In the Tablet religion magazine journalist Bess Twiston Davies reports on the latest development in the assisted suicide debate as the nation waits anxiously for Friday’s vote in the House of Commons.
A paper written by bioethicist Professor David Albert Jones and published by the Anscombe Bioethics Centre shows that in many places where it has already been introduced, assisted dying has negatively impacted palliative care provision.
The Anscombe Centre has also released a video discussion between Jones and palliative care specialist Dr Dominic Whitehouse on the nature of palliative care and the state of its provision in the UK. Most palliative care is provided by hospices and provision is not adequate as it is.
In the video, Dr Whitehouse warns of the risk that the bond of trust between doctor and patient built up over millennia will be “torpedoed”.
He says: “If I have to go to a patient, and they know that I’m thinking about assisted dying, I don’t want to see the fear of that in their eyes.”
Dr Whitehouse warns that in places where it is already legal, many doctors do not wish to do it and often it is carried out by doctors who have known the patient for just a few weeks. “How can they possibly check for coercion, elder abuse, things like that?”
In 2016, Assisted Suicide was legalised in Canada. Amanda Achtman provides an alarming account in this week’s Tablet magazine of the consequences.
“At first,” writes Amanda, the legal criteria to qualify for Medical Assistance for Dying “required the patient to be an adult, capable of consent, making a voluntary request”, with “a grievous and irremediable condition”, and whose natural death was “reasonably foreseeable”.
Come October 2020, the Canadian Minister of Justice was tabling a bill to reduce the initial safeguards.
By 2021, assisted dying had been expanded to those whose deaths are “not reasonably foreseeable” but are suffering from “a grievous and irremediable condition.”
Canada has now become “the Euthanasia capital of the world,” says Amanda: a fifth of all deaths are attributed to assisted dying.
When she worked for an MP opposed to expanding the legislation to apply to people living with disabilities and mental health struggles, they created a petition.
Then, they emailed the thousands of signatories to ask for their story about how the euthanasia expansion would affect them and their loved ones personally.
Suddenly, the parliamentary quarters where Amanda worked turned into something akin to “a suicide prevention office.”: “Reading those hundreds of desperate emails amid the pandemic shook me to the core,” recalls Amanda.
The potential impact on palliative care, on those who wish to live as long as possible even when they know not much time is left, on our medical profession itself, are among the many things that just do not seem to have been thought through properly.
And then there are apparent attempts to cancel the views of people of religious faith who oppose assisted suicide, as though even having a faith at all makes a person’s opposition to this irrelevant. But what if people are simply, and totally rationally, just frightened?
- The Tablet magazine is available on-line and in good bookshops and in the bookstalls of many churches across the UK.