Assisted suicide will undermine the value of life if it is passed by MPs. Below is the letter I have sent to my Member of Parliament urging him to vote against this dangerous bill that will undermine the value of life and have very serious consequences for us as a nation.
Dear,
I am writing to you with regards to the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill to state my strong opposition to it and urge you to vote against this dangerous bill that will undermine the sanctity of life should it become law.
I was encouraged to read in the Greenock Telegraph that you have concerns surrounding this bill and so I wanted to take this opportunity to support your concerns and perhaps offer some help to steer you towards upholding life by outlining my own position on this issue and specific opposite to this bill.
I consider that life is precious and of infinite value. It is a gift from God who created us perfectly in his own image and formed us in the womb of our mother. We are all unique and we all have unique value.
That our national parliament would even countenance reducing the value of life to the point where people could choose when they can die is of grave concern and one that we must resist.
A civilised society is one that encourages people to take up their individual and collective responsibilities to look after themselves and those around them. It is a society that expects people to look after themselves, but one that will always provide support to those who cannot look after themselves.
That is why we have a welfare system that ensures people have a roof over their head and food on the table if they are unable to provide for themselves. It is why we have a health service that is free at the point of use so ability to pay is no barrier to receiving healthcare treatment. It is also why we have laws to protect life. We rightly have laws to ban the deliberate taking of life because we deem life to hold inherent value.
If we were to change the law on assisted suicide, we would be deciding that our society no longer places the same value on life we currently do. Once we remove the absolute value of life, we will categorise people based on the relative value we place on their life at a given time. Consequently, we inevitably reach the point where people receive different treatment based on the value placed on their life. Put simply, either we absolutely uphold the sanctity of life or we do not. This is the decision you must now make with the bill put before parliament.
My first issue is with the title of the bill. It is well established that a person who chooses to deliberately end their own life is committing suicide. If another person assists them in their suicide then this is assisted suicide. This bill proposes that terminally ill people would be able to seek assistance to deliberately end their own life. This is, regardless of semantics, assisted suicide and we should call it what it is. The fact the drafters of the bill have given a different title that paints a picture of merely helping those in want of ending their life and reducing suicide to mere dying is a deceptive and deliberate attempt to twist the truth that what the bill will do is legalise assisted suicide.
Concerns around coercion and apparent burden on families and welfare systems are well documented and this bill only adds to those concerns. The bill makes it feasible for a doctor to suggest assisted suicide if they considered a patient to be in unbearable pain and having a terminal diagnosis. The bill defines terminal as having a maximum of 6 months to live. Length of life on a terminal diagnosis is only ever an estimate. Some die sooner than the estimate, many out-live it so how can we have a law that places an arbitrary number on something that cannot be absolutely determined?
A decent and compassionate society is one that looks after the vulnerable, that protects and upholds the sanctity of life. It is not one that offers death as what may be claimed as an easy way out of further suffering. Pain and suffering is a sad reality of the fallen world we live in. Empathy looks like doing what we can to alleviate pain, whilst at the same time protecting the precious gift of life, not aiding them in ending their life.
I have watched family members suffer in pain towards the end of their life. I have watched family members suffer in varying degrees of pain. At no point did they wish to end their life sooner. At no point did I wish to see them have their life ended sooner than it did in the case of those who has passed away.
I have seen how palliative care when done well can ensure that people at the end of life can die in peace and comfort whilst letting the natural course of events to take place. I would be extremely concerned that if this bill were to be passed that many people would be subtly coerced into ending their own life. We saw during covid how many people were pushed into signing ‘do not resuscitate’ orders which resulted in many people dying unnecessarily. This was done at the hand of the same state that we are now proposing to hand the keys of life and death to. I am afraid I simply do not consider this to be a safe or sensible way to go about things and would be open to various abuse.
The role of doctors is to uphold life. This bill will fundamentally alter the role of doctors by requiring doctors to aid in the ending of life when their stated aim is to protect life. It will not be long before doctors are brought before disciplinary panels for refusing to aid in the ending of a patient’s life. Our health service is a breaking point already. How long will it be before doctors face pressure to make terminal diagnoses so people can be approved for assisted suicide? How long will it be before doctors come under pressure from campaigners to push assisted suicide on vulnerable patients under a false guise of compassion and empathy?
