Assisted death Bill attacked by doctors

The UK is considering a doctor-assisted suicide law, and encouragingly, it is drawing some heavy opposition from the medical community. Maybe the Death Culture isn’t TOO deeply entrenched over there yet.

Senior doctors have joined the opposition to Lord Joffe’s Bill that would allow them to help terminally ill patients to die. Twenty-four consultants who specialise in palliative care say that the attempt to legalise assisted suicide is a “bad solution to a difficult problem”. In a strongly argued letter to The Daily Telegraph they say that the Assisted Dying for the Terminally Ill Bill, which has its second reading in the Lords on Friday, is deeply flawed.

They say the Bill “overturns without a thought the medical ethic of avoiding malevolence and the criminality of assisting suicide” and they fear that if passed it would “open the floodgates”. Dr Steve Dyer, a palliative care consultant at St Peter and St James Hospice, Haywards Heath, West Sussex, who organised the letter, said: “This Bill is at variance with the well-received principles of the care of the dying. We respect the views, the dignity and the autonomy of our patients but we do not believe it is right to end a patient’s life.”

Good for them. Hopefully this can be shut down. If not, the logical development will be for the IngSoc nationalized health system to start “assisting” patients to their final rest, all in the interest of administrative convenience, and financial savings.