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The House of Commons will hear over a hundred brief presentations Friday discussing the proposal from Lord Falconer, supported by the euthanasia lobby, to abolish the criminal offence of assisting suicide.
One of the many presenters to oppose the bill will be a man considered one of Britain’s most illustrious sons. Andrew Lloyd Webber, the global musical theatre wunderkind, was quoted by major British newspapers Friday admitting that during a bout of “deep depression” he had once considered suicide at Switzerland’s notorious suicide facility.
“What floodgates would open? Does it create a culture where older people are a burden?”
Lloyd Webber, the impresario artist, winner of almost every award in his field and who brought the world Cats, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat and Phantom of the Opera, and was diagnosed with prostate cancer and then underwent several back surgeries, said he went so far as to request the forms from Dignitas.
“There were days when I thought that I would do anything to get out of this,” he told the Daily Telegraph.
“I adore my work, and I thought that if I could not do that, then I had nothing more. I went through a moment of deep depression – that awful moment when you think that you must find a way out. I actually got the forms for Dignitas. With hindsight, it was stupid and ridiculous, but I couldn’t think what to do.”
He is opposing Lord Falconer’s bill, he said, partly from his own experience and partly from that of his mother who he said had expressed a wish to die before cancer led to her becoming a “burden” on the family, a fear that is commonly expressed by older British people. Lloyd Webber said he and his brothers disagreed and he thanked the law for helping his mother to die “peacefully” five years later.
“If people get to a point where their lives are so impossible, I would agree with the Bill,” he said. “What concerns me, and I suspect many others, is what floodgates would open? Does it create a culture where older people are a burden? In 20 years’ time, signing off on the deaths of old people might not be taken as seriously as it is now. I am totally unsure.”
Another opponent of the bill who is likely to be quoted today is oncology specialist Dr. Karol Sikora who told BBC’s Newsnight that the bill could end up reducing doctors to “death squads,” deciding who lives and who dies.
“I think the difficulty we have is that if you do implement the bill that’s proposed on Friday, doctors are going to have to make the death decision, you’re going to have to have essentially death squads, which is really out of the context of delivering good health care,” he said.
Another of today’s “presenters” in the House of Commons will be a man who died of cancer in 2012. Rev. Christopher Jones wrote a letter that has been circulated to every Peer saying that the last days of his life had been precious. Rev. Jones said he had considered suicide and was grateful that he had chosen to live out his last days.
“In hindsight, I now know that had I taken this course, I would have been denied the unexpected and joyful experience of being ‘recalled to life’ as I now am,” he wrote.
“In the light of my experience, it is of prime importance that the law should signal the priority of the preservation of life – not at all costs but as the default option,” he added.
He called the current law outlawing assisted suicide “an essential bulwark against well-meaning but unwarranted judgments about the value of life and the desirability of ending it in order to minimise or eliminate suffering.”
“In my view, suffering is inescapable in this situation, and ought not to be allowed to trump all other considerations, especially when palliative care is taken into account.”
A recent ComRes poll, commissioned by the Christian charity CARE, found 74 percent of British people are in favour of the bill. Another poll taken for ITV found 70 percent in favour and 10 percent disagreeing, but added that 47 per cent of respondents agreed that the proposed law would “inevitably” lead to elderly and vulnerable people seeking suicide to avoid “becoming a burden” to family.