Mp’s are expected to open an inquiry into assisted dying legislation in the early new year. The health and social care committee will look into the role of medical staff in assisting patients who wish to die.
According to The Times:
It will also consider how to prevent coercion and the criteria for eligibility for access to assisted dying services.
Steve Brine, the committee’s chairman, said MPs would approach the issue “with compassion and an open mind”, before making recommendations to the government: “Some form of assisted dying or assisted suicide is legal in at least 27 jurisdictions worldwide.
“It became legal in Canada in 2015; the Netherlands in 2001; Oregon in the US in 1994.
So it is time to review the actual impact of changes in the law in other countries in order to inform the debate in our own. Our inquiry will examine that evidence, hearing from all sides of the debate.”
Andrew Copson, chief executive of Humanists UK, said: “We support assisted dying because the evidence is clear: it is possible to allow it.”
Mavis Eccleston was acquitted of murder and manslaughter after the death of her husband Dennis in 2017. Their daughter, Joy Munns, said: “When my dad was dying in agony from bowel cancer, he desperately wanted to die on his own terms with his family around him.
But he was denied that option, forced to resort to begging my mum for help to end his suffering, with no idea that she would end up being locked in a police cell in her nightie and put in the dock for murder 18 months later.
I urge members of the committee to ask themselves how they can possibly conclude the law is working well when this is the impact it has.”
A Times reader using the handle Sojourner posted the following comment on the newspaper’s website:
“And that is one of the main issues with allowing ‘assisted suicide’ to be lawful, the fact that the criteria for qualifying for it would get ‘easier’ each year.
Once the main moral benchmark is breached (whether to make assisted suicide lawful in the first place), there is no logic to sticking to an arbitrary moral level temporarily agreed upon, as that level will itself be challenged by others who think that it too is restrictive and limiting.
As you point out, mental as well as physical illness has been drawn into the scope of assisted dying.
Very dangerous ground which will lead to actions never thought likely at the outset.”
Chilling.
