Top medical professionals joined with leading U.S. disability rights advocate Joni Eareckson Tada at a special seminar by Christian social concern charity CARE Tuesday to reject the proposed Assisted Dying Bill.
‘Life Valued – Euthanasia in Perspective’, chaired and hosted by Lord Michael Chan, was held as part of CARE’s campaign against Lord Joffe’s Assisted Dying for Terminally Ill Bill and comes just over a week since the House of Lords debated the report of the Select Committee on the Bill.The event also featured contributions from Baroness Ilora Finlay of Llandaff, a member of the House of Lords Select Committee on the Assisted Dying for the Terminally Ill Bill and Professor of Palliative Care at Cardiff University, and Vicky Robinson, Nurse Consultant at St. Christopher’s Hospice in Sydenham.
Speakers at the event unanimously rejected the Assisted Dying Bill and the concept of the ‘right to die’, instead stressing the need for the Government to provide better palliative care for terminally ill patients preceding their death.
Baroness Finlay criticised the “readiness” of doctors and nurses to start talking about euthanasia when the patient reaches the point of despair, and warned against euthanasia and death becoming a “very easy therapeutic option”.
She stressed the need to offer comfort and support for patients and highlighted the unpredictable emotions of patients, who often express the desire to commit suicide before changing their minds when their condition improves.
Speaking from her own experience in palliative care, Baroness Finlay said: “I have not had persisting statements about life not worth living but I have often had patients who said ‘I never believed life would be worth living again’.”
Baroness Finlay also warned that the clarity of the law as it stands would be jeopardised if the Bill is approved. “At the moment the law is a bright line. It is very clear. Doctors know where they stand, patients and nurses know where they stand. You do not intentionally kill your patients.”
She also highlighted the worrying statistics of The Netherlands, where 1 in 38 of all deaths in the country is from voluntary euthanasia, 6 times the country’s road accident figures. Baroness Finlay predicted the number of deaths resulting from voluntary euthanasia in England and Wales would be 15,000 a year.If we introduce euthanasia as part and parcel of our healthcare services then we diminish our caring societies, we erode the character of our societies and we only reinforce our alienation one from the other.
Joni Eareckson Tada, US Pro-Life Advocate
