Top Doctors Hit Back at Calls to Legalize Assisted Suicide in Britain
from Life News:
The former president of the Royal College of Surgeons, a clinical ethicist and an associate professor in intellectual disability and palliative care have all written into the Times in response to calls in the paper to legalise assisted suicide.
Palliative care expert Irene Tuffrey-Wijne took issue with an article in the newspaper’s magazine by neurosurgeon Henry Marsh, whereas Dr Lucy Pollock, FRCP Chairwoman, clinical ethics committee, Taunton and Somerset Hospital, and Lord Ribeiro Former president, Royal College of Surgeons, responded to columnist Alice Thompson.
It does put vulnerable people at risk
Dr Tuffrey-Wijne disagreed with Dr Marsh’s assertion that there is no evidence that vulnerable people are put at risk in places where assisted suicide is legal.
“With my Dutch and British colleagues, I have studied the way the legal safeguards are applied by doctors in Holland when the person requesting assisted dying has intellectual disabilities or an autism spectrum disorder,” she writes. “The evidence is very worrying.”
One of the nine cases they reviewed involved “a woman with intellectual disabilities who could not cope with her symptoms of tinnitus but was unable to see alternatives because of ‘her primitive thinking abilities’. She was helped to die on request. This was just one of the cases that raised concerns about the way in which the requirement of a ‘voluntary and well-considered request’ is interpreted.”
Dr Tuffrey-Wijne added that the Dutch evidence shows how difficult suffering is to assess, “and how this does in fact put vulnerable people at risk”.
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