‘Don’t remove our end-of-life protections’ disability campaigners warn MPs
from The Christian Institute:
Legalising assisted suicide would pose a serious threat to disabled people, campaigners have warned MPs.
Representatives of disability groups opposed to any change to the law in England and Wales voiced their objections in evidence to the Health and Social Care Committee inquiry into assisted suicide and euthanasia.
The anonymised transcript of May’s roundtable discussion involving four disability campaigners was recently published on the committee’s website.
Cost cutting
Participant A, once in favour of assisted suicide, said they had not been persuaded that disabled people could be “protected from any kind of coercion” to get help to kill themselves.
The campaigner also conveyed a growing sense of unease about the value society seemed to place on “disabled people’s lives”.
“We’re sending out a message which says, ‘Here’s an option, you can cost the state £5,000 a week for health and social care support needs, or you cost them £1,500 as a one-off and that will solve everybody’s problem’”.
The participant also argued: “If you have palliative care that works really, really well, then people are less likely to want to ask for assisted suicide.”
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