Assisted dying – where are we up to at the
present time?
I want to keep this essay
within a structure of about seven or eight points: I know that there are many
arguments for and against assisted dying; that is not my bag in this essay. I
want to focus on what I regard as very salient points. I am writing this
because the Bill is now in its crucial last stages; it has passed through the
Commons and has been accepted by them with what I only regard as a slender
majority of about 275 to 329. Now the Bill is being examined by some of the
most senior and experienced Lords in the land, these people have been or are
specialists, doctors, lawyers, Bishops, so on and so forth.
The first thing to say about
Assisted Dying is that it is going to be a death of 100 pills; that is going to
be the procedure, or how it is going to work. To me, this is murder by a 100
pills which are going to poison a person to his or her death. That is the
reality of the situation. It could take hours, it could take days; there is
nothing humane about it, people are going to have to watch someone else take
all these pills, a fair quantity of which will be regurgitated, the person will
be very sick, very sick indeed, I suspect there will be some convulsing, it
will not be pleasant at all to witness. So let’s cut out the kant that the
person will just fade away; they will not. The body, however sick, is not meant
to be poisoned to death; it’s just very unnatural. Don’t take my word for it,
very famous doctors have written on this subject. Do the research!!
The other thing about the
pills is that they are going to have to be self administered which rather cuts
out those people who have ailments (diseases) like MND? How can they self
administer? If the doctor administers the poisons then he or she might be guilty
of murder? So already you are excluding people who might want to kill
themselves, or feel that this is the thing for them. But it would be an
impossibility for them to do it and no-one can administer the drugs to them.
Then the questions come, suppose that some helpful doctor or the other helps
them to take the pills; the next thing is that the doctor is arrested for
murder. This is only one of the things that has not been thought through in
this Bill, which in my humble opinion has not been well drafted whatsoever yet
it has been passed as good by Members of Parliament.
I think I have covered two or
three times in the previous paragraphs what I think of this procedure; it is
murder by medical means, the only difference is that the patient is going to
have to murder themselves. Even if the doctor does not help the patient to take
the medicine, there is still the thought that it is assisted murder. The doctor
is the murdering assistant. How many doctors are out there who want to play
angels of death; it is very much against the Hippocratic Oath. Doctors sign up
to do things according to that oath. They sign up to do no harm but this
situation is very much doing harm to the patient. I cannot see many NHS doctors
registering to do this; I suspect that it will be a sub contracted affair to
doctors who are free-lancing and will earn an absolute packet out of it. Who
will vet these doctors; who will they be that would want to do this terrible
work? What will be their credentials? I cannot see many normal doctors signing
up for this; it seems to me to be a charter for many Doctor Harold Shipmans. It
does not pass the sniff test to me in any way, shape or form. Again and again I
ask myself, who is going to want to do this horrible work?
Regarding the technical
construction of the Assisted Dying Bill, the safeguards have been removed. The
original safeguards, once very much vaunted, were that a High Court judge was
going to have to sanction the process; he or she was going to have to be the
final arbiter of the request for assisted dying. However during he passage of
the Bill that became removed, so now we have some kind of “expert” panel
involved in the final decision. These include a psychiatrist, social worker and
lawyer. I have nothing against any of these people except that they can be
wrong, however accomplished they are. I would much rather that a judge signed
off on these things; that’s the way that we usually do things.
I think that this is just a
way of saving money anyway; the courts are already full of cases, it’s just a
way of keep the top judges out of the system. However, the judges are pretty
soon going to become involved when it all goes wrong and there is litigation by
relatives who will argue that their dearly beloved didn’t really want to die,
did not give consent to die and it has all been the most dreadful mistake.
Arguably this could happen and not just in one or two cases either.
The bill in general is badly
drawn; there are so many places where there are errors in it. I have heard many
members of the Lords make these comments. But they only have four sessions of
discussion on it to make it better. This kind of legislation should be the
subject of a public enquiry or Royal Commission. It is a subject too precious
to be left to the peculiarities of the House of Commons. Maybe even the members
of the House of Lords, some of whom as I have said, are experts, cannot save it. The safeguards in the Bill
have not been left in and not only that there is a lot of questions in the
material that has been left in. Speaker after speaker in the Lords on the 12th
September 2025 made that abundantly clear.
The next bone of contention
is that are there sufficient safeguards left to get the consent of patients.
One thing that is obvious is that this will not be a treatment available to
patients suffering from dementia and their representatives (or deputies) will
not be able to request it for them. This Bill is for terminally ill patients
who have six months (or less) to live. But the question I have about that is,
who knows for certain whether someone does have six months to live. A prognosis
of such a limited life span is often wrong and the patients will often go on to
live months longer and maybe years. This seems to me to be a line drawn in the
sand but in my view erroneously drawn. So when a person gives their consent,
they actually know not whether they only have six months left to live, or some
other period undefined and unknown by anybody.
Consent to the procedure? But
is there going to be pressure for the person to end their own life (be murdered
by the state); what is called coercion. People who would not have previously
considered leaving this life are going to think that they are a burden to their
relatives and therefore might opt for it. It is really rather up in the air;
are there sufficient safeguards within the Bill to prevent coercion? I very
much doubt it.
Nonetheless, the main thing
that will maybe stop the Bill is the very vexed question of finances and the
claims for compensation that may arise from the wrongful deaths of patients;
not the least of which will be that relatives may or may not claim that consent
was not given, or that such consent was erroneous, or somehow invalid. In which
case this is going to cost the NHS a great deal of money, with some proven
claims costing millions. There is already a liability within the NHS of £58.2BN
for claims over the past years. If we have a rash of claims for this thing, it
could very well bankrupt the NHS. All of these facts were pointed out by Lord
Bethell in the House of Lords debate on 12.09.2025. The smart money is on this
particular scenario stopping the Bill; on the grounds that it is not going to
be affordable and far too open to litigation.
Last of all this seems to be
a Bill which is based on doing a favour for a tv personality, which was
promised by the Prime Minister; this is inherently wrong as we cannot make
promises for individuals whether or not they are celebrities.
For reasons that I have
stated therefore in this short piece, it is my fervent hope that the Bill will
fail and it will not become law.
Donald Hedges©2025.
