Assisted Suicide: “No amount of safeguarding will ever be enough”

The following article was published on the blog of the disability rights group Scope in the UK.

Juliet Marlow

Juliet Marlow, a disability rights campaigner and member of Not Dead Yet UK, explains why she is against legalising assisted suicide.

"I want support to live, not to die!"

By Juliet Marlow

Lord Falconer’s Private Member’s Bill proposing the legalisation of doctor-assisted suicide (AS) for those with six months or less to live will receive its third reading in the House of Lords today, Friday 16 January.

This isn’t the first time the matter has been debated. Every few years somebody will make the proposal only for it to be nervously put aside. But this time feels different. Despite its controversial nature it seems the idea has somehow caught public imagination and there is a very real chance that this time it could become law.

My name is Juliet. I’m 44, married, a PhD student and freelance writer. I sing in a rock/pop band and mostly love my life. I have been disabled since I was four; I use a wheelchair and rely on PAs to assist me with pretty much everything. I am also passionately opposed to the legalisation of AS.

On the surface, AS doesn’t look that unreasonable. People know that sick and disabled people have had to fight hard for control of our own lives so naturally they assume we want to control our deaths too.

Not Dead Yet

I am proud to belong to the anti-AS campaign group Not Dead Yet UK. Most of us have personal experience of disability and our reasons for opposing the Bill will vary. But our core arguments are that it is unnecessary and unsafe. No amount of safeguarding will ever be enough to protect all vulnerable people, all the time. And that is a terrifying thought for those of us who face illness and death every day.

Sympathy and fear are the pro-AS lobby’s weapons of choice. Sympathy is hard to fight because some of their campaigners genuinely want to try and prevent future suffering. Nevertheless, I respectfully suggest they have missed the point – it is society that robs people of a ‘good death’, not illness. With proper pain medication and decent patient-centred palliative care, a ‘good death’ can be had. It’s never easy but it can be effectively managed to prevent unnecessary suffering.

Fear is much harder to counteract. People will die in pain and distress unless the authorities ensure all terminally ill people get the palliative support they need. It is no coincidence that at a time of savage public funding cuts, the AS question has raised its ugly head again. It is because the misguided belief that society will always take care of its most vulnerable citizens has been tarnished, exposed as a lie.

Life not death

Our solution is not to control when and how we die, but to focus on life rather than death. We choose to campaign, protest and fight until the authorities introduce a cast-iron, needs-led end-of-life service that allows each of us to live to our natural end without pain and imagined ‘loss of dignity’.

The suggestion that dignity is lost through illness and can only be reclaimed by controlling the manner of your death is not only ignorant, but insulting to disabled people who have fought to build a meaningful life. If there is any loss of dignity then it is inflicted; it is not a natural state that can be avoided by dying early. I want support to live, not to die!

Assisted Suicide campaigners’ deaths prove we do not need to change assisted suicide laws

By Dr Kevin Fitzpatrick (OBE), Director of EPC - International.

W

Kevin Fitzpatrick
at European Parliament.

e do not ‘speak ill of the dead’. De mortuis nil nisi bonum dicendum est, a mortuary aphorism that dates from at least the 4th century is, I suspect, rooted in a superstitious fear that the dead may come back to harm us if we say bad things about them; perhaps that we might ourselves be condemned to wander as ‘lost souls’ in revenge for badmouthing those who are gone. We may, at times, wish to honour the memory of someone we couldn’t stand in life, or whose works and their consequences we hated; but if we are to avoid dishonesty, insincerity, we must have the courage to stand by what we said when they were alive. We can still be properly respectful in how we speak.

Of course the rule does not apply universally, but it seems we only allow ourselves to tell hard truths if the dead person was truly bad, a mass murderer. Maybe that comes from recognising that we are all fragile, given to making mistakes, doing some bad things at times.

In any case, it is surely possible to distinguish between the person and their legacy. I met and debated with Debbie Purdy a couple of times and I thought she was wrong – she made what is called a ‘category mistake’ – mixing up the category of one individual saying ‘I want to die now’ with the idea that such a wish must be enshrined in law. Individual wishes are just that – individual. Laws cover every citizen of a state or jurisdiction in which they are passed - which means they are a whole different category. It was her campaigning for this category mistake to be legalised that brought us into opposition.

After hours of grilling by Tony Nicklinson, in an interview he had demanded, I asked him: ‘Say you get your way tomorrow and the law is changed, and the next day, even just one innocent person dies as a result - what would you say?’ He would not respond at that point, and terminated the interview.

But that is the point for me: if, as a campaigner, you cannot guarantee the safety of others, then the death of innocent people under such laws, even that threat, should stop the campaign in its tracks, force campaigners to re-assess what they are doing.

The legacy of such campaigners, three of whom (two in Britain, one in Australia) died ‘peacefully’ in hospice or palliative care settings over Christmas, is surely the biggest, final irony. These three died ‘good deaths’ without any change in law. They have proved there is no need for a change in law in the UK, in Australia, anywhere in the world.

