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 12^th 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.