Last week the UK’s House of Commons voted to pass, by a majority of 55, the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill.
Kim Leadbeater, the Labour MP who put forward the Private Members Bill, promised it would have the “best safeguards in the world” and told those who spoke in terms of introducing a “state-sanctioned suicide service” to “mind their language”. I am doing so, for that is exactly what it will introduce into the NHS and sadly a minority of healthcare staff including both hospital doctors and GPs, will be willing to dispense death as a legal option, if the Bill does become law in England and Wales. (Interestingly, a majority of Scottish MPs voted against the Bill.)
The claim was repeatedly made by those promoting the Bill that palliative care would not be affected – but the vast majority of palliative physicians were opposed the Bill. Only a few days after the vote, it was announced that 300 beds in the UK hospice network are closed through lack of funding. Once assisted suicide (to distinguish it from the assistance in dying provided to patients for decades by hospices) is legal, there will be pressure for all hospices to offer it, as has happened in other jurisdictions. Palliative care is expensive and however much money is set aside for the suicide service, it will be far less than the provision of palliative care in final months or years of life – a prognosis of six months to live is notoriously inaccurate, as I know well from 30 years’ experience as an NHS doctor.
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The Bill has many ambiguities. I shall mention just three of them here to illustrate that its figleaf “safeguards” are totally inadequate.
Part of the Bill’s definition of “terminal illness” (section 2 (1a)) is one of an “inevitably progressive illness, disease or medical condition which cannot be reversed by treatment”. Will potentially curative treatment be offered to the same extent as at present if the patient could opt for assisted suicide?
Disability and psychiatric illness are both currently excluded (section 2 (3)) as sole reasons for eligibility for assisted suicide but these restrictions are untenable long-term in the light of the emerging concept of “terminal psychiatric illness” and the fact that many young patients with anorexia nervosa have already had their lives ended by assisted suicide in countries where the practice is legal.
Should the UK Bill become enacted, there will be legal challenges to the “discrimination” of restricting access to the “terminally ill” under any definition. The suffering of those with painful chronic but not life-threatening illnesses will successfully be claimed in the courts for their right also to state assistance to end their lives. Once the principle of individual autonomy taking precedence over the protection of the vulnerable has been conceded, as it has by this recent vote, its extension to other groups is inevitable.
LifeNews Note: Ann Farmer is a writer at MercatorNet where this story appeared.
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