The real dangers of Lord Falconer’s Assisted Dying Bill
Here are some of the responses to Lord Falconer’s Assisted Dying Bill, highlighting the weaknesses and dangers of the Bill.
This is a briefing from the Catholic Church in England and Wales:
What the Bill Says
Lord Falconer’s Private Member’s Bill seeks to legalise what it calls ‘assisted dying’. In plain language, this means licensing doctors to supply lethal drugs to terminally ill patients who request them in order to commit suicide and who are thought to meet certain criteria – that they had a settled wish to end their lives, that they have the mental capacity to make the decision and that they are not being coerced or pressured.
What does the Church say about assisting suicide?
In a message addressed to Catholics in Ireland, Scotland, England and Wales, Pope Francis said, “Even the weakest and most vulnerable, the sick, the old, the unborn and the poor, are masterpieces of God’s creation, made in his own image, destined to live for ever, and deserving of the utmost reverence and respect”. The Church supports high quality care for the dying and protection for the weak and vulnerable. The Church teaches that life is a gift from God (John 10:10) and that suicide is the ultimate inability to accept the gift of life. Although attempting suicide should be treated with compassion rather than with blame, suicide should never be encouraged or promoted. Moreover the Church teaches that deliberately ending or helping to end someone else’s life, even if that person may have requested it, is wrong. Those who take someone else’s life take to themselves the power of life and death, which ultimately belongs to God.
What’s Wrong with the Bill
I. This Bill would:
- fly in the face of social attitudes to suicide. While as a society we treat people who attempt suicide with compassion and understanding, there is widespread acceptance that suicide is not something to be encouraged or assisted. Lord Falconer’s Bill stands this perception on its head.
- reinforce pressures on vulnerable people. The advocates of the bill tend to forget the background against which they are seeking to change the law. Recent examples of neglect in care homes as well as the many pressures faced by the elderly, disabled and vulnerable, who often feel a burden in a society focused on health, youth and beauty, should provide ample warning about the dangers of removing the vital protections afforded by the current law. As well as opening the door to abuse, legalising assisted suicide risks sending the message that a patient’s life is no longer worth living and could easily confirm a patient’s worst fears that the patient would be better off dead. We should be focusing instead on caring for vulnerable people and on supporting the message of the value of each person.
- remove the deterrent of the present law. Someone who was minded to put pressure on a relative to end their life for personal gain or for other malicious reasons would have nothing to fear other than that a request for assisted suicide might be refused. Under the present law they would have to reckon with a spotlight being shone on their actions after the event and of any malicious intent coming to light.
- replace the firm boundary of the present law with a purely arbitrary one. The present law rests on the clear principle that we do not involve ourselves in deliberately bringing about the deaths of others. An ‘assisted dying’ law says that there are some people whose deaths it is acceptable to hasten. Such an arbitrary boundary is hard to defend against extension to others – if the terminally ill, why not the chronically ill or people with disabilities? If the underlying principle of the Bill is the relief of suffering, there is no logic in the selection of terminal illness as a criterion.
II. More specifically, this Bill:
- contains no specific safeguards to protect the vulnerable. All it contains is a few criteria – mental capacity, settled wish, freedom from coercion. But it mandates no minimum steps that a doctor must take to ensure that these criteria are met.
- places responsibility for assisting suicide on the shoulders of doctors. But most doctors do not regard assisting suicide as an acceptable part of clinical practice and would not participate in it if it were to be made legal. Consequently many people seeking assisted suicide would have to find, or be referred to, a minority of doctors they had never met before who would know nothing of them beyond their case notes.
- would encompass large numbers of people. A qualifying person would need to be diagnosed as having “an inevitably progressive condition which cannot be reversed by treatment”. But this could include chronic conditions such as Parkinson’s, MS and heart disease as well as other relatively-short trajectory illnesses, like cancer. Such chronic and incurable conditions, while life-shortening, are not terminal illnesses in the normally understood sense of the term but, for some patients (eg the elderly or frail), they could easily attract a prognosis of “reasonably expected to die within six months”. Even in what is normally seen as terminal illness accurate prognosis is fraught with difficulty. The Royal College of General Practitioners told Lord Mackay’s select committee in 2004 that, with prognoses at a range of more than a week or two, “the scope for error can extend into years”.
