The View
So first, the good news: the bill seeking to legalise assisted suicide in Ireland has been comprehensively rejected by the Oireachtas Justice Committee. This is a significant victory for the protection of vulnerable, sick and elderly people – who are among those endangered when it becomes culturally and medically acceptable to assist a person to take their own lives.
The opposition of medical practitioners to the assisted suicide proposal was widespread, staunch and representative. More than 2,500 healthcare professionals signed a public letter rejecting the bill, and a wide range of leading medical professional representative bodies and associations also strongly opposed the measure, including the College of Psychiatrists of Ireland, the Irish Society of Physicians in Geriatric Medicine, and the Royal College of Physicians in Ireland. In contrast, just over a hundred medics signed a submission supporting assisted suicide.
The Oireachtas committee is recommending that the issue be sent to a special committee to review and examine the whole area of assisted suicide, but it looks certain that the current bill will not now be supported by the Dáil.
As the committee pointed out, the bill had serious technical issues in several sections, and it lacked “sufficient safeguards to protect against undue pressure being put on vulnerable people to avail of assisted dying”. They also found that sections of the proposed legislation “contained serious flaws that could potentially render them vulnerable to challenge before the courts”.
These findings should of course raise serious and obvious questions which should be put to every TD – including a clutch from Fine Gael and four from Fianna Fáil with Health Minister Stephen Donnelly among them – who were tripping over each other to support the assisted suicide bill before it reached committee, no doubt on the basis that it would make them look marvellously progressive in the eyes of the media.
Read
Did they even read the bill? (The same question could be asked of its sponsor Gino Kenny TD, who, in a debate on Newstalk with David Quinn seemed pretty clueless about what was actually in the proposal.) And why did so many TDs blithely ignore the urgent submissions and letters sent to them from palliative care experts who warned them of the dangers of the draft legislation? When 88% of palliative care consultants oppose a measure, TDs, you imagine, would take note. But not the current bunch of ‘progressives’ in Dáil Éireann, it seems. They should be held accountable for their actions.
The Justice Committee said it had issued an open call for written submissions on the topic “to increase the participation of civil society and reflect their views on the topic, in so far as possible”.
They acknowledged that over 1,400 submissions were received from various stakeholders, on both an individual and organisational level by the deadline on January 22, 2021 – and that a significant number of submissions from medical bodies opposed the bill.
It was noted that many of the submissions from rights bodies and individuals and others addressed the issue of the most vulnerable being made to feel a burden. Studies from Oregon and Washington in the United States, for example, show that between 51% and 54% of people who ended their lives by assisted suicide said they feared being a burden on family, friends or other caregivers.
Resources
The need for more resources for palliative care was also a major concern raised, as was the effect on normalising suicide and negatively impacting on campaigns seeking to address suicidality.
The committee also drew attention to submissions from supporters of Life Institute (of which I am a director), whose number merited a separate summary in the report. They drew attention to our contention that assisted suicide was increasingly being seen globally as a means to cutting healthcare costs – and noted that we quoted a recent paper published in The Canadian Medical Association Journal, which claimed that millions of dollars could be saved in health care spending by ‘assisting’ people to die.
Similarly, a Canadian budget report allegedly stated that CAN$149 million (€100million) could be ‘saved’ on the annual cost of end-of-life care by utilising assisted suicide.
This factor in the debate now requires more of our attention. The issue of assisted suicide has been adjourned to another committee, but it hasn’t gone away.
Rising medical costs, ageing and shrinking populations, and a lack of family and social supports are leading some politicians, insurers and policymakers to the (mostly) unspoken conclusion that assisted suicide is a useful means of reducing the cost of healthcare. This is the very opposite of compassion, or of ‘dignity in dying’. Deliberately ending the lives of those who need our help the most should have no place in a civilised society.