by Charles Moore, Telegraph
This Friday the Lords must reject a Bill that gives the state the right to decide when patients should live or die
It is an important principle of a good law that it is what it says it is. The Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill, which returns from the Commons to the Lords on Friday, falls at this first hurdle.
The phrase “end of life” is a creepy euphemism, which evades human agency. This legislation allows people who want to kill themselves, but physically cannot do it alone, to get someone else to help them do so. The most accurate description would be “assisted suicide”.
Indeed, the Bill is not really confined to the terminally ill, although most of its supporters intend that it should be. This is because a legal definition of terminal illness is elusive. For the purposes of the Bill, a terminal illness is one identified in a patient by a qualified professional and judged by him or her, and one other, to bring about death within six months.
But doctors are not clairvoyant: usually they cannot know when someone will die. Even if their diagnosis is right (and quite often, it is not), their prognosis could easily be wrong. Indeed, the advances of modern drugs are such that patients told they have, say, a year to live, often find themselves living for many more. Such improvements make the “six months” medical judgment which, under the Bill, would trigger an assisted suicide permission, essentially arbitrary. The doctor usually cannot know he is right; and his legislation offers no means of punishing him if he was wrong.