Doubtless, many believe that the House of Commons debate last Friday on the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill was about death. In fact, the decision MPs made was about life – its value and who does the valuing.
In the biggest social change to our country for years, by voting to introduce assisted suicide MPs chose to change the role of the NHS forever – no longer missioned only to protect life, but to end lives too.
I opposed this change, largely on the basis that it would be incompatible with my lifelong mission to defend the vulnerable, the disabled and those who have little voice and no power. For despite all the assurances from its advocates, the proposed legislation’s ‘safeguards’ will, in practice, prove ineffective.
Those campaigning to introduce assisted suicide laws here, when challenged for examples of where it has been a success, struggle to do so. Certainly we know, from the tragic experience of other countries, that wherever assisted suicide laws are introduced, vulnerable people are pressurised to end their lives prematurely.
Which is why it is unacceptable that this measure is being rushed through Parliament - to a degree I have seen rarely during my 27 years in the House of Commons. As I said in the Commons debate, given the plight of some of our country’s most vulnerable people is at stake, sufficient scrutiny of the Bill’s provisions is vital.
Perhaps, the campaigners for assisted suicide think that the more the matter is considered, the more support will ebb away? After all, they must know that none of the major UK disability rights groups, including SCOPE and Disability Rights UK, support making aiding another’s death legal, and that disability campaigners have pointed out that changing the law risks forever altering society’s attitude towards sick and disabled people.
Members of Parliament, in re-considering this hugely significant legislative change as it progresses, should seek their constituents’ views, as well as those of the experts, who through charities and interest groups, give voice to the sick, elderly, and disabled. So it was unacceptable that Parliament was given just five hours to debate and decide whether or not to create a lawful entitlement to take human life.
Too many questions remained unanswered: if this Bill becomes law what will become of hospice care? Will medical advances for certain conditions stall, as assisted dying becomes an accepted part of healthcare? What additional pressures will be placed on the already stretched NHS and courts system? Will European human rights laws (that we cannot block) allow for an expanded list of conditions for assisted suicide?
The cautionary lessons from abroad are far from encouraging; in Canada more than 40,000 people choose euthanasia each year - meaning that 4.6% of all deaths are at the hands of doctors! Over a third of people who died there by medical assistance report being motivated by being a “perceived burden on family, friends or caregivers”. Even more shockingly, Paralympians have been proactively offered ‘assisted’ deaths against their will, and there have even been cases of people being offered death as an option when suffering hearing loss or in the place of cancer treatment they needed.
There are simply too many unknown eventualities to change the law; just too many reasons to believe vulnerable people would be coerced to end their lives; too many examples from elsewhere of initially limited laws being drastically extended.
To paraphrase TS Elliot, half the harm that is done in this world is done by people who don’t mean to do harm, it is just that the harm doesn’t interest them. From Oregon to Ontario, from Amsterdam to Antwerp, assisted suicide, regardless of the intentions of its advocates, has harmed not helped.