Debbie Purdy Dies: Case Echoed I Accuse!

This article was published by Wesley Smith on his blog on December 29, 2014.

Wesley Smith

By Wesley Smith

Debbie Purdy, who won a landmark legal case in the United Kingdom requiring the public prosecutor to issue guidelines when assisted suicide would be prosecuted, has died in hospice after refusing to eat. She was 51.

Purdy’s case thrust the legalization of assisted suicide onto the front burner in the UK in 2009, where it remains today. Ironically, even though she wasn’t terminally ill at the time–and died now because she stopped eating–UK assisted suicide promoters continue to pretend that legalization is about terminal illness.

Considering Purdy’s case–and the support she received for the right to assisted suicide–it clearly is not. Any such limitation is only the proverbial foot in the door.

I am reminded of the 1941 German pro-euthanasia propaganda movie Ich Klage An! (I Accuse!). As in the Purdy case, the plot involved a woman who contracts progressive MS. As she loses abilities, she wants to die. Her physician husband eventually assists her suicide and is arrested. The movie ends with the character looking into the camera, as if the audience were the judges, declaring:

No! Now, I accuse! I accuse the law which hinders doctors and judges in their task of helping people. I confess . . . I have delivered my wife from her sufferings, following her wishes. My life and the lives of all people who will suffer the same fate as my wife, depends on your verdict. Now, pass your verdict.

The answer the movie-makers wanted was to validate the husband’s act. In essence, that is what the Purdy case was also about.

If you agree that the husband acted properly in I Accuse, stop pretending assisted suicide is about terminal illness and admit it is much more about disability–which is why the disability rights movement remains so opposed as they are the primary targets. It is about allowing killing as an acceptable answer to many causes of suffering, whether terminal or chronic disease, disability, mental illness, or existential despair.

Irish woman loses Supreme Court Appeal that challenged the ban on assisted suicide in Ireland

Peter Saunders

The following article was written by Dr. Peter Saunders, the Campaign Director of the Care Not Killing Alliance and published on his blog.

A 59-year-old Irish woman today lost her Supreme Court challenge to the ban on assisted suicide.

Marie Fleming is a 59 year old former Irish lecturer who has multiple sclerosis (MS) and wanted her partner to be able to help her kill herself without risk of prosecution (See Irish Times and BBC Europe reports).

She had argued the ban on assisted suicide breached her Constitutional rights and discriminated against her as a disabled person.

This morning, however, the Supreme Court’s seven judges concluded that 

“there is no constitutional right to commit suicide or to arrange for the determination of one’s life at a time of one’s choosing”.

Fleming's landmark case in Ireland is very similar to that of Debbie Purdy in Britain, who won a case in 2009 forcing the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) to make public the criteria he used in deciding to bring a prosecution for assisting suicide. These criteria were published in February 2010 and have been the subject of some controversy.

What makes the Fleming case particularly interesting is that her partner who wishes to avoid prosecution is none other than Tom Curran, the Coordinator for Exit International Europe (EIE), a pro-euthanasia lobby group (EIE is part of Exit International, which is headed by controversial Australian euthanasia campaigner Philip Nitschke). 

Suicide was decriminalised in Ireland in 1993, but Section 2.2 of the Criminal Law Suicide Act 1993 makes it an offence to ‘aid, abet, counsel or procure’ a suicide. Those convicted under this law still face a custodial sentence of up to 14 years.

The Irish Act is almost identical to the Suicide Act 1961 of England and Wales, with the exception that in the latter the words ‘aid, abet, counsel or procure’ were amended to ‘encourage or assist’ by the Coroners and Justice Act in 2009 in an attempt to make it easier to secure convictions in cases of internet suicide promotion where the guilty party did not personally know the victim.

In her case against Ireland, the Attorney General and Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP), Fleming claimed section 2.2 of the Criminal Law (Suicide) Act, which renders it an offence to aid, abet, counsel or procure the suicide of another, was unconstitutional on grounds that it breached her personal autonomy rights under the Constitution and European Convention on Human Rights (See more here)

Fleming argued that the absolute ban should and must be relaxed to meet her particular circumstances as a terminally ill person in severe pain who is mentally competent to decide when and how she wants to end her life but cannot do so without assistance. She claimed that the law discriminated against her as a disabled person who needed assistance to kill herself.

A three judge High Court ruled earlier that the absolute ban did not disproportionately infringe Ms Fleming's personal rights under the Constitution and was wholly justified in the public interest to protect vulnerable people.

The High Court also ruled that the Director of Public Prosecutions had no power to issue guidelines setting out what factors she would consider in deciding whether to prosecute cases of assisted suicide. However, the court was however ‘sure’ the Director would adopt a humane and sensitive approach to Ms Fleming's plight, Mr Justice Nicholas Kearns said.