- ignores the problems of mental capacity assessment.The Bill requires people requesting assisted suicide to have “the capacity to make the decision to end their life”. But what sort of capacity is that? When doctors assess capacity, they do so with a view to protecting patients from self-harm, not to clearing the way for their suicide. Mental capacity can be affected by all kinds of things, including depression (a frequent concomitant of serious illness) and the effect of medication that is being taken to relieve the symptoms of serious illness. Yet the bill assumes that doctors would be able to determine whether or not a patient has mental capacity without a referral to a psychiatrist for specialist assessment.
- offers information on end of life care but not experience of it. The bill requires that the qualifying person has been fully informed of the palliative, hospice and other care which is available to someone seeking assisted suicide. But, even it is available (and in some parts of the country it is not), it is not enough just to be informed. As Help the Hospices wrote in evidence to Lord Mackay’s select committee, the promise of pain control is radically different to experience of pain control and a decision to seek ‘assisted dying’ without having had the opportunity to experience good end of life care could not be said to be fully informed.
Download
You can also read this SENSE AND NONSENSE ON ‘ASSISTED DYING’ from the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales.
These more general points are from the CARE NOT KILLING website:
About Care Not Killing
Care Not Killing is a UK-based alliance of individuals and organisations which brings together disability and human rights groups, healthcare providers, and faith-based bodies, with the aims of:
- promoting more and better palliative care;
- ensuring that existing laws against euthanasia and assisted suicide are not weakened or repealed;
- influencing the balance of public opinion against any further weakening of the law.
Our position
- Any change in the law to allow assisted suicide or euthanasia would place pressure on vulnerable people to end their lives for fear of being a financial, emotional or care burden upon others. This would especially affect people who are disabled, elderly, sick or depressed.
- Persistent requests for euthanasia are extremely rare if people are properly cared for so our priority must be to ensure that good care addressing people’s physical, psychological, social and spiritual needs is accessible to all.
- The present law making assisted suicide and euthanasia illegal is clear and right and does not need changing. The penalties it holds in reserve act as a strong deterrent to exploitation and abuse whilst giving discretion to prosecutors and judges in hard cases.
- Hard cases make bad law. Even in a free democratic society there are limits to human freedom and the law must not be changed to accommodate the wishes of a small number of desperate and determined people.
- The pressure people will feel to end their lives if assisted suicide or euthanasia is legalised will be greatly accentuated at this time of economic recession with families and health budgets under pressure. Elder abuse and neglect by families, carers and institutions are real and dangerous and this is why strong laws are necessary.
- Parliament has rightly rejected the legalisation of assisted suicide and euthanasia in Britain three times since 2006 out of concern for public safety – in the House of Lords (2006 and 2009) and in Scotland (2010) – and repeated extensive enquiries have concluded that a change in the law is not necessary.
- The number of British people travelling abroad to commit assisted suicide or euthanasia is very small (150 in ten years) compared to numbers in countries that have legalised assisted suicide or euthanasia. With an ‘Oregon’ law we would have 1,200 deaths a year and with a ‘Dutch’ law 13,000.
- If assisted suicide or euthanasia is legalised any ‘safeguards’ against abuse, such as limiting it to certain categories of people, will not work. Instead, once any so-called ‘right-to-die’ is established we will see incremental extension with activists applying pressure to expand the categories of people who qualify for it.
- The vast majority of UK doctors are opposed to legalising euthanasia along with the British Medical Association, the Royal College of Physicians, the Royal College of General Practitioners, the Association for Palliative Medicine and the British Geriatric Society.
- All major disability rights groups in Britain (including Disability Rights UK, SCOPE, UKDPC and Not Dead Yet UK) oppose any change in the law believing it will lead to increased prejudice towards them and increased pressure on them to end their lives.
- Inappropriate media portrayal of suicide, assisted suicide and euthanasia will fuel copycat suicides and suicide contagion. International media guidelines must be upheld and complied with.
- Public opinion polls can be easily manipulated when high media profile (and often celebrity-driven) ‘hard cases’ are used to elicit emotional reflex responses without consideration of the strong arguments against legalisation.
For more details see our Policy Guide and FAQs.
Tags: assisted dying, assisted suicide, Care not Killing, euthanasia
This Bill flies in the face of all that is decent. Its proposals could, if it becomes law, be used by future governments to advance a situation where only those regarded as ‘perfect’ are allowed to live. For example, those in perfect health, with no familial history of degenerative illnesses/conditions. I believe it is not too many steps from the forms of murder that the Nazis introduced in Germany. If allowed to be passed, it could, potentially see a great many people become ‘eligible’ for assisted dying including those with on-going mental health conditions or other incurable but not necessarily life threatening conditions.
