Latest news with #HenryMarsh
Telegraph
26-03-2025
- Health
- Telegraph
The vile assisted suicide Bill is on its last legs. Now let's kill it off
If you're still undecided about assisted suicide – or, as its supporters prefer to call it, 'assisted dying' – I invite you to consider the following quote. It comes from a newspaper interview conducted in 2017 with Henry Marsh, a leading brain surgeon and author of a bestselling medical memoir entitled Do No Harm. The interviewer, from The Sunday Times, asked Dr Marsh about his support for 'assisted dying'. And here's the most extraordinary section of his reply: 'So much of [the opposition to it] is all bloody Christians,' complained Marsh. 'They argue that grannies will be made to commit suicide. Even if a few grannies get bullied into it, isn't that a price worth paying for all the people who could die with dignity?' Well. Quite a lot to take in there. But we might as well start at the beginning. Personally, I don't see why it should matter if opposition to assisted suicide comes from 'bloody Christians'. In any case, I would point out that opposition also comes from a great many people who are not 'bloody Christians'. I, for one, have never been religious, yet I oppose assisted suicide as strongly as anybody. The part of that quote I particularly wish to focus on, however, is not the part about 'bloody Christians', it's the part about 'grannies'. Let's read it again, and take a moment to digest it: the assertion that, even if 'a few grannies' get 'bullied into' assisted suicide, it would be 'a price worth paying'. Now, you might assume that I'm about to condemn Dr Marsh for the jaw-dropping crassness of those words. But actually I'm not. On the contrary, I wish to thank him most sincerely for his candour. Because let's face it: this is what the campaign for 'assisted dying' really amounts to. To support it, you have to believe that 'a few grannies' getting 'bullied into it' is 'a price worth paying' – even if you wouldn't dare to put it in such blunt terms. I only wish that other supporters of assisted suicide – especially the MPs among them – could be as frank, open and honest as Marsh was in that 2017 interview. Not least because, if they were, the wider public would surely be so horrified, the Bill wouldn't stand a chance of becoming law. Thankfully, though, it looks more and more as if the Bill is doomed anyway. As we report today, its future has been thrown into doubt after Kim Leadbeater, the Labour MP trying to steer it through Parliament, backed down and agreed to delay implementing the law until 2029, after the next election. Civil servants responsible for drafting amendments are said to have told her that the Bill was 'unworkable'. And opponents have told The Telegraph that the delay was indeed an 'admission that the Bill does not work'. This latest setback follows weeks of chaos, criticism and controversy. The committee of MPs overseeing the Bill removed what had previously been cited as a key judicial safeguard: the need for a High Court judge to approve each request. Meanwhile, eating disorder charities expressed their fear that anorexics would be able to choose 'assisted dying', after MPs refused to close a loophole in the Bill. And Reform UK's Lee Anderson, an MP who initially voted in favour, declared that he would now vote against ('This Bill becomes less credible by the day'). I very much doubt he's alone. Despite all these woes, it seems that Ms Leadbeater remains determined to push on. Frankly, though, I think she's wasting her time. So let me put it to her in language she'll understand: I know it's hard to accept, Ms Leadbeater, but the truth is, your Bill is dying. It has no realistic prospect of recovery. And, in all honesty, its struggles have become painful to watch. So what point is there in prolonging its existence in this futile manner? Wouldn't it be more dignified to put the poor thing out of its misery?
Yahoo
26-03-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
The vile assisted suicide Bill is on its last legs. Now let's kill it off
If you're still undecided about assisted suicide – or, as its supporters prefer to call it, 'assisted dying' – I invite you to consider the following quote. It comes from a newspaper interview conducted in 2017 with Henry Marsh, a leading brain surgeon and author of a bestselling medical memoir entitled Do No Harm. The interviewer, from The Sunday Times, asked Dr Marsh about his support for 'assisted dying'. And here's the most extraordinary section of his reply: 'So much of [the opposition to it] is all bloody Christians,' complained Marsh. 'They argue that grannies will be made to commit suicide. Even if a few grannies get bullied into it, isn't that a price worth paying for all the people who could die with dignity?' Well. Quite a lot to take in there. But we might as well start at the beginning. Personally, I don't see why it should matter if opposition to assisted suicide comes from 'bloody Christians'. In any case, I would point out that opposition also comes from a great many people who are not 'bloody Christians'. I, for one, have never been religious, yet I oppose assisted suicide as strongly as anybody. The part of that quote I particularly wish to focus on, however, is not the part about 'bloody Christians', it's the part about 'grannies'. Let's read it again, and take a moment to digest it: the assertion that, even if 'a few grannies' get 'bullied into' assisted suicide, it would be 'a price worth paying'. Now, you might assume that I'm about to condemn Dr Marsh for the jaw-dropping crassness of those words. But actually I'm not. On the contrary, I wish to thank him most sincerely for his candour. Because let's face it: this is what the campaign for 'assisted dying' really amounts to. To support it, you have to believe that 'a few grannies' getting 'bullied into it' is 'a price worth paying' – even if you wouldn't dare to put it in such blunt terms. I only wish that other supporters of assisted suicide – especially the MPs among them – could be as frank, open and honest as Marsh was in that 2017 interview. Not least because, if they were, the wider public would surely be so horrified, the Bill wouldn't stand a chance of becoming law. Thankfully, though, it looks more and more as if the Bill is doomed anyway. As we report today, its future has been thrown into doubt after Kim Leadbeater, the Labour MP trying to steer it through Parliament, backed down and agreed to delay implementing the law until 2029, after the next election. Civil servants