David Quinn
In case you hadn’t noticed, there are serious moves being made in the House of Commons to allow assisted suicide. Where Britain goes, we usually follow in due course. The bill to permit assisted suicide is not being sponsored by the new Labour Government, but by a member of the Labour party and there will be a free vote on the matter. The private member’s bill was published last week and claims it contains all sort of ‘safeguards’. I’ll say some more about those further on.
Labour now has an enormous majority in the House of Commons. It won two-thirds of the seats earlier this year based on one-third of the popular vote. Labour MPs are more likely to favour assisted suicide (its proponents insist on calling it ‘assisted dying’) than Conservative MPs, and this means it will take a big effort to defeat it, although a journalist friend of mine who follows British politics much more closely than I do, says there is a decent chance this might happen.
As mentioned, MPs are being allowed a free vote on the issue. Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, is quietly in favour, but interestingly his Health Secretary, Wes Streeting, has expressed strong reservations. Those reservations are based partly on what is taking place in Canada where the so-called ‘safeguards’ that accompanied the introduction of assisted suicide and euthanasia in that country in 2016 have proven to be almost meaningless. The grounds for allowing assisted suicide keep expanding, and even when there is a clear abuse of the law, nothing seems to happen. No-one is ever punished.
It has now been reported that in the province of Ontario alone, “euthanasia regulators” have identified over 400 “issues with compliance” with the country’s Medical Aid In Dying (MAID) law.
If the so-called ‘safeguards’ introduced with laws such as this are to mean anything, then there must be proper recording by doctors of what they are doing, but a lot of the time this is not happening. Therefore, how can doctors be trusted to follow the law properly when we don’t even know what they are doing? This assumes that they are always telling the truth when they do appear to be following the law.
We know how incredibly widely England’s abortion law has been abused. In England and Wales there are now more than 200,000 abortions annually. Any woman who has an abortion is meant to do so because of a danger to her mental or physical health or because the baby has a disability.
Dubious
The vast majority of abortions take place for very dubious ‘health’ reasons, and although two doctors must approve a termination on this ground, there is not the slightest difficulty in finding such doctors. Sometimes the forms are even pre-signed. Everyone knows that so-called ‘health’ related abortions are really being carried out on the healthy babies of perfectly healthy women and therefore England’s abortion law is being widely abused. But few care. There is a nod and a wink approach to the matter.
Therefore, if the apparent ‘safeguards’ introduced to ensure abortion are so badly flouted, why should there be the slightest guarantee that they are properly enforced if and when assisted suicide is introduced?
At first, there might be a determination to ensure the safeguards are being followed, just to reassure the public, but it is easy to imagine a more relaxed and careless approach to them as time goes on. This is without considering the fact that when laws of this kind are introduced and are restricted to the terminally ill at first, over time the grounds are widened to include those suffering from serious physical illness and then to the mentally ill.
Some of the witnesses who appeared before the Oireachtas committee on assisted suicide when it was meeting were quite clear that they eventually want the grounds for assisted suicide widened beyond the terminally ill.
Canada only introduced assisted suicide and euthanasia eight years ago and in 2022 alone, over 13,000 people died in this way, accounting for 4.1% of all deaths. The trajectory is only going upwards. Estimates are that around 15,000 Canadians died by lethal injection last year.
There is now plenty of evidence of health workers suggesting assisted suicide to very sick patients.
In 2022, the New Atlantis magazine provided examples of Canadians who suffer from chronic conditions or disabilities, and have trouble accessing adequate supports or housing, either being presented with the option of assisted suicide by heath workers, or else asking for it themselves.
The New Atlantis uncovered online discussions between assisted suicide providers in which they admit that chronically ill or disabled Canadians who are not receiving sufficient supports from the State are starting to turn to assisted suicide as a way out.
Reservations
This is why Wes Streeting, Britain’s Health Secretary, has serious reservations about the assisted suicide bill currently before parliament. He believes Britain could easily end up in a Canadian-type situation in which patients at the end of their tether, and being failed by the National Health Service there, could turn to assisted suicide in their desperation. It is not hard to imagine, and it is also not hard to imagine it happening here. Unfortunately, our Health Minister, Stephen Donnelly, seems to be in favour of assisted suicide.
The safeguards in the bill currently before the House of Commons resemble in some ways the so-called ‘safeguards’ in England’s abortion law. For example, two doctors must sign off on a patient’s request to die by lethal injection. But why should this not be abused as has been the case with the abortion law, and what is to stop patients ‘shopping’ around until they find two doctors who will accede to their wish?
What is truly outrageous is that the bill would allow a doctor to suggest assisted suicide to a patient. It is hard to imagine anything that strikes more at the heart of the doctor/patient relationship than this.
Another safeguard is that even after two doctors sign off on the request, a judge must then approve it. This does look like a genuine safeguard. It would at least keep numbers down, one presumes, by slowing down the whole process, even if particular judges are inclined to sign off on the request after two doctors approve of it.
But notably one senior English judge, the former head of the UK High Court’s family division, Sir James Munby, warned that it was not the “proper function” of a judge to rule whether someone would be eligible for such a death. He described the assisted suicide bill as “defective”.
It is perhaps this sort of sentiment that might lead to the bill being defeated. A few years ago we did not have the terrible example of what is happening in Canada before us, but now we do and we have no right to pretend something similar could not occur in Britain, or here in Ireland. Let’s hope the example of Canada will be heeded.