Today (Friday 20 June) from 9am, hundreds will gather outside Parliament asking MPs to reject Kim Leadbeater’s bill to legalise assisted suicide.
The Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill seeks to legalise assisting suicide for people who are expected to live six months or less.
Christian Concern is one of many groups firmly opposed to the bill and expects over 200 supporters to join their rally outside Parliament. They will highlight that introducing assisted suicide radically changes patients’ relationships with doctors and the NHS by treating poison as a form of healthcare.
In the past week, Christian Concern has launched a new initiative, No Way Back, which raises awareness of the true impact of assisted suicide on disabled and terminally ill people. Its dramatic two-minute video shows the pressure that would be felt by terminally ill people to end their lives, should assisted suicide be introduced.
‘Suicide is not the answer’
Nikki and Merv Kenward, who are part of the campaign group, Distant Voices, will also be present at the rally and available for interviews.
Nikki Kenward contracted the Guillain-Barré Syndrome virus shortly after she and her husband Merv married. It is a condition where the body’s immune system attacks part of the nervous system. The virus left her in a condition where she was only able to blink one eye.
She found herself locked into her own body and admits that at times her life seemed unbearable.
Her lengthy hospital stay, and her unlikely recovery, taught both Nikki and Merv a great deal about life, death and the questions surrounding end-of-life decisions. It made them realise how easy it would have been for a medical system that had been given permission or grieving family members to opt for assisted suicide rather than life.
Nikki said: “If you’d asked me then, I would have said I’d rather not live. Just one of my eyes would open and I think if my family had been asked by the hospital they’d have opted to end my life. I hadn’t seen my son for months and the thought of him being without me broke my heart more than what was happening to me.”
Now, having seen her son grow up and married, she is grateful that there was not the choice for her or her family to make. She said she is living proof that people should carry on living.
“I believe that suicide is not the answer, the answer is to be cared for with absolutely brilliant, palliative care”, she says.
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’.”
Some patients are given 6 months to live and then go on to live 3 years.