Other bloggers have commented on Lord Falconer’s amendment coming up this evening, which would allow for better safeguards for those people, now numbered in hundreds, who travel to Switzerland to end their lives, accompanied by a relative or friend who is currently exposed to prosecution. At the moment there are no safeguards either for the patient or their relative. It’s not an ideal provision; I don’t like the hypocritical way we export our problems to a jurisdiction where assisted dying is legal, the same sort of hypocrisy as in Ireland that leads to Irish women travelling to England to seek abortion here. But right now people are travelling to be enabled to help to die and we should at least provide safeguards for them and their relatives to do so.
My support for enabling legal assisted dying for the terminally ill is well known. I have already written a fair bit on the topic. My challenge to Lord Taylor would be to provide one iota of research evidence that his fear is correct that people would be co-erced into it. I know of NONE in countries where a law with proper safeguards already exists. But once you put “God’s principles” into the argument, you’ve lost me. They may be your principles Lord Taylor but they ain’t mine. Mine are about valuing people for what they are themselves and respecting their judgement about how long they wish to go on. Only in this area of medicine do we remove mentally competent individuals’ right to make their own decisions.
It’s hard to know who to reply to as this issue seems an unusual proposal that excites both the public, parliament & the Lords of the Blog. As to your comments on religion & legislation you are preaching to the converted! 😉
I see this as a step down a slippery slope that leads somewhere that is ill thought through. What’s next? Government assistance for those who want to commit suicide, then pressure on those to remove themselves as non-productive citizens?
Please don’t support this so called ‘safeguard’.
Alfred, You haven’t given any evidence of your hypothesis that there is a slippery slope. None has been found in countries such as Oregon state, Belgium, Switzerland where legislation has been extant for years. Why would there be a ‘next’ step? See my challenge to Lord Taylor again.
I have no evidence apart from comments from people like David Morris, a Spinal Muscular Dystrophy sufferer, and Chairman of the Independent Living Alternatives. He sees people in Oregon and the Netherlands etc as under reduced protection and feeling pressured and burdened by the increasing move towards ending your own life. As he said on The Daily Politics Show “This is creating a culture where lives of disabled people like me, begin to loose their value… One thing that we need to be very certain about is that the suicide factories in Zurich are not in anyway dignified. The Swiss are looking at changing the law … The suicide act at the moment works. This is a backdoor way of getting this onto the statute books without a proper public debate.
I appreciate that my thoughts on this, without supporting evidence, are of no importance.
Baroness Murphy,
I think the broader question is whether a person who would choose death can be said to be in full control of their faculties.
How many people seek to extend their lives versus end it? Don’t the very numbers itself indicate that there is some kind of depression/other mental issue at play here for those that do “choose” to kill themselves?
Evolutionarily, the reason we grieve when someone dies (and that’s universal) is because it’s something to be regretted and something we try to avoid. There are no creatures out there that have evolved to try to kill themselves! (certainly not an evolutionary advantage).IMHO, You can live with dignity there’s no such thing as dying with dignity.
And if it’s the responsibility of the state to pay for the upkeep of its citizens health (NHS), then the state has much deeper interest in ensuring they do not take their own life
Krishna, we do lots of things that evolution did not intend, like extending our lives.
But I do not think that it is moral to extend the life of someone who is suffering, especially someone who has already extracted all the vitality out of life that they can, and wishes to die on their own terms.
Dear Lady Murphy,
I have just commented on Lord Taylor’s post but wanted to ‘rant’ a little furher!
I declare an interest as someone who believes in God, has a deep faith in Him and is soon to seek admission into the Roman Catholic Church.
Nevertheless, I fully support attempts to give individuals the freedom to do with their lives as they wish, even if that includes seeking help to end it. If people choose to end their lives, that is their business, between them and their God.
I’m afraid the ‘God’s principles’ brigade talk a lot of tosh most of it contradictory. As I posted earlier how many people whose lives are being prolonged by human and medical intervention would still be alive if they were left in God’s hands?
Howridiculous.