There has been much talk around proposed safeguards in the proposed legislation. It is encouraging to see steps being taken to ensure there are safeguards, however I remain unconvinced these would stand up to scrutiny without the realistic possibility of their being undermined and ultimately altered. In fact, even before the law is altered campaigners are already openly talking about further reform, so we know already that safeguards proposed in this bill will be deliberately undermined, bypassed and ultimately targeted for reform in order to widen access which is campaigner’s ultimate goal.
The current law that bans assisting an individual in a suicide is the greatest safeguard we have. Any divergence from this will leave us open to increased and further reform in this area which will gradually result in the law being applied differently to how it is intended. Eventually there will be calls to amend the law further and so the result will be a fundamentally more dangerous situation than even the drafters of this proposed legislation intend.
We see this most plainly on the issue of abortion. When the law was changed in 1967, it was originally intended to only be used in exceptional circumstances with various safeguards in place (such as requiring two doctors to sign off (much the same as is being proposed with assisted suicide). Now in 2024, we find a situation where 1 in 3 women will have an abortion, over 40% of abortions annually are to women who have had at least one previous abortion and in the UK alone there have been over 10 million abortions – the equivalent of the entire population of London now missing as a result of a bad law with weak safeguards that have been deliberately undermined and bypassed.
David Steele and the drafters of the 1967 Abortion Act may well have had the best intentions (much like Kim Leadbetter and others today with assisted suicide), but best intentions is not a strong enough safeguard that will uphold the sanctity of life whilst also ensuring no further reform or abuse of the law.
The precedent set by other nations where assisted suicide has been legalised cannot be ignored and should concern us all. The safeguards of this bill do not guarantee protections against further reform. In other countries, young people who are mentally ill have been approved for assisted suicide. In the Netherlands, an amendment that would extend assisted suicide to babies and young children has been brought forward. In Canada, a disabled individual was offered assisted suicide when they asked for a wheelchair. In Belgium, people who are not terminally ill by our definition, but who were deemed to have a low quality of life because of severe mental illness have been approved for assisted suicide. It is simply not good enough for campaigners in the UK to dismiss these examples of how the law will be altered to further undermine life by claiming some vague strength of safeguards which in many other cases have already been found to be weak at best and nonexistent at worst.
A number of years ago, I had major surgery which resulted in me needing a lot of support for several months. During that time I lost a lot of dignity and independence because I needed so much support for basic daily tasks. At times I felt too much a burden on those around me. However, just because that is how I felt, did that mean my life was of less value then than it is today where I am able to independently conduct my life? The value of my life is infinite. It does not change because of different abilities at different point of life and nor should it for anyone else.
You will be well versed in the problem of drink and drugs that has ravaged so many lives in Inverclyde. However, we don’t just cast people aside and consider them less worthy of life because of addiction. I know many people who have come through addiction and yet at some points in their life have been deeply depressed as a result of addiction. I have seen the invaluable work of places like The Haven and know many young men who otherwise would have been abandoned, now living full lives as a result of someone picking them up and affirming the value of their life. If this bill were to progress to become law it would inevitably lead to some being classed as having a lower value of life. When we couple that with what has taken place in other countries with further reform, the proposed law will inevitably be reformed to the point where many addicts could legitimately be considered for assisted suicide on the basis of poor mental health or terminal decline in their body due to substance abuse.
There are other more sinister factors to consider as well. Recent research shows disturbing links between assisted suicide campaigners and groups that support depopulation whose stated intentions are to reduce the population of the world because (they claim) the earth is too heavily populated. I think you will agree that when we have a bill that is supposedly about having compassion on those in positions of great suffering, to find the campaign is in part being sponsored by those who want to push a culture of death is at the very least disturbing.
Overall, this is a dangerous bill as it stands. However, when you take into account the flawed safeguards, the stated intentions of assisted suicide campaigners, and evidence from other jurisdictions the proposals before parliament are far more concerning and if passed will result in radically changing our society for the worse. It is not compassionate or empathetic to assist in the deliberate ending of another person’s life. These proposals devalue life by reducing the value of life to be defined based on relative factors that change over time rather than upholding the absolute sanctity of life. For these reasons I urge you to reject these proposals and encourage other colleagues to do likewise.
Yours Sincerely
Stewart Green