Ms Fleming was not appealing against that aspect of the court's decision. Her appeal instead focussed on arguments that the absolute ban on assisted suicide breached her personal autonomy rights under the Constitution and European Convention on Human Rights and that, in her particular circumstances, this ban was not justified on public interest grounds but was disproportionate and discriminatory.

This claim has now failed, with the Supreme Court rejecting 'the submission that there exists a constitutional right for a limited class of persons, which would include the appellant. While it is clear that the appellant is in a most tragic situation, the Court has to find constitutional rights anchored in the Constitution... [and it] has not been the jurisprudence of the Constitution that rights be identified for a limited group of persons.'

Fleming’s case rested on the flawed assumption that, since suicide itself is not illegal, there is thereby a right to suicide. It is on this basis that she claimed that as a seriously disabled person she was being discriminated against for not being able to exercise that right, when able-bodied people can.

Dignity in Dying (the former British Voluntary Euthanasia Society) has used a similar line of argument.

However this is to misunderstand the basis and intention of the law.

When the British Parliament passed the Suicide Act in 1961 it was assured that the decriminalisation of suicide did not indicate any reduction of the seriousness with which either (a) suicide or (b) assisting suicide were viewed.

The Joint Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department, moving the Suicide Bill's Third Reading, said:

'Because we have taken the view, as Parliament and the Government have taken, that the treatment of people who attempt to commit suicide should no longer be through the criminal courts, it in no way lessens, nor should it lessen, the respect for the sanctity of life which we all share. It must not be thought that because we are changing the method of treatment for those unfortunate people, we seek to depreciate the gravity of the action of anyone who tries to commit suicide…..' (Hansard: HC Deb 28 July 1961 vol 645: 1961(a): Cols 822-823)

He went on:

'I should like to state as solemnly as I can….that we wish to give no encouragement whatever to suicide…..I hope that nothing that I have said will give the impression that the act of self-murder, of self-destruction, is regarded at all lightly by the Home Office or the Government.' (Hansard:HC Deb 19 July 1961 vol 644: Cols 1425-1426)

Fleming and others wish to argue that in some cases suicide is not serious and is in fact a morally good course of action. That is a position that needs to be strongly resisted at all costs.

It is one thing to argue that people who attempt suicide should be treated with mercy and compassion by the courts. But it is quite another to argue that committing suicide, taking one’s own life, is a moral good and thereby a right.

That would be a very dangerous precedent indeed, which once established would be used as a legal lever for more and more incremental extension.

Judgment Of the Supreme Court: Fleming v Ireland 

Euthanasia: A matter of Life or Death?

The following is a speech by Chief Justice Sundaresh Menon at the Singapore Medical Association Annual lecture on March 9, 2013. Link to the original article.

(Alex Schadenberg found this article to be very interesting and worth reading. He does not agree with every point in the article.)

Chief Justice Sundaresh Menon

Introduction

In a sense it all began here, in a bar in Singapore in 1995, when a young Englishwoman met a Cuban jazz musician and, despite her not being able to speak a word of Spanish and him not being able to utter a word of English, they fell in love.

Debbie Purdy had already begun to experience early symptoms of Multiple Sclerosis when she met Omar Puente, but in the first flush of their relationship, any thought of death and disease must have been the furthest thing from their minds. One would hope that they look back on their time in Singapore as a brief stop in paradise, given how much they have endured together since. They travelled through Asia for the next three years as Ms Purdy's health steadily deteriorated, gradually leaving her more dependent on her companion. When it was time for her to return to England, he followed. In the teeth of the odds, they have been together for the past 18 years, during which time she has become the most prominent face of the assisted dying debate in the UK, and the subject of what is perhaps the most important decision of the House of Lords bearing on the extent of the individual's right to control the circumstances of her death. Theirs is both a legal saga and a love story, and it serves to remind us that - whatever our political, religious or moral leanings - the assisted dying debate remains an irreducibly human issue. It follows that we must summon all the compassion and kindness in our hearts when broaching this matter.

I would like to acknowledge the assistance of my law clerk, Jonathan Yap, who assisted me in researching and preparing this paper and who discussed these ideas with me.

Irish assisted suicide court case is based on flawed assumption

By Peter Saunders, Care Not Killing Campaign Director - March 1, 2013

Peter Saunders

Marie Fleming is a 59 year old former Irish lecturer who has multiple sclerosis and wants her partner to be able to help kill herself without risk of prosecution (See Irish Times and BBC Europe reports).

Her landmark case in Ireland is very similar to that of Debbie Purdy in Britain, who won a case in 2009 forcing the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) to make public the criteria he used in deciding to bring a prosecution for assisting suicide. These criteria were published in February 2010 and have been the subject of some controversy.

Fleming has thus far, however, had far less success than Purdy.

What makes the Fleming case particularly interesting is that her partner who wishes to avoid prosecution is none other than Tom Curran, the Coordinator for Exit International Europe (EIE), a pro-euthanasia lobby group (EIE is part of Exit International, which is headed by controversial Australian euthanasia campaigner Philip Nitschke). 