I ask myself “is this the sort of society we want to devolve into?” The answer, surely, must be a resounding “No”.
No law is perfect. see the law about the drinking age? So generalizing about assisted death is nothing more the ignorance on your part. Plus what laws are perfect? How is the nazis from germany any part of the issue? There not saying we want to kill this people. They want dignity of end of life. Why is it if a person wants to live they can but if a person wants to die they cant? How is it not life threating when a person cannot walk talk do anything and are forced to live becuase of your standards of living are threated? no the answer IS YES!
For some, dignity depends on life; for others, dignity depends on the quality of life.
European liberal states have attempted to choose a middle road: Ethical legislation sometimes pursues one policy and sometimes the other. This means that it establishes no principles at all.
But ethics without principles is like ethics without truth: It may be fatally confused with pleasure, usefulness, individual or group interest, and then degenerate into egoism, convenience, condescension.
Ethics cannot be painless. It exists in order to restrain instincts and pleasures by settling limits to them.
In the end we must choose. We must NOT separate morality from truth – confuse moral autonomy with free choice – treat individuals as things – transform desires into rights – confine reason within the boundaries of science.
And then we shall not feel alone in a society of strangers or oppressed by a state that appropriates us because we have forgotten how to guide ourselves.
But people should have a right to die if thats what they want. Well what are the limits of sex? Really nothing. So why is death such a taboo subject? We dont know anything about the other person. I am not talking about disabled and going out there and killing them. But some may want to die since there quality of life is taken away. some of my relatives committed suicide since there was no cure for Syphlis they would slowly go crazy. Well strangers really dont want to help you they just wants a collective we need life instead of death well we need both and its hand in hand. We live and we die. Now why should some stranger disabled or not tell me to live?
I’m afraid I don’t understand the point(s) you’re making.
what I am saying people should have a right to die as well as a right to LIVE.
Quite apart from my belief that this proposal is wrong, I also think it could be the ‘tip of the iceberg’ leading to government/doctors or courts being able to end a persons life due to some belief at that time that the condition they have makes their life ‘not worth living’
well its only the tip if people allow it. I know you wont allow so there is that balance. We cant stop people from living why should we stop them from dying and have the dying wish?
“well its only the tip if people allow it.” By allowing the legislation to go through, we are allowing it.
No we are allowing them to given a choice in the right to die. As they see fit.
Other than the concerns held by many that this proposed law constitutes abuse of life, I fear it could easily be open to abuse in the future.
its abuse if the person doesnt want IT! which then I am with you on! But if the person is of sound body and mind they should be allowed or assissted suicide. Docter Kervorikian really pushed the envelope with it. Terri shavio case did the same thing. Why would I want to be in a vegative state and not wanting that? That should be my rights if my family knows I didnt want that then why should i have to live because you say I should?
‘some of my relatives committed suicide since there was no cure for Syphilis they would slowly go crazy’ ~ Micah thats really very very sad.
I was very good friends with an intellectual researcher at the university of Essex, he had lyme disease which caused dementia, he felt like he was going crazy, and he took his own life, leaving behind a wife and 2 young children. He was an atheist. However its never left me that he chose such a beautiful view of an idyllic place in which to end his life. I often think he went there last of all to be closest to the maker of such sublime beauty, other wise he might just well have taken it in a black pit.
Maybe others have such a sense and a hope of Heaven that they just want to go home early.
But Micah people don’t have a right to life ~ Life is pure gift ~ they have a right to Love ~ and that Love at any point might be breached thwarted and twisted if we allow for someone other than God to take life back. Man is corrupt and flawed and prone to error and misjudgment.
Assisted suicide would deny people the spiritual journey into death, a journey which I have seen with my own eyes ~ despite the pain involved for all, there are great spiritual awakenings and blessings for both the dying, and for their closest beloveds ~ that would never be revealed if we denied them the full journey home. Prayers for you and yours Micah x
thats a christain view. When did I say people shouldnt have the right to live people should but they should also have the right to DIE, why it is acceptable for us to humanly euthenize pets? How is that our right but when it comes to people wanting assited death we cant have that. How do you know? well pets will never get there since we kill them daily.
in the name of humanly doing it. How do you know there is a god? Tell god to stop having conjoined twins
its not about being a Christian ~ it is about having encounters with Loved ones who have been close to death and its about the journey experienced with them. Its about our humanity and the divinity so intimate with our humanity ~ what ever the religion ~ or even lack of.
