Not Dead Yet UK intervenes in assisted suicide court case.

Alex Schadenberg
International Chair - Euthanasia Prevention Coalition

Disability rights group - Not Dead Yet UK is intervening at the UK High Court in the Conway case. The Conway case seeks to strike down Britain's law that protects people from assisted suicide in the UK.

In their press release, Not Dead Yet states that legalising assisted suicide by any means would put other disabled and terminally ill people at risk. The Not Dead Yet UK press release states:

Not Dead Yet UK maintains any imposed safeguards will never be watertight enough to successfully protect all ill and disabled people from a change to the Suicide Act. The Act currently provides much needed protection to disabled and terminally ill people by prohibiting anyone from assisting another person to kill themselves. Even if only one person dies against their wishes as a result of a change to the law that is one death too many and completely unacceptable. We argue that disabled and terminally ill people are just as entitled to this protection as everyone else; to single out one group of society as different to the rest is a dangerous move and will be open to misinterpretation. Legalising Assisted Suicide for disabled and terminally ill people would again set us aside from the rest of society. We would effectively be second class citizens again, with suicide seen as a valid choice for us while non-disabled people would be encouraged to live. 

This issue was last considered by Parliament almost two years ago (September 2015) when Rob Marris MP’s “Assisted Dying Bill” was decisively defeated by 330 to 118 votes in the House of Commons. Mr Conway is now attempting to override Parliament’s decision by seeking a change in the law through the Courts.

The Press release then quotes from a few of their notable leaders:

Baroness Jane Campbell

Disability campaigner Baroness Campbell of Surbiton, one of the founders of Not Dead Yet UK said, 

“We have successfully seen off attempts to change the law on Assisted Suicide in Parliament. Now we must change tactics to ensure the Courts continue to uphold our equal right to life. The law must not be weakened via the back door.” 

Speaking for Not Dead Yet UK, co-founder Phil Friend said, 

“A change in the law is a terrifying prospect to the vast majority of disabled and terminally ill people who work hard towards achieving equality for all. Until we have reached that objective Assisted Suicide will remain a dangerous and prejudiced option, likely to increase suffering and distress”. 

Liz Carr

Liz Carr, star of BBC1 drama ‘Silent Witness’ states, 

“Disabled and terminally ill people want support to live – not to die. It is important that the Court hears from the people most at risk from any change to the current law. As a long standing supporter of Not Dead Yet UK I am keen to take an active role in making that happen”.

Link to other articles concerning the disability rights group Not Dead Yet.

British Parliament overwhelmingly defeats assisted suicide bill (330 - 118).

Alex Schadenberg

By Alex Schadenberg
International Chair - Euthanasia Prevention Coalition

Incredible news. The Marris assisted suicide bill in Britain was defeated today by an overwhelming vote of 330 to 118.

This victory is due to the incredible work of the disability rights group, Not Dead Yet UK, and the co-ordinating efforts of the Care Not Killing Alliance.

Not Dead Yet maintained a presence in the media by writing articles and through social media / youtube video's to clearly state why people with disabilities oppose assisted suicide. They also organized successful rallies on several occasions, including this morning, to ensure that Members of the British parliament understood that people with disabilities oppose assisted suicide.

The Not Dead Yet campaign slogan - Assist us to Live Not Die - resonated with the public as well as actress, Liz Carr, effectively countered the message from the "British elite" that assisted suicide is a progressive issue.

BBC News reported:

Fiona Bruce, the MP for Congleton, said the bill was so completely lacking safeguards for the vulnerable that "if this weren't so serious it would be laughable". 

Her impassioned speech concluded: "We are here to protect the most vulnerable in our society, not to legislate to kill them. This bill is not merely flawed, it is legally and ethically totally unacceptable."

Not Dead Yet UK protest

The Euthanasia Prevention Coalition urges our world-wide partners to learn from the British campaign.

