Sarah Ditum The Times
…….The version of the bill that MPs are about to look at has changed in a few notable ways from the one they voted on last year, but it is not necessarily improved. Then, Leadbeater boasted that her bill contained the “strictest safeguards in the world”. One of the checks its proponents were most proud of was the requirement that every application for an assisted death should be signed off by a High Court judge.
That stipulation has now gone. Instead, patients will get final approval from newly established assisted dying review panels, consisting of a current or former senior judge or barrister, a psychiatrist and a social worker. This sounds like beefed-up scrutiny, but since these panels have no obligation to ask questions and no power to compel witnesses, critics fear they will do little more than rubber-stamp doctors’ conclusions.
Many of the enhanced safeguards put forward during the committee stage were in fact rejected by the bill’s supporters: the bill still allows for doctors to raise assisted dying with 16 and 17-year-olds, even though the process isn’t available to under-18s.
There’s also no specific protection for those with terminal conditions caused by untreated eating disorders. …….
… not only was there scope for improvement all along, but such improvements as have been attempted are so confused, they only serve to highlight how messy and compromised the entire project is.
Inevitably so: assisted suicide is an attempt to sanitise something that cannot be sanitised, no matter how much some would prefer for the state to take the whole unpleasant business out of their hands. The question hospice patients ask — how do I know how to die? — suggests there might be a right way to go about death that they have yet to learn. It is this uncertainty and fear that Leadbeater’s bill offers to tame. And it is a false promise. My friend the chaplain reassures patients that there is no “right” way to encounter death — their body will know what to do. There is more humanity in that than in the illusory control offered by assisted dying.
Read The Times (£) here