from Right to Life
The BMA Consultants Conference has voted through a strongly worded motion that states that Kim Leadbeater’s assisted suicide Bill raises “serious potential moral hazards for consultants and serious potential adverse impacts on health services” and that assisted suicide is “not a health activity”.
Introduced by the Southern regional consultants committee, the motion (46) demanded an “opt-in model is adopted for providers, and no consultant shall be expected to be involved in any part of the assisted [suicide] process, including having no obligation to either suggest assisted [suicide] to patients, nor refer patients for it”.
“The state will be asking medical practitioners to cross a huge red line in medical ethics”
Speaking in favour of the motion, Palliative Medicine consultant Dr Dominic Whitehouse underlined the significant changes the Bill would present if it became law. He said “If [the Leadbeater Bill] becomes law, it will herald the biggest change to our practice as consultants we’ll ever see”.
“The state will be asking medical practitioners to cross a huge red line in medical ethics, no longer being expected to do no harm or to never administer a poison to our patients. We will instead be the ones to provide lethal medication for our patients to kill themselves”.
Whitehouse was highly critical of the Committee, led by Kim Leadbeater, scrutinising the Bill because it “keeps moving the goalposts, refusing to hear verbal testimony from those with a legitimate interest, giving insufficient time to read the written evidence, ignoring the opinions of experts and making huge changes to the Bill as they go along”.
Whitehouse made reference to a 2020 BMA survey that revealed that 54% of doctors would not be willing to participate actively in the process of administering life-ending drugs. Only 26% said they would be willing, and 20% were undecided.
He added “We also know that those most against it are those who largely look after dying patients: GPs, geriatricians, palliative care specialists, oncologists and hospital[…]physicians”.
Read also: Let us never be ‘at peace’ with assisted suicide: Committee Day 10, from The Christian Institute