Rachel Clarke: If we truly cared about those dying, palliative care would be properly funded
Christiaan Barnard, the surgeon who performed the world’s first heart transplant, vividly skewered the notion of patients “freely” choosing to have such dangerous, experimental surgery. They were, he wrote, like someone chased by a lion to the bank of a river filled with crocodiles, who decides to hurl themselves into the water: “For a dying man, it is not a difficult decision because he knows he is at the end … But you would never accept the odds if there were no lion.” Barnard captures a fundamental flaw in libertarianism that is horribly pertinent, whether we like it or not, to Kim Leadbeater’s choice at the end of life bill. The freedom to choose, so superficially seductive, can disguise all manner of coercion.