Fleming’s case is currently before seven judges at the Irish Supreme Court, and although the hearing of evidence is expected to conclude on Tuesday, the judgement may not come out for some time.

Suicide was decriminalised in Ireland in 1993, but Section 2.2 of the Criminal Law Suicide Act 1993 makes it an offence to ‘aid, abet, counsel or procure’ a suicide. Those convicted under this law still face a custodial sentence of up to 14 years.

The Irish Act is almost identical to the Suicide Act 1961 of England and Wales, with the exception that in the latter the words ‘aid, abet, counsel or procure’ were amended to ‘encourage or assist’ by the Coroners and Justice Act in 2009 in an attempt to make it easier to secure convictions in cases of internet suicide promotion where the guilty party did not personally know the victim.

In her case against Ireland, the Attorney General and Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP), Fleming claims section 2.2 of the Criminal Law (Suicide) Act, which renders it an offence to aid, abet, counsel or procure the suicide of another, is unconstitutional on grounds that it breaches her personal autonomy rights under the Constitution and European Convention on Human Rights (See more here) 

Fleming argues that the absolute ban should and must be relaxed to meet her particular circumstances as a terminally ill person in severe pain who is mentally competent to decide when and how she wants to end her life but cannot do so without assistance. She is claiming that the law discriminates against her as a disabled person who needs assistance to kill herself. 

A three judge High Court ruled last month the absolute ban does not disproportionately infringe Ms Fleming's personal rights under the Constitution and is wholly justified in the public interest to protect vulnerable people.

The High Court also ruled that the Director of Public Prosecutions has no power to issue guidelines setting out what factors she would consider in deciding whether to prosecute cases of assisted suicide. However, the court was however ‘sure’ the Director would adopt a humane and sensitive approach to Ms Fleming's plight, Mr Justice Nicholas Kearns said.

Ms Fleming is not appealing against that aspect of the court's decision. Her appeal focusses on arguments that the absolute ban on assisted suicide breaches her personal autonomy rights under the Constitution and European Convention on Human Rights and that, in her particular circumstances, this ban is not justified on public interest grounds but is disproportionate and discriminatory.

Fleming’s case rests on the flawed assumption that, since suicide itself is not illegal, there is thereby a right to suicide. It is on this basis that she claims that as a seriously disabled person she is being discriminated against for not being able to exercise that right, when able-bodied people can.

Dignity in Dying (the former British Voluntary Euthanasia Society) has used a similar line of argument.

However this is to misunderstand the basis and intention of the law.

When the British Parliament passed the Suicide Act in 1961 it was assured that the decriminalisation of suicide did not indicate any reduction of the seriousness with which either (a) suicide or (b) assisting suicide were viewed.

The Joint Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department, moving the Suicide Bill's Third Reading, said:

'Because we have taken the view, as Parliament and the Government have taken, that the treatment of people who attempt to commit suicide should no longer be through the criminal courts, it in no way lessens, nor should it lessen, the respect for the sanctity of life which we all share. It must not be thought that because we are changing the method of treatment for those unfortunate people, we seek to depreciate the gravity of the action of anyone who tries to commit suicide…..' (Hansard: HC Deb 28 July 1961 vol 645: 1961(a): Cols 822-823)

He went on:

'I should like to state as solemnly as I can….that we wish to give no encouragement whatever to suicide…..I hope that nothing that I have said will give the impression that the act of self-murder, of self-destruction, is regarded at all lightly by the Home Office or the Government.' (Hansard:HC Deb 19 July 1961 vol 644: Cols 1425-1426)

Fleming and others wish to argue that in some cases suicide is not serious and is in fact a morally good course of action. That is a position that needs to be strongly resisted at all costs.

It is one thing to argue that people who attempt suicide should be treated with mercy and compassion by the courts. But it is quite another to argue that committing suicide, taking one’s own life, is a moral good and thereby a right.

That would be a very dangerous precedent indeed, which once established would be used as a legal lever for more and more incremental extension.

Alison Davis legally challenges the prosecution guidelines in the UK

Alison Davis, the leader of the disability rights group, No Less Human, has launched a legal challenge to the prosecution guidelines concerning assisted suicide in the UK.

Davis, a woman with multiple disabilities, stated that the legal ruling, that forced the Director of Public Prosecutions to weaken the prosecution guidelines concerning assisted suicide in the UK, was unsound and based on a bias. Davis alleges that Lord Philips of Worth Matravers, now the Supreme Court's President, later expressed strong personal views on the subject of assisted suicide in an interview with the Daily Telegraph.

Lord Philips stated to the Daily Telegraph:
"I have enormous sympathy with anyone who finds themselves facing a quite hideous termination of their life as a result of one of these horrible diseases, in deciding they would prefer to end their life more swiftly and avoid the death as well as avoiding the pain and distress that might cause their relatives."

