Two prominent figures have recently expressed their view on the issue of assisted suicide and its legalisation.
Lord Phillips of Worth Matravers, Britain’s most senior judge and president of the new Supreme Court, said on Thursday last week that he supported patients with incurable diseases seeking to die. He said the issue of assisted suicide is a ‘very difficult area’ for the law to deal with and acknowledged that the ‘strongly held beliefs’ of different groups would inevitably cause clashes.
Expressing what he described as a personal view, he told The Daily Telegraph:
‘I have enormous sympathy with anyone who finds themselves facing a quite hideous termination of their life as a result of one of these horrible diseases, in deciding they would prefer to end their life more swiftly and avoid that [prolonged] death as well as avoiding the pain and distress that might cause their relatives’.
‘I don't believe it's possible to say one view is right and the other wrong,' he said, adding that he doubted a change in the law to allow assisted suicide would do anything to bring a ‘more satisfactory answer’.
In July 2009, Lord Phillips, then the senior law lord, ruled that the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) must clarify the law on assisted suicide after Debbie Purdy, who has multiple sclerosis, went to the courts seeking assurances that her husband will not be prosecuted if he helps her go to commit suicide.
(See the CCFON report)
However, Justice Secretary Jack Straw has clearly expressed his opposition to any attempt to weaken the current law on assisted suicide. Speaking to The Daily Telegraph at the beginning of this month he said he is against changing the law. He said:
‘I’m not in favour of changing the law. That would give a green light to assisted suicide, and my worry has always been the potential for abuse. I’ve had some experience of loved ones in the terminal stages of illness. I don’t think you should give relatives that discretion. I just think it’s wrong to consider assisting someone in suicide. It’s not something I’m willing to contemplate.’
‘I’ll wait to see what [the DPP] says. I think I’ve made my position clear,’ he added.
Mr Straw commented on the forthcoming DPP guidance and said the DPP 'has to apply himself to the law’.
‘I’m sure he has no intention of using prosecutorial discretion to overturn its purpose,’ he said.
At the same time, another senior figure expressed her opposition to the relaxation of the current law on assisted suicide. Barbara Wilding, the Chief Constable of South Wales Police, said that changing the law could lead to abuse as the elderly population continues to grow and that the police would have to be ‘very careful’ to make sure the law ‘does not become a way of getting rid of a burden’.
(See the CCFON report)
Professor John Wyatt, professor of Neonatal Paediatrics and Consultant Neonatal Paediatrician at University College London, and a member of Lord Rawlinson’s Parliamentary Commission on Fetal Sentience, explains the practical dangers of the legalisation of assisted suicide in his book, Matters of Life and Death. He writes:
‘There is, first, the possibility of wrong diagnosis. Sadly, serious mistakes in diagnosis are not uncommon, even in specialist centres. The last decade has seen a number of public scares as major errors in diagnostic pathology laboratories have come to light. Most experienced clinicians can give individual examples of serious diagnostic errors. What if euthanasia is carried out in the mistaken belief that the patient was terminally ill, when in fact the disease was self-limiting?
‘Then there is the problem of predicting the future. Even when doctors make the right diagnosis, they are frequently wrong as they attempt to predict how long a patient will survive. Most medical prognostication in terminal illness is more akin to educated guesswork than to scientific calculation. Yet proposed euthanasia legalisation assumes that the doctor can confidently predict that the patient is terminally ill and that death will occur within a period of weeks or months.
‘There is the possibility of abuse by doctors and other healthcare staff, who may be tempted to end the lives of patients for less than altruistic reasons, such as financial reward or to conceal evidence of medical negligence. We [know about] the low cost of euthanasia relative to care for the terminally and chronically ill; these financial pressures could lead to the possibility of abuse by health managers.
‘There is also the possibility of serious abuse by relatives who see euthanasia as an opportunity to relieve themselves of a burden of caring, and to prevent the dissipation of life saving on expensive nursing care. This is not to imply that most relatives harbour malevolent thoughts towards the terminally ill. But their own emotional distress can be a major source of pressure for health carers: ‘I can’t bear to watch her in this state. Why can’t you give her something to end it all?’ Similarly, elderly patients, seeing the financial burdens on their relatives, may feel that it is their ‘duty’ to request euthanasia. If euthanasia legislation is on the statute book, how long will it be before the ‘right to die’ becomes a ‘duty to die’?
‘There is the very real possibility that euthanasia legislation would increase anxieties for elderly and disabled people admitted to hospital, and erode trust in the actions and motivations of health trust. The patient-carer relationship would be unavoidably altered. Instead of a climate of trust, intimacy and protection, vulnerable people in our healthcare system would experience suspicion, distancing and an exacerbation of their sense of defencelessness.
‘There would also be the psychological effect on doctors who have broken deep human intuitions and cultural taboos against the intentional taking of human life. Would doctors and other staff be brutalized by the experience? Would the doctor who has just committed euthanasia fight as hard as she might have done to save the life of her next patient? What are the psychological consequences for carers, when the overriding duty of care is transformed into a duty to kill?
‘Finally, there would be the effect on society of legalized killing, and the existence of a specialized group of people who are authorized to kill under certain circumstances. Would this cheapen respect for life in society as a whole?’
The DPP policy on assisted suicide, ordered by the Law Lords, is expected to come to light in the near future.
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