Volume 1
Assisted Dying for the Terminally Ill Bill (HL) / Select Committee on the Assisted Dying for the Terminally Ill Bill.
- Great Britain. Parliament. House of Lords. Select Committee on the Assisted Dying for the Terminally Ill Bill
- Date:
- 2005
Licence: Open Government Licence
Credit: Assisted Dying for the Terminally Ill Bill (HL) / Select Committee on the Assisted Dying for the Terminally Ill Bill. Source: Wellcome Collection.
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![ABSTRACT The Assisted Dying for the Terminally II] Bill seeks to legalise, for people who are terminally ill, who are mentally competent and who are suffering unbearably, medical assistance with suicide or, in cases where the person concerned would be physically incapable of taking the final action to end his or her life, voluntary euthanasia. We have examined both the principles underlying the Bill and its practical implications if it were to become law. We have also looked at the experience of other countries which have enacted legislation of this nature, and we have in addition made some analysis of public opinion in Britain on the subject. The Bill is founded on the principle of personal autonomy. Its supporters believe that terminally ill people should have the right, subject to prescribed safeguards, to have medical assistance to die in the same way that patients, whether or not terminally ill, already have the right to refuse life-prolonging treatment. The Bill’s opponents take the view that the two situations are not comparable, that it would be impossible to ensure that any safeguards were not abused and that the law should not be changed to permit intentional killing, whatever the motive. On a practical level, we have heard conflicting views as to the likely effects of the Bill in giving benefit to some people or risking harm to others. It has been put to us, for example, that breaching the law on intentional killing would lead to a “slippery slope”, whereby the terms of any law which were to be enacted would come to be applied more widely through incremental extensions of its provisions or elasticity in their interpretation and that experience of the 1967 Abortion Act and of voluntary euthanasia in The Netherlands provides evidence of this. On the other hand, it has been argued to us that the Bill contains an array of safeguards designed to prevent the emergence of a “slippery slope”, that any relaxation would require further legislation, that the Bill is not comparable with the Abortion Act and that the evidence from Holland in fact provides reassurance. We have also been told that the Bill would improve rather than (as its opponents have argued) damage doctor-patient relationships by allowing a more open and frank discussion of end-of-life concerns and that surveys have shown that the Dutch trust their doctors more than do people in many other European countries. On the other hand, we have been told that openness between doctors and patients, including discussion of end-of-life issues, has increased greatly in recent years and that the situation in The Netherlands is untypical in that most Dutch people remain with the same doctor for many years and know—and are known by—their doctors well. From the point of view of the medical profession, while some doctors are comfortable with what the Bill proposes and while the Royal Colleges of Physicians and General Practitioners adopted a neutral stance on the principle underlying the Bill, the General Medical Council wrote to us that “a change in the law to allow physician-assisted dying would have profound implications for the role and responsibilities of doctors and their relationships with patients”. It was also suggested to us, on the one hand, that with an appropriate “conscience clause” medical practitioners should have no more difficulty in implementing the Bill than have doctors in other countries which have enacted legislation of this nature and, on the other, that the composition of the medical and nursing professions in this country, with many doctors and nurses originating from non- European cultures, might pose serious problems for its implementation. And we](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b32221915_0001_0007.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