I think you ask for the impossible. What you are asking for is evidence that could distinguish between undue and legitimate influence in a person’s coming to make some decision. But, absent some special insight into the workings of some person’s mind, there is just nothing that counts as evidence of this type.
To see this consider a parallel case that is less fraught with emotional baggage. A man finds himself in a society in which it is possible to sell himself into servitude. He has few skills and is a burden on his parents both emotionally and financially. While they think the practice of selling oneself is abhorrent they acknowledge the windfall they and he would receive and the burden that would be lifted from the family. The boy then reluctantly agrees to sign the contract and sell himself into servitude.
Now, provide me with evidence that the choice that was made was free or coerced.
But this cannot be done; no evidence of this kind is available because no standards are in place for what distinguishes a true choice from coercion.
In this society certain options are made available and the availability of these options (like divorce and abortion) make it the case that certain choices become ‘live’ in a way that they were not before the option.
So all we need to say is this. Allowing patients to choose their own deaths puts another ‘live’ option on the table. But in the absence of a working distinction between free choice and coercion there is no evidence on either side of the debate for saying, with any authority, whether this option will be one that individuals are coerced or pressured into or whether they will be avail themselves of it freely.
But we do know one thing; given the asymmetrical relationship between the sick and their caregivers it is likely to be the case the patients will defer to the wishes of those who care for them and further there will be, in some cases, a built in bias for the caregiver to see the now ‘live’ option as attractive because it will alleviate the burden placed on them.
Is this evidence for coercion? Well its not definitive, but then we have already seen that nothing could be and so in the absence of that it looks to be about as strong a piece of evidence as could be marshaled for this claim.
The issue with assisted suicide is that it enters the “moral” zone. An area while informed by science,is not wholly of it.
Now, one can be a libertarian- and say in social contracts (and hopefully economic ones too), the state should have no say as long as no one is harmed. This works for non-traditional relationships, etc. and is something most people in liberal democracies believe. However, when you come to assisted suicide, you ARE talking about one person harming someone else. Whether they want to be harmed or not is beside the point. The argument breaks down
However, you can’t have 2 laws- either you allow it throughout or ban it throughout. This winking at a practice you ban within the UK is inconsistent and dangerous law
B, a simple way around the problem you percieve is to require that only those who have made living wills be allowed to end their lives, or allow others to help them to do so.
No one is arguing that the terminally ill should be killed simply because family members do not wish to look after them, and the situation right now is that most people who do become very ill are looked after by their relatives anyway.
I can think of a number of ways the problems of determinig if a person has been forced to do something can be discovered, if we really cannot see how any of these methods can be transfered over to assisted suicide then living wills are the way to go about it.
A high quality debate, I thought. It was good to see so many members in the house. As Lord Mackay said “Lord Falconer, proposes a procedure that in my view is unworkable.“
As for evidence, the knowledgeable Lord Walton said “As a consequence of the law legalising euthanasia in the Netherlands, where we visited and saw that more than 1,000 people a year were being put to death by euthanasia when they were not capable of giving or withholding consent—the consent was given by others—there has been a decline in palliative care.”
Is that not a slippery slope?
Readers may know by now that Lord Falconer’s amendment was lost last night by 40 votes or so, hearteningly close. Perhaps Alfred I should clarify what I mean by ‘evidence’ of a slippery slope. If there was one we would have seen an increasing number of requests for assisted suicides in other jurisdictions where it is legal but in fact there has been none since it was introduced. I am deeply suspicious of anecdotes from Oregon and the Netherlands since they are so contrary to anecdotes told to me. We need measurable outcomes not opinions. Krishna, I tend to agree that the majority of people who seek death are in need of psychiatric help but this is not true of those with a terminal illness where life will end within a finite time. It is quite usual then for people to accept that death is inevitable and to seek to be clear about how it will happen and to have some control. Good palliative care gives an element of this of course. But not all people seeking to die are mentally unwell.
Howridiculous, a very refreshing comment. Troika21: Your solution, that everyone should have a living will is attractive but the real difficulty is that only a very small minority of people ever make one.
The kind of thing you ask for is still ambiguous. “Increasing numbers of requests” is consistent with both coercion and with a greater number of people freely choosing to end their lives as a result of having that option come available.
