by Anthony McCarthy, spiked
Why is the BMA advising doctors on how best to starve and dehydrate their patients?
The anthropologist Mary Douglas once noted of taboos: ‘Without the taboos, which turn basic classifications into automatic psychological reflexes, no thinking could be effective, because if every system of classification was up for revision at every moment, there would be no stability of thought.’
The taboo on suicide in our culture is powerful enough that promoters of the recently defeated Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill claimed that it was not concerned with ‘suicide’. The rich dishonesty of that stance was revealed when they sought to amend the Suicide Act of 1961 so that ‘assisting a person to seek to end their own life in accordance with the act’ would not fall foul of the prohibition on assisting suicide. The bill fell apart under scrutiny as the House of Lords, the House of Commons and, before that, medical royal colleges and disability groups – among others – showed it to be bad and dangerous legislation.
Yet, less than a month before the defeat of the bill, the British Medical Association (BMA) issued guidance clearly promoting the idea that doctors should assist in the suicide (here, suicide by omission) of patients under their care, whatever parliament may decide on ‘assisted dying’. As with the bill, the BMA’s guidance doesn’t use the word ‘suicide’ except to claim that what it proposes is not ‘assisting in suicide’ according to the law.