Daily Mail, 31 January 2006

Euthanasia is still officially illegal in this country. But slowly and inexorably, we are getting it through the back door.

Any attempt to legalise it in an upfront way would not get through Parliament. This is for the very good reason that state-mandated killing -- for however compassionate a motive -- invariably exposes the lives of those who are most vulnerable to the mercy of the unscrupulous. Yet move by stealthy move, we are slipping into accepting euthanasia in everything but name.

Draft forms which have been put out for consultation by the Department for Constitutional Affairs will from next year enable every adult to tick a box to give a friend or relative the power to order doctors to end their lives should they become incapacitated.

These forms are the logical development of the Mental Capacity Act, which was forced through Parliament last year in the face of huge disquiet and after a fudged amendment by the Lords. This Act allows the withdrawal of food and water from patients who are unable to give their consent.

At the time, this was said not to amount to euthanasia: withdrawing food and fluid would not constitute killing but merely allow a patient to die by ending pointless treatment. But this was a deliberate confusion of language to conceal the enormity of what was being enacted.

Someone can only be ‘allowed to die’ if they are already dying. By contrast, the Act permits a doctor to end someone’s life if they are not dying, but it is considered ‘in their best interests’ for their lives to be ended because their lives are no longer thought to be worth living.

This power was amended by the Lords so that doctors are forbidden to withdraw food or water if they intend to kill the patient. But since we would all die if denied food or water, it is not possible to stop providing them without intending to kill.

The amendment, therefore, was worthless. And now we can see the consequences. A person will be able to nominate someone to order doctors, in certain circumstances, to starve or dehydrate them to death or withhold life-saving medical procedures.

There are no two ways about it. This is simply euthanasia. It allows a doctor deliberately to end someone’s life on the mere say-so of a relative or a friend.

And this surrender of our most important safeguard, the prohibition against intentional killing, is to be signed away as easily as buying an insurance policy or hiring a car. What have we come to, when the decision about whether someone is to live or to die is made by ticking a box on an official ten-page form? It is but a short step from such bureaucratic trivialisation of dying to a lethal indifference towards the living.

And what if the views of the person who ticks this box might change if their circumstances change? No-one can know in advance how they might feel when the situation they dread finally arrives. Most horrifying of all is the thought that they might change their mind and want to live, but be unable through their illness to communicate that fact.

Moreover, who is to say that the person entrusted with this momentous decision will act in the incapacitated patient’s best interests? There are, unfortunately, all too many unscrupulous people who want to be rid of their ailing relative. Conversely, there are those who care too much and will agree to end a stricken life because they themselves cannot cope with seeing their loved one in such a distressing state.

It also opens the way to pressure upon relatives by doctors or health authorities to end a patient’s life. Appallingly, there are already many instances where hospitals decide that the quality of a patient’s life is so poor they decide to starve or dehydrate them to death.

In some cases, relatives have to step in to prevent their loved ones from being killed under the euphemism of being ‘allowed to die’. A recent survey by Brunel university revealed the horrifying fact that one in every 200 deaths was caused by doctors illegally helping patients to die.

And all this is happening without any boxes being ticked. Significantly, both the present and former Health Secretaries have demurred at keeping alive highly incapacitated patients because of ’scarce resources’.

In such circumstances, one might imagine that resistance to euthanasia would be stronger than ever. But on the contrary, a campaign for accepting euthanasia has been gathering pace for years. It involves a deliberate confusion of the language of dying and killing, and an unscrupulous attempt to exploit people’s fears of dying in horrible circumstances.

The Rubicon was crossed back in 1993 with the Law Lords’ judgment that allowed doctors to withdraw the feeding and hydration tubes from Anthony Bland, the Hillsborough victim who was left in a persistent vegetative state.

Since then, a number of well publicised cases have further muddied debate, misrepresented the conditions in which people die and sown widespread and unfounded alarm that the only way to end unbearable suffering is to change the law to allow doctors to end patients’ lives.

The latest of these cases was last week’s death of Anne Turner, who travelled to the controversial Dignitas clinic in Switzerland to be given a lethal dose of drugs. Although terminally ill with a chronic and progressive neurological disease, she was still able to walk, eat and talk when she chose to end her life with the help of the Swiss doctors.

The distress of such a patient and that of her children, who helped her to go to the Dignitas clinic because they could not bear to see their mother suffer, is not to be brushed aside. They deserve only compassion. But it can never be in someone’s best interests to kill them. It can never be in society’s best interests that anyone should be killed, or that doctors should be turned into executioners, or that the health service should be turned into a death service.

Mrs Turner’s case has been exploited to the full by the formerly-named Voluntary Euthanasia Society. In a cynical move to conceal what it actually stands for, this organisation has now changed its name to ‘Dignity in Dying’ But what it promotes is not dying, but killing.

As for dignity, those of us who have watched as loved ones slowly die from incurable illnesses know all too well how often dignity is tragically absent from such a process. But putting someone down as one would an animal is not dying with dignity. It is rather to treat human life itself with a fundamental lack of respect.

The fact that people might be terrified by the manipulative campaigns of the euthanasia lobby into signing away the power over their own life and death does not alter this fact. Euthanasia is a fundamentally dehumanising procedure.

Yet the ratchet is still turning. A bill put forward by Lord Joffe, promoting ‘physician-assisted suicide’, is being considered by the Lords. There is talk of a Royal Commission to consider legalising euthanasia.

We have been progressively softened up to accept it as the misleadingly termed ‘right to die’. But no-one has the right to expect someone else to kill. This path we are on will abandon those who most need protection, and leave our troubled society still further brutalised.

Posted by melanie at January 31, 2006