Paul KeenanBritain will soon debate assisted suicide, writes Paul Keenan
Will Britain join the short list of nations offering assisted suicide to patients this September 11 when Parliament finally debates and votes on the private member’s Assisted Dying Bill?
The outcome is by no means certain at this point, given the political wrangles which have surrounded the proposed legislation since it was first tabled by Lord Falconer in June 2014. While it survived attempts this year to have its title amended to the less palatable Assisted Suicide Bill, the legislation faced so many proposed amendments during a House of Lords debate in January that supporters conceded that its passage ahead of the May election was impossible.
The delay played somewhat into the hands of opponents, who have used the time to galvanise their own base in lobbying against the introduction of a ‘killing culture’ to Britain. Naturally enough, this has included faith leaders of all stripes who have not only launched direct appeals for parliamentarians to respect the sanctity of life but to their communities to play an active part in highlighting the issue with their elected representatives.
The case for faith traditions and appeals to the sanctity of all life have not been helped, however, by the most recent intervention of a religious leader, that of Lord George Carey, former Archbishop of Canterbury, who put himself at odds with his fellow Church of England prelates by declaring in a Sunday newspaper that assisted suicide is both “moral” and “Christian”.
Ethical matters
“In difficult ethical matters I often find myself asking: ‘What would Jesus do?’,” Lord Carey wrote. “I think I know what he wouldn’t do. He wouldn’t say: ‘There, there. Pain is good for you. Take it like a man or a woman.’ No, I think he would expect us in these modern times, with all the skills that doctors have, to tend the very vulnerable at the end of life and help them cross into the place of peace that they are craving.”
By way of defending his countervailing perspective, Lord Carey revealed that his view changed when he ministered to a woman who had helped a close friend end her life. This case, and others, he said, led him to the conclusion, that on assisted suicide, “the train has already left the station. People are deciding the matter for themselves; they are taking action that is essentially illegal and spending thousands of pounds to end their lives abroad.”
As a faith community figure, however, Lord Carey is a minority voice. Much louder have been those continuing to warn against what the current Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, has summed up as the “mistaken and dangerous” drive to legislate for assisted suicide.
No less vocal has been the Conference of Catholic Bishops of England and Wales, which has in recent months issued a veritable call to political arms on the part of the faithful. On his recent visit to Lourdes as leader of a diocesan pilgrimage, Bishop Mark Davies of Shrewsbury used a homily to call on Catholics to actively lobby MPs on the forthcoming debate and to make their objections clearly known.
“We may only have a matter of weeks to make our voices heard before Parliament decides whether a culture of care or a culture of suicide and eventually of killing prevails,” the bishop declared.
Moral questions
Arming their flocks for the verbal battles on the issue, the bishops have now highlighted a report from the Anscombe Bioethics Centre, a Catholic institute with a focus on moral questions arising in the medical sphere and from biomedical research.
‘Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia: A Guide to the Evidence’ examined the realities of medical practice in those areas where assisted suicide is legal: Belgium, The Netherlands, Luxembourg, Switzerland and the US states of Oregon and Washington.
The findings are worrying. In all cases, the report found, there have been increases not only in the numbers dying by assisted suicide or euthanasia, but in the number of conditions for which ‘assisted dying’ is offered. Simultaneously, there has been a decrease in legal safeguards against abuse of the system. In Belgium, for example, depression is now a qualifier for euthanasia, while in The Netherlands, ‘assisted dying’ surged by 130% for dementia patients and 200% for mental disorders in a single year.
If Britain wants to examine a test case in assisted suicide beyond the Anscombe findings, it could easily (and wisely) look towards the US state of Oregon, which legislated on the matter in 1997. More specifically, anyone interested in one possible future for old and/or terminally ill people can look to the August 17 opinion piece penned for The Wall Street Journal by Oregon physician Dr William Toffler who offered some hard truths on his state’s current practices.
Dr Toffler, director of the US-based Physicians for Compassionate Care, takes Oregon to task for what he describes as a “detrimental” regime of assisted suicide.
Dr Toffler points out that, despite a requirement under Oregon law that a patient considering assisted suicide receive a psychological examination where a doctor suspects depression or mental illness, in 2014, just three patients received such an assessment of some 105 who died by assisted suicide. Dr Toffler concludes that his state’s move to assisted suicide “has been detrimental to patients, degraded the quality of medical care, and compromised the integrity of the medical profession”.
In his opinion piece, Dr Toffler also shines a light on another potentially grim scenario, and one tempting for any health service operating under the weight of budgetary constraints.
In addition to a growing sentiment among some physicians that assisted suicide is a ‘good’ answer to, say, depression, Dr Toffler alleges that poorer patients can be put under pressure to avail of the suicide route, thereby cutting the costs of health services in terms of more costly treatments. This, he writes, is already happening in Oregon.
It is worthwhile to note that Dr Toffler’s perspective is, like Lord Carey’s, ‘coloured’ by his own experience. His wife of 40 years, Marlene, fought a long and losing battle with cancer, and assisted suicide was legally an option when her final months were predicted. However, such a path was not taken by the Tofflers, and Marlene survived four times as long as the prediction – admittedly not without pain – but, as Dr Toffler attests, Marlene ultimately died peacefully surrounded by her family.
The story poses a final question for Britain’s legislators: If their country goes the way of Oregon and those other regions cited in the Anscombe report, will the Tofflers’ experience become the exception rather than the rule in the way people face death in Britain?
Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia: A Guide to the Evidence is available at: http://www.bioethics.org.uk/evidence