First: The disability rights leaders were not only front and centre in the campaign against assisted suicide, they also held successful rallies at the British parliament. Those rallies did not require hundreds of people with disabilities to attend, but rather they had a good number of committed disability rights leaders and individuals and they were joined by other supporters.

Second: They communicated within their leadership and consulted other concerned people and designed a campaign with common messages. They did not present themselves as only one voice, but they did maintain message discipline.

Liz Carr in her role as
Clarissa Mullery

Third: They did not have money but they did maintain an effective social media campaign. The suicide lobby featured well known entertainers, while, other than Liz Carr, a well known actress and disability rights activist, the Not Dead Yet campaign featured real people who live with disabilities.

Fourth: All of the groups worked both independently and in unity.

Congratulations to everyone who worked to overwhelmingly defeat the Marris assisted suicide bill. You are responsible for protecting people from assisted suicide.

Easy ways to oppose the British assisted suicide bill.

This article was published on Dr Peter Saunders blog on September 9, 2015.

By Dr Peter Saunders

Campaign Director - Care Not Killing Alliance

On Friday 11 September, MPs will vote on the Assisted Dying (No.2) Bill which aims to allow doctors to prescribe lethal drugs to mentally competent adults with a terminal illness.

It's a Private Members' Bill tabled by Labour's Rob Marris MP, with the support of campaign group Dignity in Dying (formerly the Voluntary Euthanasia Society).

Here are some easy things you can do to oppose the bill ahead of Friday's vote in Parliament.

Read, Act, Pray and Go!

Read - CMF and the Care Not Killing Alliance have produced a number of excellent reading materials to inform your arguments against the bill. Read this CMF Blog on why the current law is not 'broken' and doesn't need 'fixing'. Also read this useful guide on the bill.

Act - Social media is becoming increasingly powerful as a tool to influence public opinion. If you're on Facebook would you share this post on your networks? Also if you're on Twitter please Retweet this Tweet. Together, our voice is stronger.

Pray and Go - If you are free this Friday please join us for a rally in Old Palace Yard (adjacent to Parliament Square), whilst the bill is being debated, beginning at 8.30am. All details here.

The narcissism of assisted suicide

This article was published on August 11, 2015 by Spiked.

A shocking case that shows that assisted suicide is about more than alleviating suffering.

Dr Kevin Yuill

By Kevin Yuill, an academic and an author.

In his sharply observed book The Culture of Narcissism, the American social critic Christopher Lasch remarked that, in modern life, ‘The usual defences against the ravages of age – identification with ethical or artistic values beyond one’s immediate interests, intellectual curiosity, the consoling emotional warmth derived from happy relationships in the past – can do nothing for the narcissist’. 

In a generation that has forgotten that it stands in the midst of a long line of past and future generations, Lasch noted, many live ‘for the feeling, the momentary illusion, of personal wellbeing, health, and psychic security’.

As Lasch later lamented, his exploration of narcissism was widely misunderstood. In his writing, narcissism referred not to a confident self-centredness, but to the inability of an entire culture to see beyond the corners of itself, to understand the self’s place in history, or to believe in its ability rationally to control the future. Lasch claimed that the survival of the self – not self-improvement – had become the highest aspiration.

There is more than a whiff of narcissistic survivalism in the openness of many Western societies to assisted suicide. This was best symbolised by the trip Gill Pharaoh, a healthy, 75-year-old retired nurse, took to the LifeCircle suicide clinic in Switzerland. Pharaoh, who died on 21 July this year, was not ill, but wished to die. She noted in her final blog that she wanted ‘people to remember me as I now am – as a bit worn around the edges but still recognisably me!’.

This ‘snapshot’ sentiment, whereby we preserve ourselves for posterity, is surely illusory. We can neither control how people remember us nor can we preserve a moment in time. There is no perfect moment or ideal physical presence, no ‘real me’, because life is a process, constantly unfolding. We continually learn and change, and the ‘authentic’ self cannot be captured at one specific time. Nor is a ‘perfect’ or merely ‘good’ death meaningful to the deceased. Killing oneself does not preserve anything – it destroys the prospect of further experiences and interactions.

