Polly Toynbee again!

This Polly Toynbee thing is getter out of hand. I have now discovered another brave, admirable article by her, this time on assisted death. Writing just 3 weeks after her mother's painful and undignified end from cancer, Toynbee discusses the guilt of not fulfilling her mother's wish to be released from her misery. Toynbee criticises the current legal and medical context that, she argues, wrongly insists that people should and can have a good, natural death through palliative care.

Given the circumstances of writing, I feel awkward at challenging anything Toynbee says but here goes. In the spirit of Ian Craib (see my very first post), I'd ask the following:

1) As Craib says death is the ultimate disappointment. Perhaps the focus on the process of dying is a way of not confronting that. Would assisted death be any more bearable or meaningful? Is there a danger here of promoting a different but equally unachieveable ideal of the good death?
2) So much of the rhetoric in this area plugs into the contemporary preoccupation with the notion of a self-managing individual in control of their own life. As Craib and others have suggested, these values are shot through with contradictions, deny social, psychological and biological realities, and are often the means through which power is exercised on us. Seen in these terms our 'right to die as we choose' is not unquestionable.