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Suicide and Self-starvation
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 January 2009
Abstract
A puzzle has been presented in the recent past in Northern Ireland: what is the correct description of the person who dies as a result of a hungerstrike? For many the simple answer is that such a person commits suicide, in that his is surely a case of ‘self-inflicted death’. Where then is the puzzle? It is that a number of people do not see such deaths as suicides. I am not here referring to political propagandists or paramilitaries, for whom the correct description of such deaths is ‘murder by Mrs Thatcher’ or ‘killed by British intransigence’ (to quote advertisements in the Belfast nationalist press at the time of Bobby Sands' death). I am rather thinking of some theologians who, despite being opposed to the hunger-strike and indeed publicly condemning the whole campaign, refused to describe what the hunger-strikers did as suicide.
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References
1 The medical certificates were amended to record the cause of death as ‘starvation’, after protests by the families of the dead hunger-strikers at the original pathologist's report which recorded ‘self-imposed starvation’. The coroner found that the cause of death was ‘starvation, self-imposed’.
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17 This paper was first read to the Philosophy Staff Seminar at the University of Warwick, and a revised version to the Staff Seminar at the New University of Ulster. I am grateful for the helpful discussion and criticism I received.
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