It’s been ten years since my brother took his own life. He waited for his wife to go away for a night and then threw himself down a flight of stone steps. When she returned the next morning she found him dead at the foot of the stairs. He was 60 years old and had recently become paralysed from the waist down as a result of kidney cancer. The coroner was unable to ascertain the cause of death or how long it had taken him to die. It was entirely possible that he had lain there for hours in the dark before he died. The family will never know and are haunted by his lonely death.
His palliative care team phoned me before his death to tell me that he had indicated his intention to take his own life and asked me what I intended to do. I told them I was going to continue campaigning for assisted dying so that no one else need ever face the prospect of taking their own life while terminally ill. Tomorrow (29 November), MPs will have the opportunity to recognise the failure of the blanket ban on assisted dying in this country, and strive for something better.
Kim Leadbeater MP’s bill would provide the option of assisted dying for terminally ill, mentally competent adults, providing end-of-life choice within a safe and compassionate legal framework. The bill follows the same model for law change that is in place in ten states in the US, every state in Australia and all of New Zealand. Around 300 million people around the world now have access to some form of assisted dying. Where it is legal, less than 1 per cent of people opt for an assisted death, but many more are comforted by the knowledge that they will have a choice at the end of their lives should they want it.
In 2015, the last time MPs voted on an assisted dying bill, the doctors’ union, the British Medical Association (BMA), and a number of medical royal colleges actively opposed the bill. Many MPs cited the perceived opposition of doctors to assisted dying to justify voting against it. But things have changed. After the vote in 2015 I fought for the BMA to survey its members on assisted dying for the first time in its history. When the BMA published the findings of the survey in 2020, it showed that more doctors supported the change than opposed it. The BMA has since dropped its opposition to assisted dying, and it now shares a neutral policy with the Royal College of Physicians, Royal College of Surgeons, Royal College of Nursing and Royal College of Anaesthetists.
This debate has been anything but rushed. For my part, I have travelled overseas to hear how assisted dying works in practice, learning from those with decades of first-hand experience. As in any area of medicine, fear and speculation are no match for evidence. Healthcare professionals have described to me how they ensure people who make a request are doing so voluntarily, free from coercion; how palliative care has improved alongside the implementation of laws; how being able to respect people’s wishes at the end of life has strengthened the doctor patient-relationship in ways that few envisaged.
There has also been an unprecedented examination of evidence inside Westminster. In February this year, the Health and Social Care Select Committee published findings from its extensive, 14-month long inquiry into assisted dying. The committee spoke to people on all sides of the debate and examined facts from jurisdictions that have already changed the law. Their conclusions could not have been clearer: the slippery slope is a myth – no law for terminally ill adults has expanded in scope – and fears that assisted dying might negatively impact palliative care are completely misguided.
What has remained constant for decades is the public’s unwavering support for a change in the law. Why wouldn’t we want change? The stark reality of what happens under a blanket ban on assisted dying is dreadful. Up to 650 people a year take their own life while terminally ill, many more suffer in ways that can’t be alleviated by the best palliative care and – at the rate of one a week – those who can afford up to £15,000 will travel alone to Dignitas in Switzerland. Those bare statistics mask a huge and recurrent burden of human suffering.
On Friday the public will be watching to see if the House of Commons has been listening to them and the evidence. Parliament will need to be at its best if MPs are to do justice to the seriousness of this issue and what it means to so many of their constituents. If the bill passes its second reading both Houses of Parliament will be able to scrutinise and hone the bill until we have the right law for this country. If the bill does not pass, parliament will be endorsing a status quo that brings misery and suffering to so many people, a status quo that is proven to be unworkable and unsafe, a status quo that robbed my brother of the opportunity to say goodbye to the people he loved.
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