Davis's legal challenge alleges that the ruling related to the Diane Purdy case was "vitiated by the principle of bias", and therefore "the decision of the former House of Lords is 'unconstitutional' and usurps the powers of Parliament."

The legal challenge also calls for "a full Supreme Court to be convened to reconsider and hear fresh arguments on the Purdy case."

In a letter to Keir Starmer, the Director of Public Prosecutions,Davis wrote that: "The guidelines are unfair, unjust, and fatally discriminatory against suffering people, who deserve the same presumption in favour of life as any able bodied person would automatically receive. They (the prosecution guidelines) have no place in a civilised society."

Andrea Williams, the lawyer for Davis, stated: "Disabled people have always had the protection of the law and disabled people are now appealing to the highest court in the land in an attempt to retain this protection."

Peter Saunders, the Director of the Care Not Killing Alliance added: "The Law Lords' decision in July, overturned earlier Judgements in the High Court and the Court of Appeal, was an unusual one to say the least - that those contemplating breaking the criminal law in this area should be advised how far they might go without risking prosecution."

Saunders also stated that: "the prosecution guidelines ... and in particular their suggestion that helping a severely disabled person to commit suicide might be regarded more leniently than helping someone else to kill themselves - we are not surprised to hear that the Law Lords' decision is now being questioned."

"It is not difficult to see why people with disabilities and seriously ill people should now perceive that they are not to be afforded the same protection that the law gives to the rest of us." said Saunders.

The spokesperson for Lord Philips stated: "Lord Philips has not called for a change in the law. He simply expressed sympathy with anyone considering ending their life because they had a terminal illness. He made it clear that this was his personal view."

The Euthanasia Prevention Coalition reacted when the prosecution guidelines were issued by stating:

The Euthanasia Prevention Coalition is particularly concerned about the devaluation of people with disabilities that is evident in the guidelines. A person, such as Alison Davis, the leader of the group No Less Human in the UK would qualify for assisted suicide under these guidelines.

When an able-bodied person becomes significant disabled from an accident or a medical condition they will often be upset by their new physical or cognitive condition. These people need the law to protect them to provide time to learn how to live with their new reality. They need to be protected and not treated with inequality or threatened by the possibility of dying by assisted suicide when they are experiencing a difficult time of life.

We are also concerned about this concept of a person being “wholly motivated by compassion.” It is nearly impossible to determine the motivation outside of the context of their actions. We reject the concept of a “compassionate homicide” and we reject the concept that a person that assists the suicide of another person is acting in a compassionate manner.

The Euthanasia Prevention Coalition is convinced that the temporary guidelines by the DPP have created a new class of inequality within the application of the assisted suicide law in the UK. If these guidelines are not amended in order to equally protect every citizen under the law, then these guidelines are likely to be struck down by the Courts thus further eroding the assisted suicide law in the UK.

These guidelines are simply unacceptable and they directly threaten the lives of people with disabilities and other vulnerable people in the UK.

The Prosecution Guidelines for assisted suicide in the UK must be revoked.

Link to the article: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/politics/6729832/Assisted-suicide-disabled-campaigner-in-11th-hour-court-challenge.html

Link to the original comments by the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition concerning the prosecution guidelines in the UK: http://alexschadenberg.blogspot.com/2009/09/prosecution-guidelines-in-uk-may-open.html

'Right to die' can become a 'duty to die'

The insightful Wesley Smith has directly connected euthanasia and assisted suicide to the Duty to Die. Wesley is always clear. People need to heed his warning.

Vulnerable people can be bullied into assisted suicide, believes Wesley Smith.

By Wesley Smith
Daily Telegraph - Feb 21, 2009

Imagine that you have lung cancer. It has been in remission, but tests show the cancer has returned and is likely to be terminal. Still, there is some hope. Chemotherapy could extend your life, if not save it. You ask to begin treatment. But you soon receive more devastating news. A letter from the government informs you that the cost of chemotherapy is deemed an unjustified expense for the limited extra time it would provide. However, the government is not without compassion. You are informed that whenever you are ready, it will gladly pay for your assisted suicide.

Think that's an alarmist scenario to scare you away from supporting "death with dignity"? Wrong. That is exactly what happened last year to two cancer patients in Oregon, where assisted suicide is legal.

Barbara Wagner had recurrent lung cancer and Randy Stroup had prostate cancer. Both were on Medicaid, the state's health insurance plan for the poor that, like some NHS services, is rationed. The state denied both treatment, but told them it would pay for their assisted suicide. "It dropped my chin to the floor," Stroup told the media. "[How could they] not pay for medication that would help my life, and yet offer to pay to end my life?" (Wagner eventually received free medication from the drug manufacturer. She has since died. The denial of chemotherapy to Stroup was reversed on appeal after his story hit the media.)

Despite Wagner and Stroup's cases, advocates continue to insist that Oregon proves assisted suicide can be legalised with no abuses. But the more one learns about the actual experience, the shakier such assurances become.

