Today (Friday 13 June) from 9am, campaigners against assisted suicide are holding a visual demonstration ahead of the second day of the Report Stage of Kim Leadbeater’s bill to legalise assisted suicide.
The campaigners are going to raise awareness of the extreme consequences of legalising assisted suicide, given the current make up of Leadbeater’s bill.
Flawed Committee Stage and removal of High Court Judge
MPs have increasingly expressed concern about how the committee stage was run and with the biased makeup of the committee.
Many sensible amendments proposing safeguards to the bill were rejected by the committee.
The bill was also changed at committee to remove the safeguard of a High Court Judge being required to sign off on each request for assisted suicide. This safeguard has been replaced with what have been dubbed ‘death panels’ of volunteers who will not have the powers of a judge to summon witnesses.
Impact assessment fuels concern about workability of Bill
The government’s impact assessment of the Bill showed that there is increasing uncertainty around how the Bill will work in practice and raised questions about the workability of the Bill given high levels of expected opt outs from NHS professionals.
The government’s equality impact assessment explicitly stated that people with mental health conditions are not excluded from accessing assisted suicide services – contrary to what some have claimed about the safeguards in the bill.
The equality impact assessment also made clear that pregnant mothers and those with disabilities will not be excluded from accessing assistance to end their own life.
Those who voluntarily stop eating and drinking to worsen their condition are not excluded from accessing assisted suicide, neither are those suffering from depression or who feel they are a burden.
If this bill becomes law, all eligible patients will automatically be entitled to assistance to end their lives while not all of those patients will have access to good palliative care.
Doctors will be allowed to raise assisted suicide with a patient multiple times without any request from the patient. There are serious risks of pressure, coercion and abuse.
There are mounting concerns about this Bill in both parliament and across society. Disabled people in particular are very concerned about pressure to end their lives.
Andrea Williams, chief executive of Christian Concern said:
“Assisted suicide claims to be compassionate but, in fact, it turns vulnerable people into problems that can be ‘fixed’ with a lethal substance.
“The message sent by a society that legalises assisted suicide is that some lives are not worth living. People start to believe that the elderly or the sick are ‘better off dead’.
“Helping people to end their lives is neither compassionate nor caring.
“Parliament and the courts have rightly refused to change the law multiple times in the last few decades. This new parliament needs to decide once again that human life deserves protection and care. We cannot be a society that believes some people are ‘better off dead’.”
For more information go to: www.christianconcern.com