Pharaoh resolutely rejected religion; she once complained that she was ‘ignored by the law, which originates from a god in whom we have no belief’. But, in the absence of any broader meaning or belief system, it is almost as if assisted-suicide advocates like Pharaoh are recreating a religion of the self. This is a religion that sees the world as a mirror, that perceives the importance of people in terms of how they are perceived, and that feels no obligation to the previous generations that struggled to make life easier and leave a legacy for future generations. It is this mindset that leads people like Pharaoh to take their own lives. But why would she imagine that those in the future would welcome her decision to sacrifice her life – all because of a fear that it would get harder and less pleasurable?

Pharaoh had been a member of the Society for Old Age Rational Suicide (SOARS), a UK-based group that aims to change existing law to provide elderly, mentally competent individuals, who are suffering from various health problems, with a doctor’s assistance to die. Many of those who belong to these groups see themselves as rugged individuals who blaze their own paths. But this is also delusional. Rugged individualism would surely demand that you do the act yourself, rather than get government assistance to do it. Pharaoh was a nurse who surely knew how to ensure her own death without having to fly to Switzerland. But part of the plea for assisted suicide is always a plea for official validation of suffering.

The narcissist feels a constant need to be noticed, to be recognised, to have his or her feelings validated and find some reflection of his or her self in the world. If the narcissist is fearful, then the world must do something about it. The narcissist sees a world that does not feel their existential pain (after all, physical pain does not even feature in the top-five reasons why people in Oregon opt for assisted suicide) as the cause of that suffering.

If this is not narcissism, then why are Pharaoh and other assisted-suicide advocates so vocal about their need, not just to slip away quietly, but to have their decision validated by the state? The drive behind the assisted-suicide lobby is the idea that the world must mould itself around the perceived needs of ‘afflicted’ individuals.

Glyn Davies - Assisted suicide: This is a road down which we should not go.

Alex Schadenberg

By Alex Schadenberg
International Chair, Euthanasia Prevention Coalition

Glyn Davies, the MP from Montgomeryshire UK, responded to Rob Marris’s Assisted Dying (no 2) Bill in an article that was published today by Politics Home in the UK.

Davies, focusses on the effect of legalising assisted suicide in the UK. For instance Davies responds to Marris's assertion that assisted suicide is happening already. From the article.

Mr Marris will be aware that breaches of the existing law in this area are rare. Less than 20 cases a year cross the desk of the DPP throughout the whole of England and Wales. However, he tells us that "terminally ill people are ending their own lives" and that "some doctors are complicit in hastening patients' deaths". 

Glyn Davies MP

The claim about terminally ill patients ending their own lives rests on an extrapolation of data from just seven out of 139 health authorities. Even so, the number is dwarfed by the death rate from legalised assisted suicide in Oregon. Oregon's death rate from this source last year is the equivalent to over 1,500 assisted suicide deaths in England and Wales if we had a similar law here. And it is Oregon's law that is the model for Mr Marris' bill. 

As for the claim that doctors are already engaging in hastening patients' deaths, I can do no better than quote the words of Sir Graeme Catto, Chair of the campaigning group Dignity in Dying (formerly the Voluntary Euthanasia Society). He told Mr Marris' meeting last week that "that is highly unlikely" because "doctors now work in teams and it is very hard to get one-to-one contact". In fact, Sir Graeme was only confirming independent research, which has concluded that covert hastening of deaths of patients by doctors in the UK is "rare or non-existent"

Davies then points out that Marris's assisted suicide bill is based on arbitrary criteria. From the article.

... The essential question before Parliament is this: do you want to license doctors to involve themselves in deliberately bringing about the deaths of some of their patients? Most doctors don't want that. 

All these 'assisted dying' bills rest on purely arbitrary criteria - like terminal illness (but not chronic illness or disability) and assisted suicide (but not administered euthanasia). Their boundaries are irrational and therefore permeable. That is why so many people are worried about the thin end of the wedge. This is a road down which we should not go.

