Assisted suicide: MPs told to ‘facilitate care not death’

Campaigners are urging Parliament to prioritise improving end-of-life care instead of relentlessly pursuing assisted suicide.

Following Lauren Edwards MP’s pledge to bring forward identical legislation to Kim Leadbeater’s assisted suicide Bill, which stalled in the House of Lords, former Labour shadow minister Rachael Maskell noted that the issue would be “so unnecessary” if everyone had access to specialist palliative care.

Maskell told Premier Christian News that Edwards “didn’t follow the evidence” considering Leadbeater’s Bill was rejected by professionals representing “95 per cent of people working in palliative medicine”.

Palliative care

Roman Catholic Archbishop John Sherrington, lead spokesman for the Catholic Bishops’ Conference on life issues, noted that such concerns from medical professionals and disability rights groups remain unresolved.

“Reintroducing this legislation, once again, places the most vulnerable at risk”, he argued.

“Surely what is now needed to help the terminally ill is an improvement in compassionate, high-quality palliative care, and proper hospice funding”.

‘Disturbing’

Last year, Chelsea Roff, founder of eating disorder support group Eat, Breathe, Thrive, told politicians of sixty women in other countries who underwent assisted suicide due to their anorexia.

Now writing for LBC, she highlighted the story of Alyssa in California, who suffered from obsessive compulsive disorder, depression and anorexia. Doctors determined that she qualified as ‘terminally ill’ to die via assisted suicide.

“What remains most disturbing about Alyssa’s case is that her clinicians knew she was suicidal. She was explicitly described that way in the case we reviewed for our study. But once doctors concluded she qualified for assisted death, the focus of care shifted from suicide prevention to facilitating her death.”

Roff emphasised: “Alyssa was not a red herring. She was someone’s daughter, sister and friend. And if legislation allowing people with eating disorders to end their lives on the NHS eventually passes here too, no MP will be able to claim they were not warned.”