It is reported that the PM wants to accelerate parliamentary legislation on medically assisted dying by affording government time to a private member’s bill. The are two from which the Government may choose, Lord Falconer’s bill in the Lords and Jake Richard MP’s bill in the Commons.
I am concerned that there should be any haste in the parliamentary process and the time for consideration.
Nobody, should have to fear a grizzly death. The proper answer is to invest in palliative care and end of life services. For the present however, that fear remains significant, but to alleviate it with medically assisted death would, in my estimate, be the greater of the two evils.
The provision of such a choice, I believe would, more swiftly than we might expect, become an expectation. The process may be subtle, but the elderly and infirm, together with the handicapped and others, can perceive that they might be considered a ‘burden’.
And who would wish to be a burden?
Oregon has released its data for 2023. Of those who applied for an assisted death, 51% did so because they felt that they were a burden rather than because the feared a painful death.
(as an aside, let us not imagine that an assisted death is always straightforward. Oregon reports that in 2023 at least 10% of assisted deaths involved complications including regurgitations or seizures, and one established a new record: 5 days and 17 hours from the time of ingestion).
It is difficult to stand out against overwhelming support reported by pollsters and campaigning by celebrities like Dame Esther Rantzen. Nevertheless, altering the law will fundamentally change the nature of medicine and the purpose of the medical profession.
Whatever safeguards we insert into the legislation, we will have accepted the principle that clinicians can lawfully use their skill to hasten death, and we cannot know how the application of that principle will evolve subsequently. The examples we have of jurisdictions that have adopted this principle, are that once a line has been crossed, the new service is very rapidly extended well beyond what was originally envisaged.
When I debated against Baroness Meacher, who had her own bill in the Lords at that time, she was emphatic about her safeguards, namely the requirement for a confirmed diagnosis of a terminal condition that would result in death within six months. In that debate at Durham University however, she was undermined by her seconder, a psychiatrist, who demanded that assisted death be available to anyone who wanted it.
Let’s be honest, there is demand for it. Of the 5000 or so suicides in England annually, only 400 have a terminal medical condition.
Dr Lehmens, Professor of Health & Law at University of Toronto visited Parliament in April to tell us that he regrets having been an enthusiast to change the law in Canada because expensive provision and adaptions for the elderly and handicapped are increasingly unavailable and patients are informed that instead they might consider applying for the assisted death.
In 2022 a 23-year-old woman had a medically assisted death in Belgium. In 2016, as a teenager, she had witnessed a bombing at Brussels Airport. She was physically unharmed but suffered PTSD.
Whilst the original intention of medical assistance in dying was to relieve suffering in death, it has become a means of avoiding suffering during life.
My argument is no more than one of the existence of a ‘slippery slope’. I make no apology for that, because I believe that it is a very steep slope and very slippery indeed.