Liz Carr

Liz Carr, who is an actress and disability rights leader stated at the Not Dead Yet UK rally two weeks ago:

I am terrified by this bill. I am terrified because as a disabled person I have experienced first-hand how poorly our society values disabled people. It's the same with elderly people.

I’m always been told, ‘If I was like you I’d kill myself’. ‘If I was like you I’d want to die.’ There are people who sincerely believe that people like me are better off dead. 

This is really serious. It’s about life and death. If this bill becomes law some disabled and vulnerable people will be subjected to exploitation and abuse and will die as a result. 

This bill if passed will also mean that innocent people get killed. The current law protects people against this kind of abuse. It does not need changing.

This is a road down which we should not go.

• Britain to debate assisted suicide bill.
• Summary of Liz Carr's speech at Not Dead Yet UK rally.
• Assisted suicide for disabled people - democracy in Britain?
• Experts in care of the elderly speak out strongly against assisted suicide.

Summary of Liz Carr's speech at Not Dead Yet - UK rally.

The summary of Liz Carr's speech was published by Dr Peter Saunders on his blog.

Not Dead Yet assembled at 10 Downing St.

People with disabilites descended on Westminster today in droves to lobby MPs on Rob Marris’s Assisted Dying (no 2) Bill.

Marris's assisted suicide bill is due for its second reading on 11 September.

Stand-up comedian and actress Liz Carr addressed the gathering and was introduced by former Paralympian Baroness Tanni Grey-Thompson.

They later visited 10 Downing Street to hand a letter to the Prime Minister.

The following is a summary by Dr Peter Saunders of Liz Carr’s speech. This is based on his (not fully legible) handwritten notes and does no justice to Liz's sense of humor and eloquence but at least it will give you the general gist. The talk was recorded so I will post a link to the video here once it has been produced. Any errors in transcription are his alone:

Liz Carr as Clarissa Mullery in Silent Witness.

Summary of Liz Carr's speech

We shouldn’t be fooled by the term ‘assisted dying’. This is assisted suicide. So let’s call it what it actually is. It’s about people having help to kill themselves.

The former name of Dignity in Dying (DID), the organisation pushing this bill, is the ‘Voluntary Euthanasia Society’. They will use any euphemism to distort the facts and disguise their wider agenda.

Their main weapons are misinformation, emotion and fear – fear about pain, dependence and disability. So we have to fight this fear with facts and truth.

Is there anyone in this room who wouldn’t prefer a pain free death with dignity? Of course not. We all want that. But this law is not the way to achieve it.

Assisted suicide is not about having a painless and pleasant death either. The drugs are unpleasant and they often do not work quickly. Far better to be in the hands of a doctor trained in good palliative care who can relieve your symptoms properly.

We are being cast as uncompassionate for opposing this bill. But we are not the people who lack compassion. We understand what it is like to suffer and to have limited options.

I’m able to speak here today because I am loud, articulate and have been on telly. But I speak on behalf of many who are unable to speak in their own defence – vulnerable and disabled people who don’t have access to the drugs, housing , social care, support and choice they would like.

Tanni Grey-Thompson

DID talk about having choice, but I speak for people who do not have a real choice. The proponents of this bill are offering a very narrow choice indeed to a very limited number of people.

If DID really believe in compassion then why don’t they use some of their millions of pounds of resources to ensure that everyone who is vulnerable or dying has good care and support rather than being steered toward suicide?

Anyone can have worth and dignity if they have proper care and support.

The term ‘right to die’ is rubbish. We are all going to die. What is really being talked about here is the right to be killed, something altogether different.

Suicide is already legal and everyone who is serious enough about it is already able to kill themselves. But this bill is about people who want someone else to do it for them. It’s about socially approved suicide. It’s about making suicide socially acceptable when it is actually something we should be trying to prevent.