At a meeting in the House of Commons on Monday night hosted by the anti-euthanasia charity Alert and Labour MP Brian Iddon, I hope to bring home to MPs and the British public just how dangerous it would be to legalise euthanasia. The Oregon experiment shows how easily the "right to die" can become a "duty to die" for vulnerable and depressed people fearful of becoming a burden on the state or their relatives. I know that a powerful and emotive campaign is being waged in the UK media – using heart-rending cases such as multiple sclerosis sufferer Debbie Purdy – to inveigle Parliament into changing the law.

Miss Purdy, who lost in the Appeal Court on Thursday, wants to secure a legal guarantee that her husband would not be prosecuted if he accompanied her to the Dignitas clinic in Switzerland – one of the few places where euthanasia is legal. Much as I sympathise with her plight, such a guarantee would lure us on to the slippery slope where the old and the sick come under pressure to end their lives.

A study published in the Journal of Internal Medicine last year, for example, found that doctors in Oregon write lethal prescriptions for patients who are not experiencing significant symptoms and that assisted suicide practice has had little do with any inability to alleviate pain – the fear of which is a chief selling point for legalisation.

The report said that family members described loved ones who pursue "physician-assisted death" as individuals for whom being in control is important, who anticipate the negative aspects of dying and who believe the impending loss of self and quality of life will be intolerable. They fear becoming a burden to others, yet want to die at home. Concerns about what may be experienced in the future were substantially more powerful reasons than what they experienced at that point in time.

When a scared and depressed patient asks for poison pills and their doctor's response is to pull out the lethal prescription pad, it confirms the patient's worst fears – that they are a burden, that they are less worth loving. Hospices are geared to address such concerns. But effective hospice care is undermined when a badly needed mental health intervention is easily avoided via a state-sanctioned, physician-prescribed overdose of lethal pills.

Do the guidelines protect depressed people in Oregon? Hardly. The law does not require treatment when depression is suspected, and very few terminal patients who ask for assisted suicide are referred for psychiatric consultations. In 2008 not one patient who received a lethal prescription was referred by the prescribing doctor for a mental health evaluation.

As palliative care physician Dr Kathleen Foley and psychiatrist Herbert Hendin, an expert on suicide prevention, wrote in a scathing exposé of Oregon assisted suicide, physicians are able to "assist in suicide without inquiring into the source of the medical, psychological, social and existential concerns that usually underlie requests … even though this type of inquiring produces the kind of discussion that often leads to relief for patients and makes assisted suicide seem unnecessary."

Oregon has become the model for how assisted suicide is supposed to work. But for those who dig beneath the sloganeering and feel-good propaganda, it becomes clear that legalising assisted suicide leads to abandonment, bad medical practice and a disregard for the importance of patients' lives.

Wesley Smith is a lawyer, associate director of the International Task Force on Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide and senior fellow at the Discovery Institute

Link to the article:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/personal-view/4736927/Right-to-die-can-become-a-duty-to-die.html

Lord Joffe to introduce assisted suicide bill

Lord Joffe will once again attempt to legalize assisted suicide in the UK by resurrecting his Assisted Dying for the Terminally Ill Bill that was blocked by the House of Lords two years ago.

This time he plans to use the story of Debbie Purdy to gain support for his cause.

Joffe told The Times that he decided to take action so that family and friends who wished to help to end their loved ones' suffering would know whether or not they were committing an offence.

Joffe also said:

"First we want to get a debate going before we introduce the Bill, so the issue has been explored in the public arena. The introduction of the Bill will be sooner rather than later. It will be a question of when time in the parliamentary calendar can be found to consider a Private Member's Bill."

"The purpose of a Bill is for a change in the law to prevent unnecessary suffering. But we would only be looking at people who are terminally ill."

It is interesting that Joffe is using the Purdy case to promote his efforts to legalize assisted suicide. Purdy is not terminally ill and with good care, she can remain comfortable and live with dignity.

Alison Davis from No Less Human stated that:

If Lord Joffe’s Bill had been law then, I would have qualified for “assisted dying” and I have no doubt whatsoever that I would have requested it.

Leaders of the disability rights movement, such as Davis, recognize that assisted suicide directly threatens their lives due to social attitudes and subtle pressures that exist within society.

Link to article about Alison Davis
http://www.notdeadyetuk.org/alisondavies.php

Lord Joffe is also wanting to appear to be a moderate within the confines of the euthanasia lobby. Joffe's comments at the World Federation of Right to Die Societies Conference in Toronto in 2006 would make you believe that his Bill would be a first measure to legalize assisted suicide. The wording of the previous Bill was based on what the euthanasia lobby believed would be considered acceptable at that time in history.

Link to the article from the Times online:
http://business.timesonline.co.uk:80/tol/business/law/article5042490.ece

Margo MacDonald bids to change law on assisted suicide in Scotland

Margo MacDonald MSP announced her intention to bring a Member's Bill to the Scottish Parliament to legalize assisted suicide in Scotland.

