Assisted dying in the UK

Concerns

Trust issues, Individual / State

Patient / Doctor

NFR / DNACPR failures

Urgent funding and reform of palliative care,

need for people to have a real choice.

Could people choose assisted suicide because of fee they will not get the palliative services they need.

Mission creep

Cost of setting up this ‘service’

Will doctors opt out or opt in?

Will juniors be expected to assist seniors administering the ‘service’?

Will there be any career progression implications?

Will the ‘service’ be part of the NHS, carried out in our local hospitals?

Will doctors be forced to refer to the ‘service’

Coercive and controlling behaviour

Vulnerable, Poor, unintelligent, demented, those without advocates

How will ‘capacity’ be assessed, which criteria will be used?

Who will assess ‘capacity’

Who will assess psychiatric profile, (any serious illness can cause depression, which is fully reversable)

Who will assess 6 months left to live?

Pressure from relatives

Not wanting to be a burden

Could a ‘right’ to die morph into a ‘duty’ to die.

I am spending my children’s and grandchildren’s inheritance

Any mistakes cannot be undone

Extension to children, mentally ill.

People judged by their worth / usefulness / popularity / wealth / not being cost / not being a burden

Volunteering for death seen as a duty

Freeing up a bed for a young person

Judges interpretation of the law (National and international)

Norm referencing allows for a new norm.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/11/29/result-assisted-dying-bill-vote-commons-silence-mps-ballot/

Tim Farron

“Our society has chosen a dystopian and contagious path if it chooses to facilitate the death of those who have a terminal illness rather than standing with them, weeping with them, valuing them and loving them against the desolation that any of us would feel if we were given a diagnosis of that sort.”

Robert Jenrick

“This Act, if passed, will be subject to activist judges in Strasbourg. They will change it fundamentally and we have to be prepared for that.”

The Commons has voted for assisted dying

– we are not the same country we were yesterday (Tim Stanley)

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/11/29/assisted-dying-not-same-country/

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/11/29/assisted-dying-not-same-country/

bringing us up to date with Oregon and, I would argue, the Third Reich.

(death could be healthcare, and necessary and kind)

We are not the same country we were; we do not rest on the same moral foundation.

we long stuck to the principle that the state does not take innocent life.

No longer.

State sponsored euthanasia debated in 5 hours

The argument for assisted dying was largely anecdotal,

MPs recounted personal experiences of illness and death, and appeals they had heard from their constituents on assisted dying.

‘unable to take the pain anymore, laid down on a railway line’

Relatives will push the elderly to die early; money will be made; the wedge will thicken;

(terminally ill adults with less than six months to live, two doctors and a judge)

and the British health service being so poor, this will come to be seen as a patriotic or desperate alternative to substandard care.

If you see someone standing on a bridge, thinking about jumping, you don’t just give them a sympathetic smile, do you?

It is the postwar consensus, as social democratic as it is Judeo-
Christian, that is crumbling – giving way to something consumerist and atomising.