by Kathleen Stock, Telegraph
If our aim as a society is to be compassionate to those in physical or mental pain, we can do better than this bill
Here we go again. Like Kim Leadbeater before her, Labour MP Lauren Edwards says she is introducing a Private Member’s Bill for an assisted dying service.
The plan, just as before, is to enable doctors to help terminally ill patients to die – that is, help them commit suicide, should they wish to – and Edwards has indicated her wording will not deviate from Leadbeater’s original. This means that, should the new bill pass in the Commons any rejection by the Lords can be overridden and the bill made law nonetheless.
I have recently written a book arguing against the organised deliverance of assisted suicide by NHS doctors, which is what Edwards and her backers are trying to get. As news of her bill was breaking, I was at the Lake District book festival, debating with a Dutch doctor Dr Rob Jonquière who himself has euthanised two people and who is now an influential international advocate for euthanasia legislation.
We had a respectful and friendly discussion; but still, what I heard from him and several others during the session only intensified my concerns.
For Jonquière, a Leadbeater-Edwards style bill doesn’t go far enough, since it confines provision only to people with a prognosis of six months to live or fewer, and not – as he would prefer it – to anyone “intolerably” suffering from a physical or mental disorder, whether terminally ill or not. This is the norm in the Netherlands and Belgium, where they sometimes euthanise physically healthy people with mental illnesses in their 20s and 30s.
My discussions with assisted dying supporters across the country suggest that some would agree with this approach, wishing an easy doctor-delivered death to be available wherever personal suffering is too intense to handle, and with no need for people to be dying first. They see an assisted death service for the terminally ill as the first step in opening up access to other suffering groups: severely disabled people, mentally ill people, people with dementia.