ON TUESDAY Dr Anne Turner went to the Dignitas Clinic in Switzerland to die as she wanted, because she was not allowed to find relief at home in Britain. Some 3,000 people a year here are secretly helped to die by their doctors, but these GPs break the law and face a possible charge of murder. Doctors also hastened death by withdrawing or withholding treatment from about 170,000 other patients, but in these cases they acted legally. The law is clearly in a mess.
Why don’t we follow the state of Oregon, which allows physician-assisted suicide, under strict safeguards, and lets the patient choose when to die? Such a law would have overwhelming public support. But the bishops and other moralists tell us this is a choice we should not be allowed to make — it would be a sin. Palliative care, they argue, is the solution.
There is no doubt that hospices provide great comfort to many people in their dying days, but only a minority can benefit because there are not enough hospices. In any case, in Oregon most of those who use the law already receive palliative care. For them it is no solution: the loss of independence and of dignity drives them to seek assisted suicide.
As it stands, the law here condemns many to a painful and distressful death, for them and for their family. Yet why is it legal, and moral, for a doctor to withdraw or withhold treatment, but illegal and sinful to provide a pill to help a patient to die? Death is likely to be more distressing in the first case than in the second.
Some theologians argue that only God can decide how we die. But ours is a secular society, with secular laws. Let bishops tell their flock what is immoral, but why should they force their views on everyone? As Lord Gilmour of Craigmillar said in a recent House of Lords debate: “The idea that it is God’s will that an old and weak person should spend a month or so dying in agony and dissolution to the anguish and distress of his family, rather than being allowed to die with dignity a few weeks earlier as the result of an assisted suicide seems extraordinary to me.”
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The Voluntary Euthanasia Society changed its name this week to Dignity in Dying. That is what most people want and what the present law denies: the right to die with dignity. Is that really so immoral?
The author is a Liberal Democrat Peer