Bishop Michael's Articles
The importance of Coroners and Justice Bill, 22 June 2009
Bishop Michael writes
The Coroners and Justice Bill is currently before the House of Lords, with the Committee stage beginning this week and continuing on 23 June 2009. It is in Committee that Amendments to a Bill are proposed, debated and voted upon.
Clauses 49-51 of the Bill before the Lords are concerned with 'encouraging or assisting suicide'; they are intended to simplify and update the law in this area, particularly by taking note of the possibilities offered today by the internet, but not to change the scope of the legislation currently in force.
When the Bill was in the House of Commons, unsuccessful attempts were made to introduce amendments, in response to recent high profile examples, the effect of which would be to remove the risk of prosecution from anyone who assisted another to travel abroad to take her or his own life. In the Commons, and again in the Lords at Second Reading, the Government advised that the Coroners and Justice Bill should not be used for this purpose.
Similar amendments have, however, now been proposed in the Lords by Lord Falconer and by Lord Alderdice; they are likely to be debated and voted upon on June 23rd or even perhaps on June 30th. Notwithstanding the head of steam gathering behind them in the media, I believe that it is vital, both for the health of our society and for the welfare of countless vulnerable people, that these amendments fail. If they were to become part of the Bill, and if the Commons accepted them, it would become very much more difficult to withstand the case, three times rejected by the House of Lords in recent years, that Assisted Dying should be made legal in this country.
In what follows, I shall first attend to the Amendments themselves. I shall then make clear what I, and others who oppose these amendments, are not saying, by our opposition, to those whose situations are currently in the news or before the Courts. Finally, I shall argue to retain the law as it stands, in the face of those who are pressing that Assisted Dying, or Assisted Suicide, should be legalised in this country.
The two sets of amendments to Clauses 49-51 flatly contradict the clear thrust of those very Clauses, because to legalise assistance is surely to encourage it. They variously engage medical practitioners (who are not required to be specialists in relevant areas of medicine) or coroners; and by implication at least they effectively involve the State in monitoring the processes they would make legal.
Those of us who oppose these amendments are not making any comment on particular people, whether those seriously ill or their friends or relatives, whose situations have been or are before the Courts. Nor are we criticising the Director of Public Prosecutions. But it des not follow, as proponents for change argue, from his decision not to prosecute in relation to particular cases, that he could not in other situations find that “assistance” was not, after all, disinterested, or that it did not significantly influence or “encourage” the person determined to take her or his own life.
Those pressing for a change in the law mainly have in mind a small minority of highly resolute people who argue not just for their own but for everyone’s “autonomy” over themselves and their own lives. But even these people, let alone the rest of us, are not in reality “autonomous”; everyone’s life is bound up with, depends upon and influences the lives of others – and of those whom we do not know as well as those whom we do know and love.
Parliament has a particular duty to care for the very many who in illness, pain, fear and loss of their faculties may be more vulnerable, than the resolute and articulate few, to the influence and persuasion of others or indeed to the persuasion of their own care and anxiety for their families – especially as distinguished voices are suggesting that dependent sufferers are “wasting the lives who care for them, and have a duty to die to stop being a burden on others”. No wonder that most disabled people, and their organisations, are passionately opposed to changes in the law relating to assisted Dying.
Parliament also has a duty to defend the integrity and trustworthiness of the medical and nursing professions – again with an eye especially on the need of the most vulnerable to be able to trust those professionally engaged in their care.
We have a fundamental responsibility as a society to care for those who are frightened, confused, in pain, vulnerable for any reason – and to care for those who are dying right up to their deaths with the best resources made available to them all; we have no right or place to kill them. This means giving a much higher priority, in every part of the country, to the provision of the best Palliative Care.
As a Christian I believe that life is God’s gift to everyone; that we have no more right to kill ourselves than to kill anyone else; that anyone can look to God for his help to live our lives for him until their end; and that very seriously ill, and dying, people very often continue to be an inspiration and an encouragement, a blessing and a gift, to those around them, especially when they are surrounded by good medical care and by sheer human love and compassion.
Finally, it is worth pointing out that although both these amendments, and Assisted Dying more generally, are widely opposed by the Churches across the UK and by members of other Faiths too, it is also the case that many of those who are leading opposition to Assisted Dying, both in Parliament and more widely, are not people of Faith.