Dear Colleague,
Assisted Suicide
We are writing as former Ministers of Health to express our concern about the private member’s bill in the House of Lords which would legalise assisted suicide.
There are agonising moral complexities surrounding end of life care for a loved one, and there are unintended consequences andrisks we facewhen contemplating legalising assisted suicide.
These have been described in letters in the press, such as ‘Why I remain firmly against assisted dying’ (Daily Telegraph, 4th October 2021).
Well-intentioned proposals which offer a false promise of dignity and compassion for people undergoing great suffering have all too few safeguards for the vulnerable people they claim to support, particularly disabled people and the elderly or the majority for whom prognosis is a mere guess and mental capacity is altered by fear, by disease and by medication.
Such a law would be fundamentally unsafe.
Legalisation overseas has seen initially strict guidelines eroded over time, with the “right to die” slowly becoming a “duty to die”.
Introducing assisted suicide, as Baroness Meacher’s Assisted Dying Bill would do, would place intolerable pressure on NHS doctors and medical professionals, and indeed within the medical profession there are no major organisations in the UK which support changing the law. Indeed, the British Medical Association, the Royal College of General Practitioners, the Royal College of Physicians, the British Geriatric Society, and the Association for Palliative Medicine either are neutral or oppose such moves.
A change in the law would risk devaluing the lives of millions of disabled people, dementia sufferers and those with other degenerative illnesses. At a time where the nation has rightly made such sacrifices to protect people in at-risk groups from Covid-19, introducing a bill which calls into grave question the value of the lives of some of the very same vulnerable people would be both unnecessary and ill-judged.
We hope the House will realise the dangers and reject this misguided bill.
Yours,
Baroness Cumberlege Lord O’Shaughnessy Baroness Hooper Lord Hunt of Kings Heath
19th October 2021
