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November 28, 2024 - 7:00am
Ahead of MPs voting on the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill this Friday, the most recent More in Common polling for The Sunday Times shows that two-thirds (65%) of Brits support assisted dying. Further, YouGov polling suggests that 73% support assisted dying in principle. But other polling from earlier this year demonstrates that changing the language of the questions can yield different results.
The YouGov poll found that 73% supported the assisted dying bill. The bill requires that the patient have the “mental capacity to make the choice and be deemed to have expressed a clear, settled and informed wish, free from coercion or pressure”, among other conditions such as the approval of two doctors. While 73% is strong support, it is predicated on the assumption that the bill works as intended with no overreach or slippery slopes. MPs across the political spectrum, however, have raised concerns that the bill will not be able to completely safeguard against coercion.
Other recent surveys of public opinion have shown that support for assisted dying more generally is less convincing. August Polling for the think tank Living and Dying Well showed that nearly half of the public (46%) believe “assisted suicide” is too complicated for the implementation of safe and practical legislation in Britain.
The terminology used in this polling was “assisted suicide”, and the survey found that a lower percentage (60%) supported AD/AS when a doctor administered the life-ending drugs. A majority of those surveyed (56%) voiced fears that legalising AD/AS would lead to a culture where suicide becomes more normalised than it is at present. This figure climbed to 67% when those who answered “don’t know” were left out.
| Responses to assisted dying polling vary depending on terminology |
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The specific language used in polls and surveys clearly skews results, and some worry that the language used in the assisted dying debate has been misleading. In a new paper, the director of the Anscombe Bioethics Centre, Professor David Albert Jones, writes that there is “widespread confusion with surveys showing between 39% and 42% of people think that ‘assisted dying’ refers to withdrawal of life-sustaining treatment”. In addition, a new Focaldata poll for the anti-assisted dying lobby group Care Not Killing found that when those surveyed were presented with 10 arguments against AD/AS, support dropped to 11%.
Focaldata polling in October at King’s College London used the “assisted dying” terminology. It found that around two-thirds (63%) of people in England and Wales say they want the current parliament to make assisted dying legal for terminally ill adults. However, even if they are broadly supportive of its legalisation, three in five (61%) say they would be concerned about some people being pressured into an assisted death if the law were changed.
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SubscribeSo interesting the the views of the public are touted as important and used to sway politicians in this case; the public have been overwhelmingly in favour of limiting migration and the death penalty, but in neither case have politicians been swayed by the public’s wishes.
Suicide cheap. Palliative care expensive. We all know which one will win the vote. The result of this vote wil be as warped as the one on 5 July.
The debate on assisted dying seems be one of the most ill-informed since the Brexit debates. There isn’t even any consensus on the language e.g. suicide, dying, euthenasia, assisted. This seems to be down to the disingenuous and partisan nature of many participants in the articles.
I’m sure there are disingenuous and partisan people manipulating the language on all sides of this debate. Facile to suppose that this only applies on one side. Each side will use the language it thinks best supports its case. How could it be otherwise ?
You’ll need to give some actual examples beyond a sweeping generalisation to persuade me that the debate is particularly ill informed.
I suspect you are “not for persuading”.
I’m still listening. So let’s hear it then.
Not least of which, Gordon Brown – in The Guardian, of course.
Why on earth should anyone attach weight to what his view on the matter is? According to him, anyone with genuine concerns about uncontrolled immigration is “a bigot” (General Election campaign 2010, when he thought the radio mic was switched off).
The only views that matter are, in fact, the views of the terminally ill whose prospects are of dying a helpless, undignified and protractedly painful death – best palliative care notwithstanding.
Satarting from…. All of you who want long term frail care or palliative care go your own way and those of us who want assisted dying just write your living will now and have a law to protect us.
I think Britain is terminally ill…
Absolutely they are. The world is full of surveys containing questions that are impossible to answer accurately because no option that accurately reflects your opinion is offered.
There’s a big element of scientism in the obsession with polls
Don’t worry the devil chimes in too, on this one
I’ve been an aged, disability and palliative carer for 15 odd years down here in Australia, where the Voluntary Assisted Dying debate has largely been ‘won’, in terms of near-universal jurisdictional policy implementation goes. (Pretty much every state has a form of VAD now in play.)
