1 week Ago By Kat Brown
A proposed law to legalise assisted dying in England and Wales has led to thoughtful discussion from both sides and on Friday afternoon, MPs voted 330 to 275, majority 55, to approve it at second reading. The Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill was introduced by backbench Labour MP Kim Leadbeater , who said: “This bill will give society a much better approach towards end of life.” The i Paper spoke to people on both sides of the debate about what the bill passing means to them.
‘People must know it’s not about the family; it’s about the end of your life not being so traumatic’ Emily Cleary’s stepmother died from a brain tumour in June 2015. Her father died in hospital that November. When death is inevitable, it is only right that we take away as much trauma, suffering and pain as we can.
For people to be able to say their goodbyes on their terms is a step forward and I really welcome this decision. I hope it can progress, with rigid criteria and protection for everyone involved, so that some of the awful suffering that happens at end-of-life can be relieved for everyone involved. My dad, Kevin, had been unwell all his adult life with type one diabetes.
He’d had a kidney transplant in his early 40s and had to retire. He’d been on immunosuppressants, which can cause various cancers and he was registered blind. He would have been 65 when his wife of 30 years got a brain tumour.
My dad, always thinking he would go first, but she was in a hospital bed in their dining room for five or six months. I remember him saying to me, “It’s inhumane. They’ve taken away every bit of her life.
” Read Next The next steps for patients, the NHS and campaigners as assisted dying bill passes Because he’d been the only person there who wasn’t a professional carer, his health had deteriorated. A cancer he had in his throat came back. His kidneys were failing.
He went into hospital in September. Between us, my dad and I had a conversation with the doctor about Dignitas. Dad had just seen his wife die in horrible, undignified circumstances, and he said to me: “I’m not scared of dying but I am scared of the pain.
” My dad was a historian, a very educated, worldly man from his living room. He wasn’t looking for an easy way out. He had seen the person he loved most die a drawn-out death and he didn’t want that for himself.
He was in such pain. He was itching all over. He was in agony and it was traumatising for him.
By the last week, he was begging for his life to end. He didn’t want to leave his daughter or his grandchildren but he was really afraid of what was coming. The funding isn’t there for everyone to have a nice peaceful death with a nice view and vases of flowers.
This was a dark, dingy room in a hospital. At the end, he was taken off the drugs keeping him alive – all perfectly legal. In the weeks after he died, I still felt like a murderer, because I went along with him, saying to the doctor, “Can you stop giving me the drugs that are keeping me alive.
” It was the most humane thing they could do in the worst circumstances. The people who argue against it – have they ever sat there with someone pleading for a mercy injection? It wasn’t cowardice. It was just pure desperation.
People must know it’s not about the family around them; it’s about the end of your life not being so traumatic for so long. There was no way he was going to get better. No way that he would have anything in his life that would be without pain, distress, or trauma.
If I could have done that for him, and gone to Switzerland with him as we had planned, I’m sure I would have had guilt about it – and I know I wouldn’t have been able to go back the second time – but it would have been on his terms. As it was, he was alone and in pain and so drugged up on morphine that he almost wasn’t there. When you’ve been in that position, you really understand.
This is not about making life easier, it’s about making death easier. This bill is for my dad because this is what he truly believed in. ‘I have seen people suffer – really suffer.
Palliative care can’t touch that suffering’ Professor Dame Clare Gerada DBE, former President of the Royal College of General Practitioners, Patron Doctors in Distress The bill passing is fabulous news – a step closer to real choice for us at the end of our lives. I backed the bill as a doctor, but then as a person. For far too long, we’ve allowed doctors to control this debate.
When I was the head of my profession (RCGP), I led a debate about moving our college to a neutral viewpoint on assisted dying, as this felt fairer than assuming all 50,000 GPs hold the same opinion. They don’t. I equated this to the abortion debate.
Doctors can be for or against abortion, but it’s not their right to have more sway than the man on the Clapham Omnibus. I hope I will be the first generation who will be able to choose legally to assist my death. I am only 65, but if I do get an incurable and truly debilitating disease, I want that choice.
