Ian McEwan calls for assisted dying rights to be extended to dementia patients | books

Author Ian McEwan said the legalization of euthanasia should be extended “gradually” to include dementia patients.

McEwan has been “shocked by the attempts to dig into the ice” by those who oppose the UK’s assisted dying bill, he told a public writers’ event in London, citing more than 1,000 amendments. MPs and peers supporting the bill now believe it is “almost impossible” to pass the House of Lords before the end of the session in May due to alleged obstruction.

If passed, it would legalize medically assisted death in England and Wales for adults with less than six months to live. “We’re not asking for a lot,” said McEwan, a sponsor of Dignity in Dying.

“I like it when a bishop says on the radio, ‘It’s the thin end of the wedge,’” I think Yes“It’s the thin end of the wedge”, because certain groups are “missing from it”, such as people with dementia. “It must be physical pain.”

“I think if we pushed it forward with all the protections around it — from doctors and neutral people making judgments — we would look at this and think: Why did we let people die of agony?”

Asked explicitly if he would add an amendment to extend assisted dying to people with dementia, McEwan said: “Yes, gradually, I will do that. But I think it takes a lot of thought and the idea of ​​living wills.”

“My mother used to say to me: ‘If I get really terrible, I would like you to kill me.’ But of course, that would mean committing murder in the current situation. Imagine standing up in court and saying: ‘Well, she said that when we were at the beach 20 years ago…’”

McEwan spoke about the impact of dementia on his family – his mother Rose had dementia, as did his brother-in-law and another close family member. “By the time my mother was too advanced to recognize anyone, she was dead. She was alive and dead at the same time. It was a terrible thing. And the burden on the people closest is also part of the radiation damage from it all.”

McEwan was speaking at St Martin-in-the-Fields Church in central London, as part of its series of talks, where he discussed his latest book, What We Can Know, of which dementia is a central theme. He also wrote about dementia in previous novels, Lessons and the Sabbath.

The Atonement author also discussed the new novel he’s working on, during a conversation about the ban on social media platforms for under-16s in Australia, and the potential adoption of the measure in the UK. The author said he began “wishing the Internet didn’t exist. I look back with envy at the 1970s, when one of civilization’s greatest luxuries — isolation — was so abundantly available, and it’s been eroded, and now a lot of dark stuff is coming out of it. I’m trying to write a novel about this. The disappearance of childhood, or the feeling of a guarded childhood.” He said he supports banning social media.

One of the main themes of What We Can Know is climate change: the novel is partly set in the year 2119, in which Britain has become an archipelago, having been submerged by rising sea levels. McEwan said that although he has “never known the world to be in a worse state,” he maintains “a modicum of optimism that we will overcome it.”

The author said that What We Can Know has an “emotional background” consisting partly of despair and partly of hope. If you have children and grandchildren, “you want the humanitarian project to continue.” However, there is a “compensatory current” common to all old people, he said – in order to make sense of their lives, people think: “With my end, it will be the end of everything -”Then, the flood.’ “The pessimism of the elderly is a very strong obstacle to clear thinking.” He argues that what we can know is an expression of those “opposite forces.”