Anyone can already kill themselves without assistance – by simply stopping eating, taking an overdose or even driving their wheelchair down the stairs. I’m using these examples to make a point – not suggesting that anyone do it. But the point is, why then do we need to change the law to allow people to be assisted to do what they can already do without assistance?

This bill wouldn’t actually help the tiny number of people like Tony Nicklinson who are unable to kill themselves. We will then be told that it is cruel to discriminate against these people and that we should legalise euthanasia as well.

We hear a lot about the term ‘slippery slope’. I don’t use this term because this widening of the law we see in every country that has legalised it is not a passive process. It’s much more accurate to call it ‘incremental extension’.

Let’s have no illusions about the wider agenda. I was in Luxembourg just after they changed the law. The MPs who were pushing for it wanted it for children and elderly people with dementia as well. But they knew they wouldn’t get it so they went for the softer target of the terminally ill.

It is no different here. DID say it is only for mentally competent adults with less than six months to live but think about the people they are using to make their case – Tony Nicklinson, Debbie Purdy, Jeffrey Spector, Paul Lamb, Terry Pratchett. Not one of them actually fits with their definition. None of them are actually terminally ill.

But through these cases they are softening up public opinion for a much bigger legal change.

They say they only want suicide for people with terminal illnesses. And yet they also say they want to prevent vulnerable people – say with mental illnesses – from committing suicide. But many people with terminal illnesses are not desperate to die and many people without terminal illnesses are.

So why do we have one law for one group and another law for the other? This is really just discrimination. It’s saying that it is good for people who are terminally ill to kill themselves – but bad for younger people with mental illness to do so.

But we can’t on the one hand push for suicide prevention for one group of people and encourage suicide for another group. This is a dangerous and confusing mixed message.

And just how workable will this law be in practice? Two doctors are supposed to assess whether a given patient has mental capacity, is terminally ill and has not been coerced. Think of how busy your own GP is and how well they know you. How can they possibly be expected to make an objective judgement about these things?

When I did my euthanasia tour I talked to people involved in the group Compassion and Choices – the equivalent of DID in the US. Their strategy was very clear – push for 10-15 years with stories of desperate cases and eventually public opinion will change and the law will follow.

DID are using the same techniques here and lining up all their celebrities to endorse it. They have all the money and all the media support. But we have no money and our only celebrities are me and the Pope!

I am terrified by this bill. I am terrified because as a disabled person I have experienced first-hand how poorly our society values disabled people. It's the same with elderly people.

I’m always been told, ‘If I was like you I’d kill myself’. ‘If I was like you I’d want to die.’ There are people who sincerely believe that people like me are better off dead.

But I don’t want to die. And to talk about choice when so many vulnerable and disabled people do not have a choice about basic care, housing and support is to put us in a very dangerous position indeed.

This is really serious. It’s about life and death. If this bill becomes law some disabled and vulnerable people will be subjected to exploitation and abuse and will die as a result.

The very reason we don’t allow capital punishment in this society is because the best police investigation and the best judges can come to the wrong conclusion and execute an innocent person.

This bill if passed will also mean that innocent people get killed. The current law protects people against this kind of abuse. It does not need changing.

I appeal to you to join me on 11 September in opposing this bill.

Not Dead Yet - UK: Open letter to David Cameron

This letter was written by Not Dead Yet UK to British Prime Minister David Cameron.

Prime Minister David Cameron

Dear Prime Minister

We are hugely grateful for your stated personal opposition to legalising assisted suicide, especially in light of the forthcoming ‘Marris Bill’ (September 11, 2015) in the House of Commons. We are however deeply concerned about the intention to have a ‘free vote’ at that time. That such that a law might be passed with such consequences, especially for vulnerable and disabled people, on the strength of ‘individual conscience’, is very worrying indeed.

We imagine that you already know that no Disabled Person’s Organisation (DPO) has favoured a change in law to permit third party intervention in any individual’s end-of-life decisions. Not Dead Yet UK is the lead DPO speaking out in Britain, and e.g. in the US disabled colleagues have been clear in rejecting such laws, for reasons of their consequences. Legislators there have almost universally turned away from their intentions to legalise assisted suicide once they are fully informed of those consequences.

