Doctors Who Refuse Euthanasia Face Criminal Charges

Lord Falconer, the Lord Chancellor of England, has warned doctors in a recent statement that they may face prison sentences if they refuse to euthanise patients. Criminal charges of assault could be laid against doctors or nurses who refuse to allow patients to die, even by removal of food and hydration tube.

The Labour government unveiled its new guidelines for doctors to follow the Mental Capacity Act that is to come into effect next spring.

The guidelines instruct doctors that a patient's "advanced decision" - often referred to as a "living will" - that includes a request for cessation of medical treatment must be followed even if it means the patient will die.

The government's guidelines instruct doctors, "If you are satisfied that an advance decision exists which is valid and applicable, then not to abide by it could lead to a legal claim for damages or a criminal prosecution for assault."

British courts, in conjunction with jurisdictions around the world, have determined that it is sometimes in the patient's best interest to be dehydrated to death by removal of feeding and hydration tubes. In many parts of the world, including Canada, food and hydration is considered "medical treatment" and as such can be, and frequently is, withheld on the grounds that it constitutes "extraordinary treatment".

This was the thinking that allowed the court-ordered killing of Terri Schindler Schiavo in 2005.

Dr Peter Saunders, head of the Christian Medical Fellowship, says that the worry is not for those dying patients who are already so close to death that they could not benefit from food and hydration.

"But we are concerned that patients will make unwise and hasty advance refusals of food and fluids without being properly informed about the diagnosis. It is too easy for patients to be driven by fears of meddlesome treatment and 'being kept alive', into making advance refusals that later might be used against them."

Dr Jacqueline Laing of London Metropolitan University, who called the measures an obvious "cost-saving" effort on behalf of the National Health Service, said the Act "inverts good medical practice by criminalising medical staff who intervene to save the lives of their patients with simple cures and, in certain cases, even food and fluids."

While the new Act insists doctors kill patients who might otherwise live, the reverse determination was not upheld either by British or European courts. Leslie Burke, a British man who suffers from a degenerative disease that will one day render him unable to communicate, went to court to obtain a guarantee that he would not be dehydrated to death on the orders of doctors.

Mr. Burke argued that British guidelines left too much latitude to individual doctors to decide when a patient's life was no longer worth living. He lost his case in Britain and the European Court of Human Rights who said that adequate protections for patients already exist in British law.

The Church of England has stood by a recent submission by the Bishop of Southwark, the Rt Rev Tom Butler, to the Nuffield Council on Bioethics consultation on the treatment of extremely disabled or premature newborns and foetuses.

Bishop Butler came under intense media fire for his submission to the Nuffield inquiry on 'The ethics of prolonging life in foetuses and the newborn', with some newspapers reporting that he defended baby euthanasia.

In his submission, Bishop Butler said that in some cases it may be justified to withdraw treatment from newborns.

"The foetus and neonate are unique individuals under God. We cannot therefore accept as a justification for killing them the argument that their lives are not worth living.

"This is not incompatible with accepting that it may in some circumstances be right to choose to withhold or withdraw treatment, knowing that it will possibly, probably or even certainly result in death," said Bishop Butler, who is also the vice chair of public affairs of the Mission and Public Affairs Council.