The public conversation suffers profoundly by the way that VAD is invariably presented as a transactional solution for the benefit of those who want to use it (or might in future), with a commensurate ‘skating over’ of the wider and much more problematic questions about societal attitudes to on-going care provision for those who do NOT want to use it. It’s always a matter of ‘choice’, say advocates, blithely ignoring the profoundly ‘loaded’ message such a State-legitimised shift sends to the latter cohort. VAD adocates are being deeply dishonest when they ignore how much it cheapens the definitive obligations and practical resources ‘civilised’ societies collectively agree to provide for those who are suffering – physical pain, indignity, isolation, loss of Human worth – which in fact can be ameliorated, often to a life-changing degree, if only we who do NOT need care remain willing to embrace that obligation.
The more I listen to the VAD case the more I am convinced that at the heart of it is a deep – a craven and odious – agnegation of that obligation to our fellow Humans. As a carer, it belittles the daily efforts I and my colleagues make to render difficult life challenges less so: to make ‘indignity’ dignified, to make unbearable pain bearable, to ensure that ‘worthless’ lives that many instinctively recoil from as ‘not worth continuing’…bloody well worth continuing. Support for even the most difficult bodily and emotional realities, including into and through palliative care, can and often does – if properly resourced and if EVERYONE gets on board – make all the difference, in all but a rare few cases. Offering someone the VAD option, if society has not done everything possible to make a life bearable first, is just euthenasia. (Anyone who thinks that the way we have currently disposed our health and care sectors in this user-pays, self-absorbed age, allegedly represents ‘everything we can do’…is simply delusional.)
Euthenasia is easy. Caring for people is f**king hard. If those who advocate for the former would at least be honest about the choice they are truly arguing we collectively make, when they demand that The State and all of us who sail in her must legalise and legitimise the (easy) ‘choice’, that would at least inject some honesty into the conversation, which would in turn make those of who work to provide care feel less like we are wasting our time and emotional energy seeking to take the latter path.
Assisted dying, as a policy optional ‘choice’ a society decides to either make available as a formal State pathway, or not…is a profound existential question that turns NOT upon whether we The State ought to ‘help’ those who do want to die. But upon whether we The State is to continue to prioritise helping those Humans who do NOT want to die, even as all around them they are effectively being told (or having it implied) that their ‘undignified, painful, miserable’ life isn’t really worth our society even trying to make more bearable – and even rich, joyful and included as part of our tribe.
This bloody narcissistic age. Me me me me me, I want, I want, I want, I want. Therefore, The State must, The State must…The State simply must bespoke all our laws and recalibrate all our ancient tribal wisdoms to suit…me me me me me. It will be the f**king end of us all.
Like most carers I know (and there are varied views on it in the sector), no, I won’t ever go to the barricades over VAD. (Pro or anti, we are all too busy providing actual care to take to the streets and Parly Houses), I will keep working as best I can with whatever we democratically decide. I know our transactional, utiltarian, user-pays cost/benefit era has already made this profound shift a foregone conclusion. But don’t think for a second that VAD doesn’t devalue the entire vocation of health work, of giving care, of the tenets of the Hippocratic Oath. We’ve long surrrendered the progressive, John Donne-ish ideal – we Humans choose life, not death, and we are all of us connected by and in that bond – down here in Australia; surrendered to the mirthless technocrats and the busy-busy bean counters and the louder, more arrogant voices of the medical community’s materialists. Fine.
But don’t kid yourselves about the choice you make, Britain, is all I would urge.
Thank you for having the courage to speak out about this. I’m from Canada where we have also passed MAID laws. I live on government disability and have been medicalized since the age of 11. The healthcare system genuinely doesn’t care, and it makes me both sick to my stomach and utterly terrified that so many of my fellow Canadians seem perfectly fine with expanding MAID laws to include people like myself whose only ‘unbearable” condition is being inconvenient.
The deliberate manipulation of language to gain consent of the population for an “assisted dying” bill in no way suggests any such coercion will be employed in individual cases, or that indeed any questionair can be considered coercive.
I really hope that’s sarcasm.
Or the deliberate manipulation to avoid consent …