COMMENT: Daily Telegraph
Assisted dying will always be open to bullying and exploitation
The process cannot be made safe because the ill will be exposed to fears of being a burden or to pressure from unscrupulous relatives
LORD HUNT 3 October 2021 • 8:00pm
Confronted with the reality of the distressing death of my mother, I have had to think long and hard about assisted dying. I had been clear in my mind that I would oppose Baroness Meacher’s Assisted Dying Bill which returns to the Lords for a Second Reading this month, because I was concerned that the legislation could be abused by some relatives.
The argument for dying people to be given a choice of their own death was not far from my own mind, as I sat by the bedside of my mother, who was undoubtedly suffering, and wondered whether it was fair for our loved ones to continue to experience such poor quality of life.
Having just celebrated her 99th birthday in the previous week, my mother was struck down by a stroke during her daily walk. Formerly an active and energetic woman, my mother was sentenced by her treatment to a difficult end to her life, which lasted for some distressing and disturbing weeks, although I can only speak highly of the care she received in hospital and in her nursing home.
Although my mother had been clear before her stroke that she did not want extraordinary treatment to save her life in such circumstances, this was given, no doubt with the best of motives, in our local A&E department. Sadly, this led to 12 weeks of a long, painful and slow decline with her quality of life deteriorating day by day. The manner of her passing was a difficult time for her and our family. It prompted me to reflect deeply on my views of assisted dying and whether there was anything to recommend it, having previously opposed it on the grounds that it was likely to be abused by avaricious relatives.
Over those many hours I realised that while I could certainly sympathise with the compassionate instincts of those who support assisted dying, it remains my sincere belief that we owe those same loved ones a further protection from feeling pressured into ending their lives because of a fear that they might be a burden and from those who might seek to gain from the accelerated death of a relative.
We need only to look to the American state of Oregon, often cited by assisted dying campaigners as the perfect system, for consistent and concerning evidence of the heavy weight of familial pressures on decisions by patients to end their own lives. Last year, over half of all patients who had an assisted death in Oregon reported concerns over being a burden on their family, friends or caregivers among their reasons for seeking to end their lives. Since the introduction of the Death with Dignity Act in Oregon in 1998, these concerns have featured in around 47 per cent of all cases of assisted dying.
In the UK, financial abuse by family members has typically been the most common abuse reported to the helpline of Hourglass. The charity, which is dedicated to ending the harm, abuse and exploitation of older people, reports that a staggering one million people over the age of 65 are victims of abuse each year in the UK.
Copious evidence of elder abuse related to assisted dying in other jurisdictions leads to only one conclusion: any assisted dying law would be fundamentally unsafe for the elderly in our society. Particularly vulnerable to familial pressures, elderly members of our communities would be left exposed to the very real danger of their premature death to serve the financial self-interest of others.
In this country, palliative care doctors have stated that offering someone the option to die is akin to saying that we do not value their life or feel that it may not be worth living. Even worse, patients may feel that the motivation for offering this option is cost-driven. As the doctors point out, people will soon realise that assisted dying is cheaper than the myriad other treatment options we could offer them.
I deeply appreciate the importance of compassionate and comprehensive end-of-life care, which tends carefully to the changing needs of patients and their families. As a bereaved son and witness to a painful end-of-life process, I do understand the complexity of such cases and sometimes the sheer agony of seeing a loved one living a life where suffering outweighs quality.
I will be urging peers to reject a Bill that, however kindly meant, would expose vulnerable patients to either experiencing pressure from relatives to die before their time or to feeling that they are a burden and consequently requesting an assisted death.
Lord Hunt is a Labour Co-operative member of the House of Lords and is a former health minister and chief executive of the NHS Confederation
