Right-to-die bill returns to the Lords
Doctors will be able to refuse to help someone with a terminal illness end their life under new proposals put to the Lords today.
The plans are included in an amended version of the assisted dying for the terminally ill bill, a private member’s bill first introduced last year by Lord Joel Joffe.
Then, it ran out of time, but not before concerns were raised about whether it could lead to incapacitated patients being helped to die against their wishes. A debate on the issue by peers last month never even reached a vote, such was the opposition.
Today’s revised bill now removes any mention of voluntary euthanasia, in which a doctor physically helps a patient to die by administering an injection themselves.
Instead, it only allows for doctors to prescribe terminally-ill patients medication that they could take to kill themselves when or if the time came.
In addition, the bill also states that “no person shall be under any duty to raise the option of assisted dying with a patient” – effectively a get-out clause for doctors uncomfortable with the idea.
“I feel very strongly about assisted dying. It seems to me to be a human right to make a decision in relation not only to how you run your life, but how and when you die,” Lord Joffe told the BBC.
“Some terminally-ill patients suffer terrible deaths and the bill is all about preventing unnecessary suffering.”
The new legislation would require two doctors to agree that the patient was terminally ill and had less than six months to live. The patient would also have to sign two separate declarations that they wished to die, one of which would be witnessed by a solicitor.
However, Christian Medical Fellowship (CMC), which represents 5,000 UK doctors, described the bill as a “further move to legalise physician-assisted suicide”.
“A lot of pressure has been exerted to convince peers and the public that physician-assisted suicide (PAS) is not ‘euthanasia proper’. But the key issue is intention,” said CMC general secretary Peter Saunders.
“There is no moral difference between PAS and euthanasia. In both cases what the doctor means to do is to bring about the death of the patient. He or she is the moral agent without whom the death could not happen. PAS is simply euthanasia ‘one step back'”.
However, Labour MP Joan Ruddock, chairwoman for the all-party compassion in dying group of MPs, said the new draft of the bill brought “transparency and important safeguards”.
