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August 3, 2024 - 8:00am
As things stand, “assisted dying” is illegal in England and Wales under section two of the Suicide Act 1961 — but will this change under Keir Starmer’s government? Lord Falconer’s Assisted Dying for Terminally Ill Adults Bill had its first reading in the House of Lords last week and has just been published.
The bill is similar to the one he proposed a decade ago, which made it to a second reading in the Lords in 2015. In the same year, a bill in the Commons proposed by then MP Rob Marris, was defeated by vote. More recently in 2021, Baroness Meacher’s bill received second reading in Lords but failed to progress before the end of the parliamentary session.
However, supporters of Falconer’s new bill are optimistic this time round, in part because the Prime Minister has promised time for it to be debated, and there is progress with similar legislation in the Isle of Man, the Channel Islands and in Scotland, where a deadline for expert evidence ends later this month. But many critics of euthanasia legislation assert that “assisted dying” is merely a euphemism for “assisted suicide”, and if such legislation were to pass, they fear it would be prone to abuse by those who want to exploit vulnerable relatives or friends for material gain.
Of course, this is by no means a straightforward debate. Polling indicates that two thirds of Brits are in favour of legalising assisted dying and in the last two decades, 540 Brits have travelled to Dignitas in Switzerland to end their life. Disability rights campaigner and Silent Witness actress Liz Carr, however, has been a vocal opponent of “assisted dying” for more than a decade. Her documentary Better off Dead? was compelling viewing, exposing the inherent risks of legislation for the disabled.
On moves to change the law, Carr told the BBC, that in countries where assisted dying has been legalised, complications have arisen. She said: “What we are seeing in countries like Canada[…] the Netherlands and Belgium, is that these safeguards that begin, they whittle away, and when we say it’s going to be for a small group of people it extends, either the definition extends, or the number using the law extends.”
She’s not wrong. In Canada, where medical assistance in dying, or Maid, became law in 2016, there has been controversy surrounding people in poverty with chronic health conditions who failed to get social housing and opted for assisted dying instead. The law changed in 2016 to permit those whose death was “reasonably foreseeable” to have an assisted death, and then in 2021, it additionally captured those “suffering unbearably” with a medical condition. The deeply contentious proposed extension of the law to those whose sole reason for Maid is their mental illness, has been delayed twice. Carr is right, this is indeed a slippery and dangerous slope to be on.
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SubscribeThe legalisation of assisted dying would give to a High Court judge in the Family Division such power over life and death as no judge in this country had enjoyed since the abolition of capital punishment. My paternal grandfather was born before such working-class men could vote in parliamentary elections, and my maternal ancestors included African slaves, Indian indentured labourers, and Chinese coolies. We who come off the lower orders and the lesser breeds, and perhaps especially those of us who are disabled, know perfectly well who would be euthanised, and how, and why.
Even if we had made it past the industrial scale abortion that disproportionately targeted us, then we would face euthanasia as yet another lethal weapon in the deadly armoury of our mortal enemies, alongside their wars, alongside their self-indulgent refusal to enforce the drug laws, alongside Police brutality and other street violence, alongside the numerous life-shortening consequences of economic inequality, and alongside the restoration of the death penalty, which is more likely than it has been in two generations now that the Prime Minister is a former Director of Public Prosecutions who had managed to become a war criminal even while he was only the Leader of the Opposition.
All this, and the needle, too? This is class and race war, and we must fight to the death. That death must not be ours, but the death of the global capitalist system. Having subjected itself to that system to a unique extent, Britain is uniquely placed to overthrow it, and to replace it with an order founded on the absolute sanctity of each individual human life from the point of fertilisation to the point of natural death. That foundation would and could be secured only by absolute fidelity to the only global institution that was irrevocably committed to that principle, including the full range of its economic, social, cultural and political implications.
That foundation would and could be secured only by absolute fidelity to the only global institution that was irrevocably committed to that principle, including the full range of its economic, social, cultural and political implications.
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Then that global institution will define that principle 😉
This is what has always worried me. You don’t need unscrupulous relations. An elderly person needing a lot of care, fearing being a burden on his/her family and seeing how releasing funds could help younger family members struggling with mortgages etc could easily feel a moral pressure to opt for assisting dying. Old people will end up feeling guilty for still being alive when it is in their power not to be. The argument should be about ensuring terminally ill patients have the best palliative care so their death is as pain free as possible.
If that was true old people would just top themselves. Nothing easier than drowning in the bath or leaping off a bridge. But they don’t. So.
I imagine that those things are actually quite hard. Shooting oneself is comparatively easier, but of course the UK has very restrictive gun laws.
I am never going to “feel guilty about staying alive” but I may get to a sad point where I choose to end my diminishing life in order to help out the rest of my family. I am disappointed that so few people recognise my right to choose this perfectly logical action.
You have that choice now. It’s no longer a criminal offence to top yourself. Why should a doctor or medical practitioner be obliged to help you?
That’s a different point in reality. No doctor or medical practitioner will be obliged to help me, but those that would wish to help me end my suffering will be allowed to do so under the right circumstances.
