Britain’s largest organisations of Christian doctors and lawyers have expressed similar concern. Charlotte Vincent of the Lawyers’ Christian Fellowship, said, "A change in the law would give doctors power that could be too easily abused, and a responsibility that they should not be entitled to have."
The Christian Medical Fellowship (CMF) criticised the Lord’s committee of lacking "the wisdom and courage unequivocally to reject euthanasia in the face of a strong and emotive campaign from factions seeking a change in the law."
The Bishop of St Albans, the Rt Rev Christopher Herbert, who was a member of the committee, welcomed the report, according to a press release from the Church of England. However, he was in fact opposed to euthanasia and assisted suicide and believed that the Bill should be rejected.
Instead of providing the choice of euthanaisa, Bishop Herbert pointed out that palliative care in the UK to enable people to die with dignity and be surrounded by compassion should be improved. The current Bill could distract us from this task, he said.
"There are so many dangers in euthanasia and it could lead to terrifying slippery slopes. The solution to dying with dignity lies not with euthanasia but with palliative care," he added.
Yesterday, the London Telegraph revealed the result of a recent study published in The Lancet. The study examined the deaths of every baby who died within a year of birth in Flanders, the Dutch-speaking region of Belgium, between August 1999 and July 2000. Paediatricians who responded to the survey admitted they had taken "end of life" decisions in more than half the cases.
In 1995, Holland legalised euthanasia. And in 2002, Belgium passed a similar law which allows adults who are suffering "constant and unbearable physical or psychological pain", and who are sufficiently conscious to make the request to die. However, in neither country is it legal to put infants to death. The current phenomenon in Flanders therefore is very worrying, showing that the legalisation of euthanasia for adult is extending to the illegal application towards infants.
Britain has been called by many to consider deeper all the ramifications of the Mental Capacity Bill that could possibly intensify the abuse of the law for Euthanasia. Ozimic from SPUC concluded in his statement, "Just as the Westminster Parliament was the first Western legislature to legalise abortion on a mass scale, and the first legislature to legalise human cloning, it has added to its shameful record by being the first legislature to pass a comprehensive statute enshrining euthanasia by omission on a grand scale."
