Slippery Slope – Care Not Killing

Slippery Slope

Key Points

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The Claim

We will put “the strictest possible safeguards” in place to protect vulnerable people.

The Problem

There is a fundamental flaw that causes safeguards to slip and fall.

The Agenda

The dirty secret is that activist groups have a roadmap for how to extend the laws once the principle is passed.

The Stakes

This is irreversible. Get this wrong and there’s no going back.

What’s Wrong with Legalising assisted suicide?

Can we trust the safeguards?

No country in the world has safely legalised ‘assisted dying.’

The Danish Ethics Council recently examined them all in a report for the Danish Government which concluded, “it is in principle impossible to establish proper regulation of euthanasia.”

What makes us think that our politicians will be able to do the impossible?

Can we expect Westminster to achieve something that no other parliament in the world has been able to?

Parliamentary sovereignty means that it’s impossible for a parliament in the UK to pass a law that can’t be amended by a future parliament.

And courts in the UK, whilst they would not introduce an assisted suicide law by judicial legislation, can interpret and expand statute law after it has been introduced by parliament.

The fundamental problem is that, as soon as an assisted suicide law is passed, it legislates into existence a form of discrimination.

All assisted suicide laws discriminate between those who have access to it and those who do not – which is inevitably challenged in court, or changed in parliament, on equality grounds.

After all, it’s about giving people equal access to a ‘healthcare service’.

It’s not fair, so the well-rehearsed argument goes, to exclude people from eligibility because their suffering is due to a chronic illness, or a mental illness. We must treat people equally, right?

Canada is a roadmap to learn lessons about how safeguards are changed.

No one is proposing the current Canadian euthanasia model for the UK. But Canada started off with a much tighter system, very similar to UK proposals.

And, given that Canada is an English-speaking country which has a very similar public healthcare system to our own, it’s essential to understand how and why their safeguards collapsed, so that we can avoid the same mistakes.

Equal access is the reason why Canada’s ‘terminal illness only’ safeguard lasted less than 5 years.

Originally, Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) was only available to adults with a grievous and irremediable medical condition whose death was reasonably foreseeable. The Canadian government was forced to change this safeguard by a court case brought on equality grounds.

Canada extended MAiD to include people with chronic illnesses and disabilities.

They also removed other safeguards for people with terminal illness which had come to be seen as ‘barriers to access’.

An expansion to include Canadians suffering solely from mental illness is legislated to come into effect in 2027.

It should have begun in 2024 but the implementation was delayed over fears that their mental health service was inadequate and not ready for it.

Where next? Mature minors? Dementia?

A further expansion to include mature minors and allow advance directives for people with dementia have been recommended by a federal joint parliamentary committee.

As soon as you make the state the arbiter of who can, and who cannot, have a state-assisted death, you turn the safeguards into the political football.

That opens the door to the different activist lobby groups who disagree about where the limits should be. Humanists UK and My Death, My Decision both want a much wider law than the one Dignity in Dying currently advocates for.

Safeguards quickly become seen as barriers to access, leading to demands to extend the law.

It’s interesting to note how the language shifts after legalisation. ***‘Robust safeguards’* quickly become characterised as *‘unjust restrictions’***

How much do you trust NHS & government administration?

Can you imagine a scenario where backlogs in the NHS and court systems caused the complex countersigning of applications by two doctors and a judge to prevent the timely implementation of an assisted death?

How long do you think it will be before the calls come for this ‘unjust restriction’ to be streamlined?

All assisted suicide laws sow the seeds of their own expansion.

The rationale for changing the law in the first place is quickly leveraged as the justification for extending it. Politicians must be inconsistent and arbitrary to deny the logical conclusion of their own position, so it becomes illogical not to extend the law.

If the underlying reason for allowing assisted suicide is to give people autonomy and choice, on what consistent basis would you deny choice to someone else?

What do you think the people who feel they are being unfairly discriminated against would do?

If the underlying reason is to end unbearable suffering, it is not obvious why it should be restricted to terminally ill people.

Arguably, the suffering of people with chronic illnesses is worse because there is no end in sight. Many would argue that suffering with psychiatric pain is just as valid as physical pain.

If the wording is vague enough, the law itself doesn’t even need to be changed to be expanded. It can simply be reinterpreted.

In the Netherlands, euthanasia was legalised in 2001 for adults with ‘unbearable suffering’ and no prospect of cure. In the first few years the cases focussed on physical pain. In 2008, cases started to rise where ‘unbearable suffering’ was interpreted to include psychiatric pain.

Before this bill was even launched we already had fifty MPs calling to go beyond ‘terminal illness only’ and include those are ‘incurably suffering’.

If assisted suicide is legalised in the UK, it will inevitably be extended to include wider and wider categories of people.

The ‘safeguards’ are not really safe.

Safeguards can never be enough to protect vulnerable members of the public.

But they can be enough to lure legislators into changing the law, through an appearance of safety.

When the negative outcomes are easy to see because they have already happened abroad…

and when you being to realise that you cannot prevent the same thing happening here…

to open the door is to intend those outcomes.

The only safeguard that works is the current law.

The only safe way to proceed is to maintain the prohibition of killing and to not open the door to assisted suicide in the first place.

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