MacDonald, a member of the Independent Lothians party, said it should not be a crime to assist the suicide of someone who is suffering from a condition and wants to die.

MacDonald intends to publish a consultation paper by the end of November and will include a wide spectrum of people to discuss the issue.

The detailed proposals of the Bill will be determined by the responses to her consultation paper.

MacDonald, who lives with Parkinson's disease said:

"The politicians have run a mile from this, but they cannot continue to run. I'm not telling them what they have to believe, we all have our own values and beliefs, but they owe it to their constituents to debate the matter."

MacDonald says she has been moved by the case of Dan James (23) a former Rugby player who was paralysed by a training accident and recently died in Switzerland by assisted suicide with his parents accompanying to his death.

MacDonald's announcement specifically followed the decision by the High Court not to guarantee that Debbie Purdy's husband, Omar Puente, would be free from prosecution if he would assist her suicide in Switzerland at the Dignitas Clinic.

The Scottish people need to be aware of how legalizing assisted suicide specifically threatens the lives of people with disabilities and the other vulnerable people in Scotland.

Legalizing assisted suicide creates an inequality in the healthcare system because it allows some people to receive death as the treatment for their condition and others to receive good physical, psychological and social care for the same condition.

It also introduces subtle and overt pressures on people who are living in the most vulnerable time of their lives. Social and economic pressures will often coerce people to "choose" death because they feel they have no other "choice" or to fulfill the wishes of their loved ones or caregivers of the "burden" of care.

Link to the article from the Edinborough Evening News:
http://news.scotsman.com:80/politics/Margo-MacDonald-bids-to-change.4643890.jp

Diane Purdy loses assisted suicide case in the UK

Debbie Purdy, who lives with MS, asked the court for clarity concerning the law on assisted suicide in the UK.

Purdy, who has stated that she intends to travel to Switzerland to die by assisted suicide at the Dignitas clinic, is concerned that her husband, Omar Purnte, may be charged with assisting her suicide by participating in her death in Switzerland.

Purdy was granted a judicial review on the grounds that the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) had acted illegally by not providing guidance on how decisions on prosecutions are reached.

David Pannick QC - the lawyer for Purdy - said that guidelines already exist for crimes of domestic violence, bad driving and football-related offences.

Pannick argued that Purdy and Puente were entitled to the guidance to enable them to "foresee" if Puente was likely to be prosecuted if he assisted the suicide of his wife.

The two high court justices ruled that the rights of Purdy and her husband have not been infringed and existing guidelines are adequate.

Lord Justice Scott Baker stated:

We cannot leave this case without expressing great sympathy for Ms Purdy, her husband and others in a similar position who wish to know in advance whether they will face prosecution for doing what many would regard as something that the law should permit, namely to help a loved one go abroad to end their suffering when they are unable to do it on their own.

This would involve a change in the law.

The offence of assisted suicide is very widely drawn to cover all manner of different circumstances - only Parliament can change it.

The judge also said that their were reasons why the DPP had produced specific guidelines for other types of crime. The Judge stated:

They concerned "a particular prevalent social problem," were "more easily identifiable," and in those cases "it was clearly imperative that the public should understand the specific criteria that the DPP and crown prosecutors would employ in deciding whether to prosecute them."

The Care Not Killing Alliance in the UK, that is led by Dr. Peter Saunders, responded to the Purdy case by stating:

Assisting in another's suicide is a criminal offence which carries a sentence of up to 14 years imprisonment. The law is very clear on this matter and should not be changed. Changing it to allow assisted suicide would place vulnerable people – the sick, elderly, depressed and disabled – under pressure, whether real or imagined, to request early death. Vulnerable people often feel that they constitute a financial or emotional burden to others and the so-called 'right to die' can so easily become the duty to die. Once a person has been 'helped to die' it is often very difficult to know whether there has been subtle coercion involved from someone who has an interest in a person's death.

Requests like this are thankfully extremely rare and hard cases make bad law. We must not legislate for exceptions and the House of Lords for this reason in 2006 quite rightly rejected Lord Joffe's assisted dying bill. There are over 70,000 people in Britain with multiple sclerosis at present and only a very small number ever request assisted suicide. These requests are virtually never persistent if patients' physical, emotional and spiritual needs are properly addressed. Our key priority must therefore be to make the very best palliative care more widely accessible and to get rid of the postcode lottery of care that currently exists in Britain.

We are concerned about Mrs Purdy's expressed fear of choking to death or experiencing excruciating pain because with good palliative care these fears are quite groundless. The public is being misled over this. There have been great advances in the management of multiple sclerosis which have benefited patients and now mean that many with the disease live an almost normal lifespan. Mrs Purdy has had MS for 13 years already and may have many more years still to live. It is also not at all clear, given the type of illness she has, that she would ever need assistance to end her life, should she be determined to do so. This case has to be seen therefore in the wider context of an ongoing campaign by Dignity in Dying, formerly the Voluntary Euthanasia Society, to change the law.

