life, filled with terror, discomfort and indignity?” said his mother, Julie.
Thomas Inglis, brain-damaged, unconscious, was unable to make that decision and so his mother believed she could make it for him. Doctors said Thomas might, over many years, recover a little, but she either did not believe them or thought his existence would still not constitute more than a living prison.
And in the end she was galvanised by a doctor’s report that suggested the only way that she could allow Thomas to die was if she applied for a High Court order to have his feeding and hydration tubes removed.
Maybe I have not — yet — witnessed enough loved ones departing to be anything but creeped out by the euthanasia lobby. Whole lives devoted to the championing of death! Certainly the Dutch system, held up as a model by many in this movement, has the air of officiously snipping off the loose threads of mortality. Doctors do not only assist the terminally ill who have asked to die, but perform what is known as a “termination of the patient without explicit request”.
In the Netherlands Mrs Inglis would not have had to superglue a hospital lock to keep doctors out while she injected her son: very likely they’d have been holding the syringe.
But at least the Netherlands has the moral maturity to assume a position on euthanasia. Britain continues to wring its hands, to fudge and judge, to ignore the medical practices that have extended life too often beyond its desirable limits.
(Why can the Government not encourage every adult to sign a living will so relatives would not have to second-guess our wishes?) We avert our eyes as more than 100 British citizens die on Dignitas mini-breaks, the DPP rules that relatives who assist the terminally ill are unlikely to be prosecuted, yet still these mothers continue to come. Brave or wicked? We can’t say: let a jury decide.
Yet if a coma patient can be legally denied sustenance — a death that can take ten days and who knows what distress — why could Frances Inglis not apply for a quicker, more humane end for her son? “People keep saying Tom is not suffering. How can they know how he feels,” Inglis wrote. It might seem a ghastly presumption that Inglis was certain her son wanted to die: but it is worse to assume that everyone — in the most miserable of circumstances — would want to live.
When Frances Inglis, a slug of brandy for courage, completed her ghastly mission, which took her both to jail and utter loss, the rest of Thomas’s family stood solidly by her. They knew that only she could have done it; only his mother loved him enough. |
