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Launch of the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition (EPC) in Europe November 13th Brussels

http://alexschadenberg.blogspot.ca/2013/11/belgian-euthanasia-researcher-admits.html.

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Baroness Butler-Sloss: Lord Falconer’s right-to-die bill a ‘blank cheque’ for suicide

Baroness Butler-Sloss: Lord Falconer’s right-to-die bill a ‘blank cheque’ for suicide.

 

By John Bingham, Social Affairs Editor Daily Telegraph

 

An attempt by Lord Falconer, the former Lord Chancellor, to relax the ban on assisted suicide would amount to asking Parliament to write a “blank cheque” for euthanasia, according to three of Britain’s most senior legal authorities.

Baroness Butler-Sloss, the former head of the High Court Family Division, Lord Carlile QC and Lord Brennan QC said the proposed change would leave vulnerable people at risk of abuse and threaten “public safety”.

The three peers warned that the plan, set out in a private bill before the Lords, would deny society the basic ability to use the law to single out suicide as something fundamentally to be discouraged.

They argue that the current law had a “stern face but an understanding heart”, striking a careful balance between deterrence against abuses and basic compassion for those in terrible suffering.

In a joint paper, they argue that altering that balance would be a “fundamental change” to the law – making it legal for people to “involve themselves in deliberately bringing about the deaths of others”.

But supporters of Lord Falconer’s bill insisted that retaining the current law would amount to “turning a blind eye to suffering” and potentially put vulnerable people at greater risk rather than less.

The former Labour Cabinet minister has tabled a bill which would enable terminally ill patients deemed to have no more than six months to live to be prescribed a fatal dose of drugs.

Largely modelled on a system operating in the US state of Oregon the bill would require patients to demonstrate that they have reached a “clear and settled intention” to end their life.

But while the bill sets out criteria people wishing to die would have to meet, the three peers argued that it lacked real safeguards as exact details of how it would work would be set out in guidelines to be drawn up later.

They argue that the use of the term “assisted dying” is a “euphemism” designed to make the concept more “palatable”.

“But knowing what the proposed safeguards are and assessing their effectiveness is an integral part of Parliament’s consideration of the bill,” they write in the paper published by the campaign group Living and Dying Well.

“As it stands, the bill is asking Parliament to sign a blank cheque.

They add: “We should not forget that public safety is itself a key principle of legislation: it cannot be offloaded onto others.”

The peers continue: “The law exists not only, or even primarily, to punish offenders but also to indicate those actions of which, as a society, we disapprove.

“One of those actions is aiding and abetting other people’s suicides.”

But they add: “Licensing doctors to supply lethal drugs to some of their patients to facilitate their suicides would represent a major change to the criminal law.

“If Parliament is to be asked to give serious consideration to such proposals, it needs clear evidence that the law as it stands is not fit for purpose.

“No such evidence has been produced.”

A spokewoman for Dignity in Dying, the campaign group which supports Lord Falconer’s bill, said: “This is not a question of patient safety versus compassion, nor about encouraging suicide.

“A new law, applicable only to dying people, would provide both choice to those suffering at the end of life, and greater protection to potentially vulnerable people through upfront safeguards.

“Those opposed to the assisted dying bill have every right to raise their concerns, but in doing so they also have a responsibility to explain why some dying people should have to suffer against their wishes.

“Doing nothing is not an option, turning a blind eye to suffering is uncompassionate and ignoring dying people taking matters into their own hands is unsafe.”

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