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Friday June 9, 2006
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Non-Voluntary Euthanasia – Next Logical Step for Britain says Prominent Ethicist
By Hilary White
LONDON, June 9, 2006 (LifeSiteNews.com) – The TimesOnline reports that a prominent British medical ethicist has suggested it is time to “regulate” the already existing practice of “involuntary euthanasia”. Len Doyal, a professor of ethics at Queen Mary, University of London said that doctor-assisted deaths were already taking place in Britain on a “regular and recurring basis” and needed to be better regulated.
Doyal argues that the practice of involuntary euthanasia, more commonly referred to in British law as “murder,” already happens so broadly that it must be legalized for the sake of protecting physicians from prosecution.
Writing in the Royal Society of Medicine journal Clinical Ethics, Professor Doyal said that the starvation and dehydration of patients, a common practice in Britain and abroad, should be called what it is: euthanasia. “Doctors may not want to admit this and couch their decision in terms such as ‘alleviating suffering’ but withdrawal of life-sustaining treatment from severely incompetent patients is morally equivalent to active euthanasia.”
His suggestion to solve the problem of the suffering caused by death by dehydration, is to move forward to active killing by doctors. “Withdrawing feeding tubes, ventilators or antibiotics from incompetent patients may result in a slow, painful and incomprehensible death that could be avoided through the legalization of non-voluntary active euthanasia,” he writes.
Lord Joffe’s Assisted Dying Bill--which would give doctors the right to prescribe drugs to terminally ill patients, by which they could end their lives--has been delayed by six months after a vote in the House of Lords, but its supporters are not deterred. The euthanasia movement in British medicine has a strong foothold and is supported by the courts.
Last year, a disabled man, Leslie Burke, sued the National Health Service to obtain a guarantee that, when his degenerative condition reached a point where he could no longer feed himself, he would not be killed by dehydration. Mr. Burke lost the case, with NHS arguing that it would overturn existing ethical norms to make such a guarantee.
The argument for legalization on the grounds that doctors need protection from prosecution and that the practice must be made more ‘humane’ is one that created the current situation in the Netherlands where elderly people are reportedly afraid to enter hospitals for fear of being killed.
Doyal’s advocacy of active euthanasia will not be a surprise to observers of British medical ethics, where he is a prominent promoter of killing patients at any stage of life.
In October 2005, he submitted written evidence to the House of Commons Select Committee on Science and Technology, saying that “all constraints” on “reproductive freedoms” should be abolished, including the existing 24-week gestational limit on abortion. He also said that IVF and other artificial methods of procreation should be completely deregulated, including for sex-selection.
He was not opposed to cloning for “reproductive purposes,” but only advocated it after the technology has been sufficiently developed to avoid disabled children.
Doyal is a consultant to the General Medical Council, the Department of Health, the Royal Colleges of Surgery and Medicine and the Medical Research Council and a member of the ethics committee of the British Medical Association (BMA).
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