When I was still teaching I rashly predicted that Voluntary Euthanasia would be legal by the time I retired. Lord Joffe’s Assisted Dying Bill of 2006 was pending. It contained the key phrase ‘Voluntary Euthanasia’ but it failed. Minette Marin in the Sunday Times said deletions of such key phrases partly explained the fatal objections to the Bill.
The nearest to euthanasia in the Bible appears to have a similar fatal end: The wounded King Saul asks his armour-bearer to kill him (1 Samuel 31). The armour-bearer refuses, afraid to kill the king. Saul falls on his sword and dies… or does he? Saul begs an Amalakite to finish him off. He does so (2 Samuel 1).
David commands the Amalakite to be executed.
Ahithophel also requests death (Judges 9) and several suicides are mentioned. Generally, we are warned not to ‘play god’ because God alone dispenses life and death. However, today we plan our lives, including scientific medicine to maintain ourselves so why not similarly plan our deaths?
Our 1961 Suicide Act removed ‘attempted suicide’ as an offence and since suicide and euthanasia are deemed so similar, the one justifies the other [J. Fletcher] especially as the sodium pentobarbital, which clients drink in solution at Dignitas, is now available in tablet form [Dr Philip Nitschke, Exit, Australia]. However, anyone ‘encouraging or assisting a suicide’ could be imprisoned for fourteen years.
In 2002 Diane Pretty’s request for release from her motor neurone disease was refused, while a Miss B was taken off life-support. In 2006 Dr Anne Turner with supranuclear palsy succeeded in dying with Dignitas in Zurich because she could afford it.
Switzerland is not the only country that has legalised euthanasia but it is the only one that will allow access to non-citizens for this purpose. In 2007 Daniel James, 23, broke his neck playing rugby. He said, ‘I have nothing left to live for.’ Knowing he would be denied euthanasia in Britain, Daniel also travelled to die with Dignitas, but his parents were afraid that they would be prosecuted for assisting him. Baroness Mary Warnock gave the Jameses her support: ‘We must try yet again to change the law, not by excluding from criminality those who assist death by taking the suicide abroad, but by liberalising the laws of our own country.’ In 2008, Debbie Purdy, with multiple sclerosis, found the courts would not confirm whether her husband would be prosecuted if he helped her to die.
In 2009, Director of Public Prosecutions, Keir Starmer QC, said that ‘financial benefit’, ‘persuasion or pressure’ or ‘if the patient were deemed incompetent’ would prejudice the defence of anyone assisting a suicide. In 2010, he updated his guidance by reintroducing that key word ‘Voluntary’ in the patient’s decision.
Voluntary Euthanasia is now in the collective psyche but the media still says it means bumping off grandma, the disabled, gays, Jews – name your ‘slippery slope’ spectre of Nazi eugenics – yet if you have an incurable condition a doctor may legally give doses of pain-killing morphine that also shuts down organs and kills you very s-l-o-w-l-y. This is the palliative care used in hospices that offer an alternative to euthanasia, if you do not wish to die in your own time. You may write an Advance Directive to add to your Will, if you wish to die should you have certain conditions: the medics will ease your passing.
The BMA is against Euthanasia and the GMC struck off Dr Michael Irwin who has long campaigned for Dignity in Dying. Then in 2010 Dr Ann McPherson, dying of pancreatic cancer, set up Healthcare Professionals for Assisted Dying. She quickly gained 340 significant names simply by word of mouth. With surveys polling 80% of us wanting to change the law in favour of Voluntary Euthanasia, the nettle is being grasped. The basic needs are: 1. Making choices for our death as we do for our life. 2. Choosing help to die if I am unable to help myself:
Voluntary but Active Euthanasia. 3. Protecting our selves, families and trained personnel against prosecution.
So where there’s life there’s still hope of a change in the law.