responsible for drafting amendments are said to have told her that the Bill was 'unworkable'. And opponents have told The Telegraph that the delay was indeed an 'admission that the Bill does not work'. This latest setback follows weeks of chaos, criticism and controversy. The committee of MPs overseeing the Bill removed what had previously been cited as a key judicial safeguard: the need for a High Court judge to approve each request. Meanwhile, eating disorder charities expressed their fear that anorexics would be able to choose 'assisted dying', after MPs refused to close a loophole in the Bill. And Reform UK's Lee Anderson, an MP who initially voted in favour, declared that he would now vote against ('This Bill becomes less credible by the day'). I very much doubt he's alone. Despite all these woes, it seems that Ms Leadbeater remains determined to push on. Frankly, though, I think she's wasting her time. So let me put it to her in language she'll understand: I know it's hard to accept, Ms Leadbeater, but the truth is, your Bill is dying. It has no realistic prospect of recovery. And, in all honesty, its struggles have become painful to watch. So what point is there in prolonging its existence in this futile manner? Wouldn't it be more dignified to put the poor thing out of its misery? Once Ms Leadbeater thinks about it in those terms, perhaps she will finally come round to my point of view. I certainly hope so. This vile Bill is on its last legs. Now let's kill it off. Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
Yahoo
28-01-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Appreciation: Henry L. Marsh III
Sen. Henry Marsh, D-Richmond, at an event hosted by the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia in 2009 marking the 50th anniversary of the end of Massive Resistance. (Courtesy of UVA Center for Politics) It could be easy at times to forget that Sen. Henry Marsh was even there, listening quietly from his back-row desk in the Senate of Virginia. Marsh, who died last week at the age of 91, wasn't flashy or given to florid oratory. He had long ago tilted at his share of windmills in a consequential career as a civil rights lawyer and political leader who cut a wide swath on behalf of people of color. The years had taught Henry L. Marsh III to listen harder than he spoke. It served him well as he continued his fight at an age when most people who have achieved as greatly as he had were peacefully retired. When he did speak, it was softly — just above a whisper — and sometimes haltingly, but his words were heard. They were rooted in the bitter experience of a Black man who had spent most of his life casting Jim Crow's yoke off his people, so he commanded the attention of friends and adversaries alike. In a time before political parties became intractable redoubts of hardened and sometimes extreme conflicting ideologies, Marsh's gentle voice made a difference. Few people brought the sort of portfolio to the General Assembly that Marsh did. He had been a classmate and roommate of Doug Wilder at Howard University's School of Law. Both would become Virginia trailblazers. In 1989, Wilder became the nation's first elected Black governor. In 1977, Marsh became the first Black mayor of Richmond, once the seat of a seditious breakaway government formed to perpetuate the enslavement of Black people. Before that, Marsh had taken up the causes of African Americans' rights as a young attorney in the small Richmond firm established by his role model, Oliver Hill, a legendary Black litigator whose work led to the Supreme Court's 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision that ended segregated public schools in America. Alongside Hill, Spottswood W. Robinson III and Samuel Tucker, Marsh was part of the legal dream team that attacked institutionalized discrimination in housing, employment, voting rights and Massive Resistance, Virginia's shameful bid to circumvent Brown. Marsh not only helped bury the lie of 'separate but equal' in the middle years of the 20th century, he had endured disparate levels of public school funding: first-rate facilities, plentiful faculty and brand new textbooks for all-white schools; leaky, substandard buildings where Black children and teachers using textbooks cast off from white schools shivered in winters and sweltered every summer. That's why Marsh, a Democrat, was a steadfast foe of Republican efforts to use public school funds for vouchers to help pay the costs of attending private schools and privately run but publicly funded charter schools that operated independently of In 2000, for the first time since Reconstruction, the GOP held majorities in both the House of Delegates and the Senate. Charter schools legislation, which had floundered in the 1990s, was on track to finally pass. The Senate was a more collegial place then. The charter schools bill was up for third reading and a final Senate floor vote. The most anticipated words on the bill would come from a genuine lion of the Civil Rights movement. Marsh could have thundered against what he regarded as a latter-day form of segregation. He could have banged his fist on his desk and recounted his own compelling childhood story of walking to school while his white contemporaries rode buses, of third- and fourth-hand books and of a cramped one-room school. He could have gone for the jugular emotionally. He didn't. I've long since lost my clips and notes from that day. My faded and dusty recollection is that his floor remarks were brief and direct, noting his opposition to diverting public resources away from those with the least. The bill passed the Senate 21-18 and eventually became law. I do, however, remember asking him in a Capitol hallway afterward why he didn't invoke his considerable personal history and fill his speech with fury and pathos. His response was so soft I missed it the first time, begged his indulgence and asked him to repeat it. I leaned forward so as not to miss it the second time. 'I said I didn't need to,' he said. 'This isn't about me.' A quarter of a century later, those two sentences abide with me as the essence of Henry Marsh. It never was about him. It was about others — the poor, the voiceless, the forgotten. No life could have a better epitaph. Bob Lewis covered Virginia government and politics for 20 years for The Associated Press. Now retired from a public relations career at McGuireWoods, he is a columnist for the Virginia Mercury. He can be reached at blewis@ Twitter: @BobLewisOfRVA SUPPORT: YOU MAKE OUR WORK POSSIBLE