Through rigorous research, we have gathered a body of evidence that such laws are not only dangerous, leading to the deaths of disabled people, but they also fundamentally depend on the stated views of their ‘architects’ in other jurisdictions, that our disabled lives are ‘not worth living’. This is paradigmatic disability discrimination – fatal discrimination in this instance.

Certainly some disabled individuals, like some non-disabled people, do come to seriously consider dying early, but disabled people will sometimes reflect their communities, discussions in the public domain and other factors. While we respect their views, we are at pains to distinguish a very few individual voices, supported by a wealthy pro-assisted suicide lobby, from our collective view. The effect of any law is to cover every citizen. Extension of the law’s reach, once passed, is almost immediate to those supposedly never intended to be ‘beneficiaries’ of them.

We see the lack of universally available best palliative and social care, and critically the right kind of human support, as core to what leads many people to despair of their futures, however long or short they may be. When the only choice available to someone in despair is death, we count that as no choice at all. The rhetoric around choice an autonomy is just that – rhetoric. Choice is an illusion, and the proposed law places all the decision-making power in the hands of doctors anyway, removing it from patients.

Not Dead Yet assembled at 10 Downing St.

Pain we know and even Lord Falconer has now publicly admitted, is not the issue that leads most people to ask for an untimely death – feeling themselves ‘to be burden on others’ is the biggest driver (e.g. 61% in Washington State, US which has a law very similar to the ones proposed so far). We expect no great differences in the terms of the Marris Bill, unless it attempts to subvert our opposition by pretending there can be ‘safeguards’.

Additionally, Lord Falconer’s own self-styled ‘commission’ reported clearly that ‘assisted dying’ is ‘a compendium term’ for assisted suicide and voluntary euthanasia (Demos 2012, p39). So a vote for an assisted suicide Bill that mimics his, as we expect Marris’s will in essence, will be a vote for assisted suicide and voluntary euthanasia. We understand that the public at large do not understand this nuance but we hope it should not be lost on your parliamentary colleagues.

We must widen understanding of the dangers of legislating in the face of media insistence in exploiting ‘hard cases’ which generate natural waves of public sympathy. Those people who appear have our every empathy too, from our lived experience as disabled people. But, for example, Oregon is chosen as the paragon of such a law working well. when again we have a body of evidence to demonstrate the anomalies, the abject failures of so-called ‘safeguards’, and what occasionally surely amounts to cruelty in implementation: a depressed patient whose GP knew him well over many years and declared him not to be a suitable candidate for Oregon’s assisted suicide programme but who ‘doctor-shopped’ and found another doctor who knew him not at all – the patient was dead weeks later. Or the patient who had no private health insurance and who received by letter the news that the state would not fund his drugs for terminal cancer. He was informed by this same letter that he qualified for the assisted suicide programme. There are many more factors: no doctor is required to be present when the patient finally takes their final lethal dose (sometimes years later – so much for the six months to live prognosis). No investigation is permitted post-mortem, which begs the question, who could know if there was suggestion, coercion, or even murder.

Thankfully the proportion of doctors who say they would be willing to perform such acts remains very small. But that will increase dramatically should a law be passed – the act involved, providing suicide assistance will be legal – self-questioning will become redundant. The short step to people claiming they cannot do the final act themselves, challenging the by-then existing law to ‘grant them their rights’ too, will follow swiftly. Voluntary euthanasia will supplement what the courts already allow, non-voluntary euthanasia (typically, switching off life-support), and we will find involuntary euthanasia, the final peg, ‘helping’ people with Alzheimer’s Disease for example, to die will arrive soon after. We will have the full panoply of a Belgium in just a few years.

We are convinced that the law in Britain as it stands provides for those who are serious in their intent to die whilst protecting all those who become vulnerable when faced with such terrible end-of-life issues. The best protection against these developments is keeping the first steps illegal.

