Assisted Dying bills are going through the Scottish and UK parliaments.
These are dangerous proposals which devalue human life and puts the most vulnerable in society under pressure to end their lives prematurely.
What we do need are MSPs and MPs to champion the improvement of palliative care.
Palliative medicine provides care and support to prevent and relieve suffering for people with life-limiting and life-threatening illness.
Palliative Care and the hospice movement have developed rapidly since the late 1960s. Better palliative care is about ensuring those at the final stages of life feel valued, treated with compassion, given the benefit of modern pain relief and helped feel some peace at the end through physical, social, psychological, and spiritual support of patients with life-limiting illness, delivered by a multidisciplinary team.
Hospices provide an invaluable service, welcoming the terminally sick, ensuring that they are cared for until the last moment of life.
Those involved in Palliative Care are worried that funds intended for Palliative Care will be diverted to fund Assisted Dying.
In society, do we not owe a common responsibility to each other, especially to those who are weak, ill and dying? Legalising assisted suicide amounts to a rejection of this shared duty.
Marie Curie say that currently one in four people die ‘without the care and support they need at the end of life’. The UK’s population is ageing so the number of people with palliative care needs will increase, Marie Curie goes on to say if the system does not change then hundreds of thousands will not get the support they need.
Wes Streeting, the Health Secretary for England, voted against the bill, the Culture Secretary, Lisa Nandy, voted for the bill, both agree that the palliative care system needs to improve.
Assisted suicide will allow the state to provide the medical profession the means to kill patients. Not only is this wrong in itself but it takes us down a dangerous spiral that inevitably harms the most vulnerable members of our society. Most elderly, disabled and mental health advocacy groups are campaigning against the bills. One test of good law is that it ensures our weakest citizens can feel safe, assisted dying does the opposite.
The bills seem to be saying when vulnerable people express concerns about being a burden, that the appropriate response is to suggest that they have a duty to die. Would a more compassionate society not be better to commit itself to meeting needs, providing the care and compassion that vulnerable people need to help them live.
Liz Carr is disabled, an actor from Silent Witness, argues in her video Better Off Dead that disabled people feel threatened. A hard watch, the video is very informative, talking to both sides of the discussion, but worth a watch.
Her campaigning group has a slogan – Help us to live, not to die – which sums up perfectly disabled peoples’ feelings about their status in society and the potential impact of the bill.
MSP Pam Duncan-Glancy, the first permanent wheelchair user in the Scottish Parliament, said, ‘if this Bill passes, there is a real risk that, for people like me, it will be easier to access help to die than to live…..Rather than legislate for assisted dying, legislate for assisted living.’
Ms Duncan-Glancy also challenged the claim by supporters of the Bill that it is designed for terminally ill patients and excludes people with disabilities. She pointed out that under most definitions, including under the Equality Act, someone with an advanced and progressive condition from which they are unable to recover and that can reasonably be expected to cause their premature death is considered disabled.
Even supporters of the bill feel that vulnerable people could feel pressured to end their life early under assisted dying laws, in a YouGov survey, conducted for The Salvation Army, 56 per cent thought it was likely people would have assisted deaths because they feel a burden to others.
Commissioner Paul Main, territorial leader of The Salvation Army in the UK and Ireland, said: ‘Everyone agrees that people should have relief and dignity in their final days.
‘But this survey shows that the public are concerned that the legislation will not provide that.
MP Jess Asato said: ‘Public support for assisted dying has always been conditional on protecting the most vulnerable from abuse within any new regime’.
On the afternoon of 23 April, MP Jess Asato tweeted that in Parliament, MPs heard from voices that were not invited to give oral evidence to the Assisted Dying Bill’s Committee.
She said ‘Today’s testimony was powerful and much-needed. It’s so incredibly important that MPs are able to hear about the many vulnerable and marginalised groups who will be placed at a greater risk of harm by the Assisted Dying Bill’.
Among others, Robert Clark spoke of his experience of the assisted dying system in Victoria, Australia, saying that people there receive a gold-standard service if they want to die but a bronze-standard service if they want pain relief and palliative care. Prof Dr Syed Qamar Abbas, a palliative care expert, raised the issue of the lack of trust those from ethnic minority backgrounds have in palliative care already, and how this will likely be exacerbated by this Bill. Prof Sleeman emphasised that palliative care works – and that the campaign behind this Bill has presented a warped view of death and dying, pain is not inevitable, while most bad deaths reflect a failure of care.
MP Jess Asato had to organise this information event herself as the committee were very selective about who they listened to.
Alicia Edmund of the Evangelical Alliance, Madeline Grant in the Telegraph, Lauren Smith on Spiked, and Nikki da Costa on ConservativeHome all said much the same thing.
Scrutiny of the bill has been ineffective for two reasons. Firstly, the committee membership was skewed 18 to 5 in support of the bill, including ministers from both the justice and health ministries. Secondly, the bill sponsor along with the 17 other supportive MPs have dismissed the many concerns raised by palliative care, legal or health specialists as obstacles to individuals exercising personal autonomy.
Parliament voted 330 to 275 for the bill to go forward to committee, that is 55% to 45%. However, the committee has a skewed membership in favour.
The Royal College of Psychiatrists (RCP) only got to give evidence because of the public outcry when a vote went against inviting them.
This loaded committee was never a search after truth; it’s function was to validate the bill.
There will be a slippery slope. A major problem with euthanasia is that however the bill is set up those countries with long standing laws have witnessed significant expansion, there is constant pressure to expand legislation. There is nothing that parliamentarians can say or do to stop expansion.
In the Netherlands, eligibility has expanded from the terminally ill to the chronically ill and from physical illness to mental illness which can include autism.
In a chilling, official impact assessment, the UK government has put a figure on the value of death through savings that would follow from assisted dying being in place, £10 million in costs in its first year in England and Wales, annual savings would rise to just under £60million by the time of its tenth year in operation.
There would be savings on ‘unutilised healthcare’, as the dead patient would not require further treatment, as well as pensions and benefits no longer being paid out.
There would be follow on savings of not needing to pay care home charges with less local authority care workers.
Could the government work out a figure for the value of life?
Brian Nugent, Party Secretary, Sovereignty