There in lies one of the problems. They will start out stating that DRs or MPs will not be “required” to help, and shortly it will be “expected” then “obligated”, just as the events will start out “rare”, move to “common” then essentially “obligatory”.
There are other jobs available if doctors don’t like the one they’ve got.
…those that would wish to help me…
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You’ll be surprised at how many people are willing to help.
I regularly institute palliative care.
A British MAID is not required.
It will be abused and extended, as in every other country it’s been introduced into.
At first, they’ll say that of course, they’ll provide more high quality palliative care so that actually killing old, disabled and mentally struggling people will definitely be ‘safe, legal and rare’.
Then – the above will be coerced with implications they’re being selfish, impractical and blind to their own best interests.
The medical Royal Colleges are already polling their members to see if they would support/perform these ‘procedures ‘ – the Royal College of Anaesthetists electronically polled us last month.
The ducks are being lined-up by all the movers and shakers in the executive and key establishment stakeholders.
It really is only a matter of time.
Such enabling legislation will never be reversed, of course.
Baal doesn’t work like that.
Far better to just let those people linger on suffering, eh? That’s the Christian way!
This is the way of people who know where the way leads.
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Your way is The Blind Leading the Blind. You simply don’t want to admit that.
I know which way I want to go, but I don’t seek to impose my views on others.
As has been pointed out by others, if a person has to fill in a form with predetermined criteria to obtain assisted dying, this is institutional control, not freedom of choice.
The state wants bureaucratic oversight over what is a most personal act of private life, suicide.
Once legalised, assisted dying can become to be thought of as the moral thing to do in a variety of circumstances. It becomes the expectation.
In 2019 a Dutch woman, aged 17, was allowed to end her life by assisted dying as a remedy for the continual distress of having been raped at the age of 14. Does this allow evil to win two victories?
It’ll be a free vote and not a whipped vote for Lab MPs. Starmer previously been clear he supports a free vote.
Some water to flow under the bridge yet on exact formulation of the legislation. The details will v likely make alot of difference to how any free vote plays out.
Works in Netherlands and Switzerland and can’t believe if they can do we can’t do it even better picking up lessons learnt from those.
The lesson learned is quite clear: “Don’t legalise it”
Certainly a v legit debate here on pros/cons. Interestingly though we have other Unherd articles getting us into the potential for crackdown on other freedoms, and yet on this subject many seek to prevent the freedom to choose. It is an interesting paradox. That said recognise the ‘right to die’ is complex.
Spot on – it’s odd how so few people value a person’s freedom to choose. Equally missing is the failure to respect the possibility that someone may rationally choose this.
I wonder where are all the “my body – my choice” placards are being stored ?
Yes, presumably targeting the far right. Sorry, but even living on a small island off the uk this week as been harrowing viewing. More seriously slippery slope in Canada terrifying.l portent. People are increasingly economic units, and it’s not just a bankrupt state leading the rationing charge. I frequently hear economically constrained millennials expressing the wish their parents would die so they can trade up or buy a home. You are being harvested from cradle to grave. What did Nietzche warn?
If I recall it correctly, Nietzsche said something about staring at an ibis….
The issue os assisted dying has the interest of many because they can see so much suffering where modern medicine has no answers. This is because modern medicine’s primary focus is stopping people from dying (doing everything possible, in which is is quite effective) and controlling symptoms but not so good as making people healthy. We need to start asking from the medical profession that it starts putting the healing of people (animal and farms) as its primary aim. Healing in the sense of helping our natural systems to try and keep and effective as possible health balance. This is different from ‘curing illness’. When we focus on an illness it is a predefined diagnosis: the patient is put in a box and the main attention is to their illness. Making the patient overall better is getting more attention but the real understanding of this (healing, ugh this is a fluffy word, i am afraid to use it…) has not really gained full recognition by the modern medical profession.
The traditional and complementary sector tends to aim at making the patient overall better, in a healing sort of way, so that they then need no further treatment when their health is improved. This was recognised by the G20 in the Gujarat declaration. All the regions, apart from Europe, are making progress on this… it will only change if we (the patients in Europe and other regions) vote with our feet: start refusing medication: https://beyondpillsappg.org/
Thank you Right to Life : “Legislation in Canada as enacted in 2016 had a requirement that the death of the person requesting assisted suicide or euthanasia be “reasonably foreseeable”. In March 2021, however, the Canadian Government amended the MAiD law to remove the requirement that death be “reasonably foreseeable” after a successful legal challenge (to allow for assisted suicide in cases of non-terminal illness) in the Superior Court of Québec in 2019.”
I would have thought that everyone’s death is “reasonably foreseeable”, in that none of us are going to live forever.
Path dependence ensures that the cultural direction of travel will generally be towards more liberalization in any field, so you have to think very carefully about whether you want to set the ball rolling in the first place.
The Canadian system has been vastly exaggerated in the antagonistic media. MAID works very well. Very few of the publicized cases of people misusing it actually went through – people apply but don’t necessarily get ur. Meanwhile people are committing suicide every day with fentanyl.
Being able to choose tumour death calmly legally and without traumatising friends and family is only civilised. I will choose my death if it becomes necessary. I don’t want to live with dementia or severe immobility.
Should abortion be scrapped just in case some women may be pressurised by family to have one ?