You may already be aware that at their meeting on the 21st of June 2017 the BMA voted by 198 to 115 to continue their opposition to assisted suicide. While this provides some comfort to us, we must not lose sight of the fact that those who want to change the law continue to use every device available to them to resurrect the debate. Baroness Meacher recently reminded the House of Lords that problems associated with assisted suicide as set out by Supreme Court *are still not fixed” and there is yet another call for a Royal Commission.
In a recent article in the Guardian Newspaper http://bit.ly/29xHVaf the Kings Fund suggests that we should look at the evidence coming out of Oregon and the Netherlands which indicate that there has been a major increase in the numbers of people using assisted suicide. Linking this to the BMA’s recent decision, the article points out that in Oregon, “There is “doctor shopping”, whereby people whose doctors won’t participate in assisted dying (and two out of three won’t) seek lethal drugs from other doctors who are willing but have never met them before and know nothing about them beyond case notes. One such doctor issued no less than 27 prescriptions for lethal drugs in 2015 alone”.
The article also makes the point that is better to learn from other people’s mistakes than from your own. Very good advice!