This letter and others on these pages give examples of good points to raise in writing to MPs or Peers about the Joffe Bill. Put the ideas in your own words and add a personal angle based on your own experience of the issues.
Dear...
I am writing to express my concern about the Assisted Dying for the Terminally Ill Bill, which aims to legalise assisted suicide and receives its second reading in the House of Lords on 12 May.
Advocates of the bill have been quick to point out the so-called 'safeguards' within it; that it is only assisted suicide and not euthanasia, only for adults and not children, only for those with 'six months to live', only for those with unbearable suffering and only for those who make a 'persistent and considered' request. They further emphasise the option of palliative care, the need for signed consent, assessment of mental competence, the two-week waiting period and the detailed documentation.
However they fail to point out the following:
- Assisted suicide is euthanasia by intention and often unsuccessful leading for the need for the doctor to step in with a lethal injection
- Assessments of 'competence' will extend the Act to children using the precedent of Gillick.
- The prognosis in terminal illness is difficult to define and can be altered dramatically by treatment
- Suffering in the bill has been completely subjectively defined contrary to the advice of the Select Committee
- Individual cases of assisted suicide are not to be reviewed independently until after the key witness (the patient) is dead
- The evidence from Oregon and the Netherlands proves that relying on doctors' self-reporting is notoriously unreliable
- Requests for assisted suicide can be profoundly influenced by fear of being a burden which is impossible for those without personal knowledge of the patient to properly assess
- People often express a wish to die because of depression and no psychiatric referral is necessary in the bill
- The bill only requires advice about palliative care not experience of palliative care when we know that many suicidal terminally ill patients change their minds completely once they receive good care
- The Bill has taken on only four of the House of Lords' Select Committee's ten recommendations.
This Bill also contains within it the seeds of its own extension. If we are allowing assisted dying for reasons of compassion, then why deny it to patients who are suffering unbearably but not terminally ill? If we are allowing it for reasons of autonomy, then why not grant it to anyone who wants to make the choice? Such inconsistencies will be ripe for challenges under the Human Rights Act the minute that assisted suicide is established as a therapeutic option for anyone at all.
Lord Joffe is to be commended at very least for his honesty in giving evidence to his own Select Committee: 'We are starting off, this is a first stage... I believe that this Bill initially should be limited, although I would prefer it to be of much wider application… But I can assure you that I would prefer that the law did apply to patients who were younger and who were not terminally ill but who were suffering unbearably, and if there is a move to insert this into the Bill I would support it.'
Please don't be fooled by the 'it's only' safeguards in this bill. It's only the beginning.
Please oppose this bill.
Yours sincerely