I hope the days of patronising arguments, “slippery slope”, and so on can be put to bed. This is not a slippery slope. This is not euthanasia.
It is about choice and compassion. I have seen people suffer – really suffer. Palliative care can’t touch that suffering: the existential fear that people have, the problems with continence, breathing, mobility, swallowing, and the loss of dignity.
We’re talking about conditions such as end-stage Parkinson’s, motor neurone disease, and these incurable neurodegenerative diseases. Palliative care doesn’t deal with them well. It’s part of a humane society to give people a choice.
It’s right that MPs voted. It is a burden on them, but that is what we elect our politicians for. ‘It’s important to recognise that the resources just aren’t there’ David Foster is a litigator at Moore Barlow, who has worked with families on several high-profile cases including that of Archie Battersbee and Alta Fixsler This was a thoughtful debate and showed the way that people can disagree well.
It was important that MPs focused on the lack of palliative care and the broken social care system, which should be sorted out before a bill like this is enacted. In its current form, the bill is poorly drafted, and while legal and medical professional bodies may have been neutral in principle, it is now of the utmost importance that they engage in the detail. The current law protects the weak and the vulnerable.
After 40 years in practice, I’ve seen a lot of vulnerable clients – not just elderly but younger people, increasingly with problems around mental health – and in my view, putting forward the notion that suicide is a sensible option is not a healthy one. The bill doesn’t give enough credit to the fact that people can have treatment to ameliorate their conditions, even when they might have a terminal condition. There is concern over how you spot coercion, which can be very subtle.
Judges have said in cases such as Noel Conway in 2017 and Paul Lamb and Jane Nicklinson in 2013 that it’s difficult for the courts to see where coercion occurs. The High Court family division is the most likely place where these cases would land. The figures quoted by Sir James Munby on the problem of resources show there are only 19 judges.
From the end-of-life cases I’ve done, it’s easy for them to be appealed because they are important cases and they take up a lot of judicial time, potentially up to the Supreme Court. It’s important to recognise that the resources just aren’t there. Certainly, it will be a recipe for a lot of litigation.
Let’s give people the right to palliative care, not the right to die. ‘People at their most vulnerable should not have to make the agonising decision of whether to take their lives’ Anonymous, 61, is an editor and family carer I am really concerned about the bill passing. Despite all the attempted safeguards, it seems inevitable that pressure will sometimes occur for people who are vulnerable, suggestible, in unnecessary pain because of poor palliative care, or whose lives are considered by others to be not worth living.
People at their most vulnerable should not have to spend their last days trying to make the agonising decision of whether to take their lives. They should be able to rely on proper palliative care. Read Next In this assisted dying vote, MPs chose compassion I don’t have specialist views and recognise this is massively complex, emotive, and even triggering, including for families who have lost people to suicide or have seen people die without good palliative care.
I care for my 92-year-old mum, who is a wheelchair user, which some parts of the NHS seem to equate with being a life-limiting condition (she has arthritis in her knees). She has previously faced pressure from health care professionals attached to her GP surgery to accept there are no circumstances in which she would want to be taken to hospital. Luckily I’ve been there to fend them off, but a more suggestible person or someone lacking an advocate could easily have agreed.
Many older people feel they are a burden and I think we all accept there are relatives who keep one eye on the diminishing inheritance of people in care homes. I also have a friend who about 10 years ago was moved to a hospice with three days to live due to multiple myeloma. The doctors asked her family to help her accept that she was dying.
In the hospice, she was trying to speak. Her friend had to put his ear up to her face to hear what she was saying. It was: “They think I’m dying, but I’m not going to.
” She was right; she’s still with us. Lifespan is notoriously difficult to predict, although not normally so close to the end. Pain medication aimed at ending pain that might have a secondary effect of being incompatible with life is a different order from putting people through the anguish of choosing to end their own lives.
I would like to think we can trust doctors to make that call with high enough doses of meds to deal with pain, although I know it is not currently the case. As the bill stands, people would have to self-administer the assisted dying meds, so (sadly) they can already choose to self-administer medication to commit suicide. So apart from anything else, this isn’t particularly effective at ending later pain and distress after people have passed that point.
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