The key issue here remains whether the law should be changed for the very small number of people who press for assisted suicide. Our view is that in order to protect others from exploitation it should not be.

Link to the response from the Care Not Killing Coalition concerning the Debbie Purdy case:
http://alexschadenberg.blogspot.com/2008/10/debbie-purdy-case.html

Link to the Care Not Killing Alliance website:
http://www.carenotkilling.org.uk/

Purdy has been given permission to appeal the decision. She says she has been left in "a confused mess".

Purdy stated:

I will continue to campaign so that I and others do not have to worry about whether the people we love will face prosecution after we are gone.

The Purdy case is sure to continue.

People with disabilities should be concerned that Purdy may appear to be representing their interests. It is clear that the leadership of the disability rights movement opposes euthanasia and assisted suicide because they are the targeted in society by negative attitudes and social pressures.

People with disabilities really want society to provide them with opportunities to live with dignity. They are not demanding a removal of protections in the law and create an inequality whereby they are subtly and socially pressured to die.

Response from the Care Not Killing Alliance to the Debbie Purdy Case

October 29, 2008

Care Not Killing welcomes court decision on Debbie Purdy

The Care Not Killing Alliance has welcomed today's High Court decision not to require the Director of Public Prosecutions to provide information about how decisions to prosecute for assisted suicide are made.

Debbie Purdy, who has multiple sclerosis, had sought a guarantee from the High Court that her husband would not be prosecuted should he accompany her to the Dignitas suicide 'clinic' in Zurich, Switzerland.

Care Not Killing had previously welcomed a full airing of the arguments, but had warned that any loosening of the law to make assisted suicide easier would put vulnerable people at risk and make them susceptible to exploitation and abuse - a view upheld by the House of Lords vote on the Joffe Bill in 2006.

Speaking in reaction to the news of the judgment, Care Not Killing director Dr Saunders said:

We welcome this decision. The current law is very clear and does not require the sort of clarification that has been sought in this case. There has been a huge amount of media interest in this case but the High Court Judges, in giving permission for Debbie Purdy to proceed with the hearing, had made it very clear that they were not giving her any grounds for optimism that her arguments would succeed. We are not surprised that the court found that, in order to protect vulnerable people from exploitation, the current law should be upheld.

Assisting in another's suicide is a criminal offence which carries a sentence of up to 14 years imprisonment. The law is very clear on this matter and should not be changed. Changing it to allow assisted suicide would place vulnerable people – the sick, elderly, depressed and disabled – under pressure, whether real or imagined, to request early death. Vulnerable people often feel that they constitute a financial or emotional burden to others and the so-called 'right to die' can so easily become the duty to die. Once a person has been 'helped to die' it is often very difficult to know whether there has been subtle coercion involved from someone who has an interest in a person's death.

Requests like this are thankfully extremely rare and hard cases make bad law. We must not legislate for exceptions and the House of Lords for this reason in 2006 quite rightly rejected Lord Joffe's assisted dying bill. There are over 70,000 people in Britain with multiple sclerosis at present and only a very small number ever request assisted suicide. These requests are virtually never persistent if patients' physical, emotional and spiritual needs are properly addressed. Our key priority must therefore be to make the very best palliative care more widely accessible and to get rid of the postcode lottery of care that currently exists in Britain.

We are concerned about Mrs Purdy's expressed fear of choking to death or experiencing excruciating pain because with good palliative care these fears are quite groundless. The public is being misled over this. There have been great advances in the management of multiple sclerosis which have benefited patients and now mean that many with the disease live an almost normal lifespan. Mrs Purdy has had MS for 13 years already and may have many more years still to live. It is also not at all clear, given the type of illness she has, that she would ever need assistance to end her life, should she be determined to do so. This case has to be seen therefore in the wider context of an ongoing campaign by Dignity in Dying, formerly the Voluntary Euthanasia Society, to change the law.

The key issue here remains whether the law should be changed for the very small number of people who press for assisted suicide. Our view is that in order to protect others from exploitation it should not be.

Read more: our previous press statement on Debbie Purdy, our media profile and further details about the case.

Notes for Editors
Care Not Killing is a UK-based alliance bringing together around 50 organisations - human rights and disability rights organisations, health care and palliative care groups, faith-based organisations groups - and thousands of concerned individuals.

We have three key aims:

*to promote more and better palliative care;
*to ensure that existing laws against euthanasia and assisted suicide are not weakened or repealed during the lifetime of the current Parliament;
*to inform public opinion further against any weakening of the law.

We seek to attract the broadest support among health care professionals, allied health services and others opposed to euthanasia by campaigning on the basis of powerful arguments underpinned by the latest, well-researched and credible evidence.

Key groups signed up to Care Not Killing include: The Association for Palliative Medicine, the British Council of Disabled People, RADAR, the Christian Medical Fellowship, the Catholic Bishops Conference of England and Wales, the Church of England and the Medical Ethics Alliance.