The next government must resist the misguided demands of the assisted suicide lobby
by Georgia L Gilholy, Conservative Home:
To the surprise of zero people familiar with his tenure at the Crown Prosecution Service, Sir Keir Starmer recently admitted his support for assisted dying. The not-so-shocking revelation was made in the Labour leader’s phone call with broadcaster and campaigner Dame Esther Rantzen – who has expressed her own wish for an assisted death following stage IV cancer diagnosis.
Now, Rishi Sunak has also told journalists he is “not opposed” to assisted dying in principle. It seems, whatever crop of MPs wind up on the Commons benches on 5 July, our physicians’ duty to offer the “utmost respect for human life” could soon be turned on its head.
Much of the assisted suicide lobby, including figures like Rantzen undergoing their own health struggles, are genuinely motivated by the noble cause of reducing harm. However, jurisdictions where the procedure has been legalised offer a stark warning that this is rarely the result.
There are two main forms of assisted dying, with those that end the lives of people deemed to be experiencing “pain and suffering” commonly termed euthanasia. ‘Assisted dying’ generally describes the ending of a patient’s life by a medical professional. ‘Assisted suicide’, though technically a form of assisted dying, involves a medical professional handing a patient the chemical toolkit to end their own life.
The narrative of mercy could dominate campaigns to legalise both these procedures, but all too often airbrush their grim reality.
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