But, since you seem to be relatively insensitive to distinctions of this type in your discussion and are only interested in a steeply rising set of statistics as evidence of the thing you deny has occurred: here is what you have asked for.
http://www.internationaltaskforce.org/orstats.htm
A clear set of tables that show the demand for assisted suicide has risen 3-fold since the law was introduced in Oregon. Since you count this sort of thing as evidence for a slippery slope, I would expect that data of this kind would cause you to give up support for assisted suicide. I won’t hold my breath.
That said, I do wish that someone in your position would take a much more rigorous approach to what counts as evidence. After all, mere increase in request has so little to do with coercion that using one to track the other borders on the laughable. No one would ever suggest that, for instance, because more and more people each year are having breast augmentation surgery every year this is evidence for a slippery slope toward coercion. Indeed the best of evidence for coercion would be exactly the kind of antecodotal evidence you reject: namely interviews with women who describe the strong pressure they felt to keep a significant other interested or the subtle social pressure they felt to always look sexy and the way that these influences went on to shape their attitudes and decisions.
My faith in government is diminished when I see such cavalier attitudes toward evidence and reason on the lips of those who hold the most power.
Isnt’ this discussion trying to answer 2 questions
(1) Should it be legal to take your own life? [subject to strict controls, etc., etc.]
(2)Should it be legal to assist someone to do (1)?
Shouldn’t we try to answer (1) first. If the answer to (1) is that it shouldn’t be legal then (2) definitely can’t be.
If the answer to (1) is that it should be legal, then should it be legal to assist someone in performing a legal activity?
Baroness Murphy,
I have a great deal of sympathy and respect for your point of view. My concern, possibly reflected in the decision, is the scenario of the paraplegic in their twenties who feels that ‘life is no longer worth living’. You no doubt no far more than me about examples or lack of them. Or spurious arguments based on ‘spin’ which give case studies without telling the whole truth.
Of course, one cannot force such people to live, or wave a wand and give them a reason for living. But for younger people to be able to ‘demand’ that physicians help them to die seems to me to open a “Pandora’s Box”.
No doubt you will be frustrated as I’m sure I don’t have as full a grasp of all arguments pro and con. But don’t we already have a palliative care system which allows medication to be given even though the pain relief will shorten life somewhat ??
I agree that ultimately humans should be able to have choice over their ‘end-of-life’ – but it seems to me that they also need protection from pressure from relatives or even, heaven forfend, a medical establishment which in future will be far more ‘market and profit-driven’ than now.
I’m sorry if this has annoyed you, because I can see that you are not suggesting that non-terminally ill people are ‘bumped off’ on demand, or anything even close. But in ethical matters, once the rubicon has been crossed, it is sometimes difficult to go back.
That is not a reason never to cross it if the arguments are very much in favour of exploring that line or even crossing it.
But we do need careful thought about this as we could have much to regret. That said, it is easy for me to say that in middle-age with two parents who are alive. One suspects that views on this can change as one moves along the conveyor belt of life…
Baroness: “My challenge to Lord Taylor would be to provide one iota of research evidence that his fear is correct that people would be co-erced into it.”
My challenge to you is to provide one iota of research evidence that indirect discrimination against minorities is not at work amongst the public and that people are not coerced into it.
And what of the Hippocratic oath?
The debate seems centred on the physician or the vet. The former could be a monotheist whilst the latter could be an agnostic. Where between the two should we search for dignity?
Ref: Hippocratic Oath: Modern Interpretations
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippocratic_Oath
The Hippocratic oath eh, well lucky we don’t allow abortions then or we’d be breaking it there as well!
Just off abroad. i will respond to these latter points in full later, just bear with me…..
…for how much longer?
I find the current system sickening. The liberal snobs who have never had to make a hard choice in their lives and the wealthy look down their noses and tell the poor of this country to die with “dignity”(over a period of years) while at the same time these same people should they be faced with the same situation would choose otherwise but have the option of trotting off abroad to an easy death. The system is unfair. A modern Britain must show its humanity and not be bogged down by a moral code that predates modern medicines ability to keep you alive until your screaming for death.