I consented to have my 16 year old cat euthanised I was with her too ~ it was a quick, easy and simple death ~ it left me with the worst feeling ever ~ I denied her of something which has never left me ~ and that was a cat ~ Animals are often our greatest teachers.
So why cant humans have that release? HELL I dont want to die and i doubt this people who want assitaed death want to die. But i can understand why this people too die why should we be the judge to them? what did you deny her? a release from death? From life? Your cat and all of us are going to die. Why should you tell me my life is good and you need to live?
your cat was very old. your cat lead a good life and yes animals can teach us stuff
The fact is that I decided the time was right for her life to end ~ she didn’t ~ and the vets agreed with me.
And despite me considering her too old, too desperately thin, with dementia, (she began soiling inside) to go on living, I still sensed her choosing to live on ~ she showed a bigger reluctance than usual to go to the vets on that morning, she tried not to enter that basket or that veterinary practice. I told myself it was being kinder to her and us all. i knew she wasn’t going to improve. But still i denied her of her natural end, the end that she would have chosen.
If she wanted her life to end she could of run in front of a car, refused food, drown herself etc. Her natural instinct was to survive, was to live, was to keep on until she couldn’t any longer.
I was holding my fathers hand when he naturally died too. He lived out the last few weeks of his life in bed, unable to move. We talked, we laughed, we shared, I cried :O). and he drifted in and out of the room in an almost childlike consciousness. We shared his pain, by caring for him whilst his body was in pain, by rubbing his heavy body to ease the hurting. And we waited and waited ~ and in the precious waiting there were subtle moments of processing. There was a natural emotional, physical and spiritual transition, almost a refined filtering ~ until all that was left was Pure Love, so intense, that there was no divide between living and dying, between body and Spirit. And the whole momentous experience left me with such an awakening, that regardless of the excruciating grief of loosing my father when he was just 59, I had witnessed a place that I had never before seen in such clarity.
If we take peoples lives we deny them and us of that vital witness.
well how do you know? Everyone fights to live. Tell me what is a natural end of life? some have dragged out pain and there is nothing to do for them except let them eat dog food. Meaning humans if the have Dementia. Oh for gods sake how is an old person going to run in front of a car refuse food drown etc etc? people would stop that. now your making no sense. and you will always remember the ghost of who he was. we need to have the right to die as we have the right to live
I was brought up without a practising faith.
well it seems you have been brought up since we need to see them die with Dementia Alhiezmer disease. Those are the people who need to die. Since the families are just hanging on to the flesh and nothing more
Rising is the natural end to life.
what do you mean rising?
We die yes. Dead.
But beyond death Love lives on – a Higher Love to which we become a part.
The Love that you still feel between you and your Loved ones proves this Love still exists.
We become One with God who is Love and Spirit.
And it is possible to know this Love in our world too.
For Christians it is Heralded in The Lords Prayer
‘On Earth as it is in Heaven’
We just have to learn to Love absolutely
God Bless Micah †
But what of the people that dont believe that? They will be in eternal damnation? Hindu dont believe that and the chinese dont believe in heaven thats why there is hell money. People should have a right to LIVE and to DIE.
I believe that we are all Gods beautiful creation whatever our religion or race or being.
I believe that if we know Love ~ then even if we don’t realise it we know God.
I believe further still ~ that Jesus is Love personified, A Very Special Being who Loved the poorly, the sinners, and the outcast, He called to account those who failed in their loving, that we might learn to Love better ~ and I think by us Loving people whole heartedly to the very end of their life might be the most enduring Love of All. x
Thats all good but people should have the right to die as well as the right to live. No one should tell me its good to live when they dont live my life if I want to die
Plus saying we will start doing away with the disabled is not trying to get your facts right.
Micah people would be letting you, themselves, and God down, if they weren’t showing you the Love that you so deserve, or being the Love that they were created to be, if they thought that euthanising you was a better option than Loving you.
How will people think that way? I will always remember my grandmother and her glazed died eyes just staring at me! She needed some help to go to the other side!
There was nothing left in there except the shell
you want to know who I sleep with and how I die but other then that you dont give a damn
like I said RIP
prayers for peace you and your grandmother Micah x
She already passed away but that memory of her life will always be with me until i die