By Rollin Grams, Bible and Mission.
Introduction
This chapter samples positions for and against physician assisted suicide. It includes statements in the United Kingdom and the United States of America (California) and makes special note of Christian groups opposed to suicide and assisted suicide. By noting the proposed regulations for assisted suicide, we can see what an immense project this becomes once one allows the possibility of institutional support for suicide.
Privatised and National Health Systems
We should consider the differences between countries without government funding of health care and countries with such funding and oversight:
US-style privatised medicine has a perverse incentive to keep the patient alive with increasingly extreme and expensive (but ultimately futile) interventions…. UK-style socialised medicine has an equal and opposite perverse incentive to reduce the number of patients, especially in times of crisis.[1]
Cajetan Skowronski adds that giving oversight of suicide to the National Health System (NHS) in the UK is a frightening possibility. An impersonal, institutional system that takes away decisions from doctors involved with patients is the problem.
Consider two proposals for assisted suicide, one from the United Kingdom and another from California. The 2025 UK bill before the House of Lords, the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill, having passed the House of Commons, is 56 pages of regulations.[2]
The Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill:· eligibility for voluntary assisted dying,
· a commissioner for this, procedures,
· safeguards, and protections to put in place,
· information in medical records,
· the provision of assistance to end life (such as authorising another doctor),
· protections for health professionals and others,
· offences (dishonesty, coercion, pressure; falsification or destruction of documentation),
· regulatory regime for approved substances,
· investigation of deaths,
· codes and guidance,
· provision of and about voluntary assisted dying services,
· advertising, and notifications and information.
The previously proposed bill in 2015 was not passed.[3] One shudders to imagine the regulation, oversight, and implementation of a department of dying and of what burden this would place on medical providers. Diagnoses of how long someone has to live are conjectures and sometimes prove to be very wrong. This bill for England and Wales to legalise assisted suicide has received over 1,000 amendments. It has reached the stage of being read in the House of Lords, but it is meeting opposition. Scotland’s bill, tabled in 2024, proposes assisted suicide for adults (over 16 years of age) with terminally ill diseases and who have six months to live.