Dr Cajetan Skowronski writes against assisted dying saying the ‘right to die inevitably becomes a duty to die’. He adds: ‘Our elderly, frail patients frequently feel they are a burden’
Dr Cajetan Skowronski writes against assisted dying law change as a representative of Our Duty, Our Care group.
If Kim Leadbeater’s bill passes on Friday, it will do so because it has been rushed through before any serious scrutiny can take place. Our MPs have had barely two weeks to read it and will have only 5 hours to debate it.
For a sense of perspective, our foxhunting law was debated for over 700 hours. The Assisted Suicide bill will redefine the killing of patients with a drug overdose by an NHS doctor as a new therapeutic option.
Once we accept that principle, we have to accept that it will be extended from terminal illness to those who suffer chronic disease, or even mental suffering alone as in Canada, Belgium and Holland.
Even Oregon, which is held up as the stablest of assisted suicide states, now permits suicide for people with chronic conditions like anorexia or diabetes who stop eating or taking insulin. Anyone can be terminally ill if they refuse to eat. The six month prognosis is no safeguard.
Doctors are lousy at predicting life expectancy. We get 68% of six month prognoses wrong, and a third of patients were still alive over a year later.
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The right to die inevitably becomes a duty to die. Our elderly, frail patients frequently feel they are a burden, to their family, to the NHS, and to society overall. In Oregon, half of those seeking Assisted Suicide do so because they feel they are a burden to others.
No one can say how the bill’s “safeguards” against coercion and pressure will actually work. Care costs in the last year of life often exceed £100,000. If a family member who stands to lose a lot of their perceived inheritance to care bills chooses to launch a subtle campaign of encouraging assisted suicide, always under the veneer of care and compassion, how are we doctors supposed to detect it?
The government tells us that the NHS is broken (I agree) and that our social care system is broken (I agree) and that palliative care is only available to 75% of patients, leading to 100,000 deaths without access to this support per year.
Is this mess of failures, in which patients are the victims, not considered a very real form of “pressure”? Or are we so content with our failures that we now think the right solution is to end our problems by ending our patients?
