The case against assisted suicide

Those in favour of the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill insist they’ve addressed critics’ principal concerns and that ‘stringent safeguards’ are in place. But it is impossible to see how this could be the case. If suicide is institutionalised as a form of medical treatment it is inevitable that vulnerable people will feel under pressure to opt for it, and inevitable that the bill will in time be amended and extended.

Under the terms of the existing bill, a terminally ill person given less than six months to live will legally be able to take their own life if sanctioned by two independent doctors and a High Court judge. Doctors are not under any duty to raise assisted suicide – or ‘assisted dying’ as its advocates prefer to call it – with a patient, but the bill does allow for them to ‘discuss the matter with a person’ when it is in line with their professional judgment. The bill promises that those opting for assisted suicide would have to make two separate declarations, at different times, of a desire to die, and that the decision would have to be confirmed by a judge.

The involvement of the courts might sound reassuring, but we know from the scandal of the single justice procedure – under which thousands of people have been prosecuted for TV licence evasion without their knowledge – how easily a judicial decision becomes in practice a rubber-stamping procedure.

The experience of Canada and the Netherlands, which have (among others) already legalised assisted suicide, indicates how the practice would develop in Britain if this bill passes. In Canada, assisted suicide was introduced on the understanding that it should only be available to terminally ill people whose death was ‘reasonably foreseeable’.