We seek further dialogue over these pressing matters, with yourself if at all possible, with your colleagues, officials, to hear our evidence-based concerns and how they are so integrally associated with this terrible desire to offer State sanction to assisted suicide.

Please accept our letter to you as another way to fulfil our aspiration to have an intelligent debate about assisted suicide/euthanasia in our country. This is about the kind of society we want to live in – disabled people more than any other group are under threat. Patient safety remains at the heart of good clinical governance in best medical practice. We too need to be safe.

On behalf of Not Dead Yet UK, we remain

Yours sincerely

Baroness Jane Campbell
Baroness Tanni Grey-Thompson
Liz Carr, Actress
Dr Kevin Fitzpatrick, OBE
Dr Phil Friend, OBE
Sian Vasey

Experts in care of the elderly speak out strongly against assisted suicide

This article was published by Dr Peter Saunders on his blog on July 13, 2015.

Dr Peter Saunders

Peter Saunders is a founder of the Care Not Killing Alliance.

The leading organisation representing health professionals caring for the elderly in Britain has this last week spoken out strongly against the legalisation of assisted suicide.

The British Geriatrics Society is the professional body of specialists in the health care of older people in the United Kingdom.

It has over 2,750 members worldwide and draws together experts from all the relevant disciplines in the field - doctors, nurses, allied health professionals and scientists.

In a powerful statement issued on July 10 the society says that whilst it respects that patients have a ‘right’ to determine the choice of treatment and care they receive and some symptoms are ‘difficult to control’ a policy which allows physicians to assist patients to die is ‘not acceptable’.

Speaking from the experience of caring for ‘many older people with frailty, disability and those who are dying’ the experts ‘accept life has a natural end’ and believe that their job is not to ‘prolong life at all costs’ but to ‘improve quality of life’ whilst accepting that death is inevitable.

They express deep concern that many requests to end life come directly or indirectly from the patients’ families and not the older person themselves: ‘Often such requests are then forgotten if such degrading symptoms as urinary and faecal incontinence, depression and unremitting pain are relieved.’

They argue that the clear priority is ensuring that the best possible care is available.

They observe that much of the public demand for assisted dying seems to stem from ‘the fear of a prolonged death with increasing disability sometimes associated with unwanted burdensome medical care’.

Britain to debate assisted suicide bill.

Alex Schadenberg

By Alex Schadenberg

International Chair, Euthanasia Prevention Coalition

The British House of Lords has debated many assisted suicide bills over the past few years. In fact the House of Lords debated the Falconer assisted suicide bill in the past year, a bill that died on the order paper before the election. The House of Commons has not debated an assisted suicide bill in 20 years.

Yesterday backbencher British Labour MP, Rob Marris, was chosen first in the Private Members bill ballot giving Marris the right to introduce Falconer's assisted suicide bill in the House of Commons.

According to the BBC, the Marris assisted suicide bill is scheduled for its first hour of debate on September 11.

Prime Minister Cameron

Prime Minister David Cameron, who has a majority government, opposes assisted suicide. The Express and Star reported that Cameron told his weekly Prime Minister's Question Time that:

“I don’t support the assisted dying proposals. I don’t support euthanasia.” 

...problems with the existing law can be ‘dealt with sensitively’ without ‘bringing in euthanasia’.

Mark Atkinson

The media reported that Mark Atkinson, the interim chief of the disability rights charity - Scope warned that legalizing assisted suicide would put people with disabilities at risk:

"Many disabled people are really worried about the legalisation of assisted suicide. 

“They are concerned that it will lead to them feeling under pressure to end their lives.”

While Agnes Fletcher, Director of Living and Dying Well, added: 

“The bill contains very few explicit safeguards.”

The Care Not Killing Alliance, Not Dead Yet UK, Living and Dying Well coalition and many other groups oppose the assisted suicide bill because it gives physicians, the right in law to cause the death of their patients when their patients are at the most vulnerable time of their lives.