22 July 2024

Assisted suicide back on Parliamentary agenda

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A bill to legalise assisted suicide is to be introduced in Parliament. Lord Falconer, former Lord Chancellor and long term campaigner for legalised assisted suicide, has secured second place in the Private Members' ballot in the House of Lords. The bill he will be introducing is the Assisted Dying for Terminally Ill Adults Bill.

This bill carries the same name as a private members bill before the Scottish Parliament introduced by Liam McArthur in March. That bill is currently being reviewed by a Scottish Parliamentary committee and is open for consultation until August.

Lord Falconer's bill will certainly find support in the Lords when it is read. A similar bill was passed by the Lords in 2015. It timed out before it could reach the Commons due to the 2015 election. A However, MPs had already debated and heavily defeated a bill on assisted dying earlier that year, so there was no realistic chance of success.

In 2021 yet another private members bill was introduced into the Lords by Baroness Meacher. That also passed the early stages in its progress, but timed out at the end of the Parliamentary session.

Campaigners for assisted dying have continued to push hard for change. Esther Rantzen recently gave the campaign further publicity and support as she shared her own terminal cancer diagnosis. She also shared that she has joined the Swiss clinic Dignitas and begged MPs to reconsider the law. Her appeals certainly carried weight and over 200,000 people signed a petition to legalise assisted dying in response.

Lord Falconer of Thornton

Perhaps partly in response to this, actress Liz Carr presented a documentary entitled Better off Dead? in which she shared how her disability puts her in the position of being legally allowed to requested assisted suicide in a number of countries and her fears about those laws.

In the past, however, these debates have been largely irrelevant to the legal position of assisted dying, with MPs in Westminster having clearly shown that such a law would not pass. However, we have a new Parliament now with very different makeup.

Most notably, the Prime Minister has been clear that he personally supports the move to legalise assisted suicide and has committed to making time for such a bill to be debated in the Commons and a free vote given. Lords Private Members bills are extremely difficult to get past and can be derailed by a single MP when they come to the Commons, so any such move would require government support to create time on the government's business for the bill.

The new Parliamentary arithmetic on this issue is not known, so we must consider this now a live issue.

Most Christians are clear on the dangers of such a move, including the dehumanising effect of labelling some people eligible for termination, and oppose assisted suicide. In the 2021 Lords debate on Baroness Meachers' bill Justin Welby spoke against it, stating, "No amount of safeguards can perfect the human heart, no amount of regulation can make a relative kinder or a doctor infallible. No amount of reassurance can make a vulnerable or disabled person feel equally safe, equally valued, if the law is changed in this way."

In 2022 the Church of England's General Synod overwhelmingly voted to reaffirm the Church's formal opposition to assisted dying.

However, the former Archbishop of Canterbury Lord Carey has spoken in favour of the move, describing it as 'profoundly Christian'.

Historically, campaigners could call on the powerful support of the British Medical Association, speaking on behalf of doctors in opposing assisted dying. They had argued that it should not be the decision of doctors to determine who can and who cannot end their life and it is against the hippocratic oath for doctors to end life. However, they changed this position in 2021 moving to what they described as a 'neutral position' on the issue.

All this means that those supporting a change feel that their time has come. The PM is on their side. The doctors have stopped objecting and they even have an ex-Archbishop of Canterbury on their side. Opinion polling has consistently been in favour of a change in the law.

If Justin Welby and the Church of England are to win this argument, it feels to Mouse that they need to up their game and make the case.

2 comments:

  1. That’s the ‘Hippocratic’ Oath - typo - but be aware that the meaning of the Greek could be about letting non-doctors have access to potentially lethal drugs rather than ‘euthanasia’.

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  2. Thanks for spotting my typo - definitely blaming autocorrect, although my proofreading is notoriously unreliable.

    The issue for doctors is that the proposed legislation (and most models used elsewhere) rely on doctors certifying as to whether the individual is of 'sound mind' and that they are terminally ill and sufficiently close to the end (Lord Falconer suggests with less than six months to live). So while they may not be administering the lethal drugs, they are the key decision makers as to whether the individual's case meets the legal criteria. However, medical cases are often not clear cut and an individual's prognosis can change unexpectedly and may vary as new/experimental treatments are available. So all in all, the doctors are being put in a difficult position.

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