By James Tillman
LONDON, United Kingdom, June 8, 2010 (LifeSiteNews.com) – In a sign that opposition to legalizing assisted suicide may remain relatively strong in Britain, 60% of those in attendance at a public debate sponsored by the Royal Society of Medicine (RSM) voted to oppose any relaxation of British law forbidding assisted suicide.
The debate came at the end of a long RSM-sponsored day of speeches both for and against the legalization of assisted suicide in the United Kingdom.
Professor David Jones, Director of the Centre for Bioethics and Emerging Technologies at St. Mary's University College, pointed out that in the Netherlands, where assisted suicide has been effectively legal since 1993, many patients are now killed without their consent.
A study that was published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal (CMAJ) this year found that nearly half of the nurses who had cared for euthanasia patients had been involved in killing patients without their "explicit request."
His concerns were echoed by Baroness Campbell and by Baroness Nuala O'Loan. Baroness Campbell, chair of the Disability Committee on the British Equality and Human Rights Comission, warned that “disabled people are fearful that when [assisted suicide] becomes an option, it will gain a credibility that will erode the resolve of many people experiencing personal difficulties."
“Not only will it enter our heads, it will also enter the heads of our family and our friends and ultimately I’m afraid those who hold the purse strings."
Baroness O'Loan pointed out that "when the Assisted Dying for the Terminally Ill bill was debated, more than 100 disabled and terminally ill people protested outside against the bill, for a very simple reason."
"They were afraid."
She said that in the Netherlands there was evidence that patients chose suicide because they feared they would be left in pain - because the assisted-suicide laws in the Netherlands worked against the institutional development of pain-reducing palliative care.
Speaking in favor of assisted suicide, Dr. Ann McPherson said that "assisted dying for someone who is terminally ill may be a celebration; it shouldn’t be seen as a tragedy.”
McPherson is terminally ill with pancreatic cancer. She added that she doesn’t "want to go somewhere like Switzerland, to Dignitas, to be able to die with dignity. I want to have the option of being able to be in my own home."
Dignitas, a Swiss assisted-suicide group, has helped make Switzerland a destination for "suicide tourism."
Last month the British Medical Association issued guidelines advising doctors to avoid all actions that could be interpreted as assisting or encouraging suicide. Specifically, it said doctors should not advise patients on what constitutes a fatal dose, suggest a suicide abroad, or help plan a suicide in any way.
The BMA's annual representative meeting also recently passed a motion pointing out that palliative care and other forms of patient care eliminated most persistent requests for assisted suicide.
Nevertheless, other reports have indicated that "continuous deep sedation" is being used as a form of "slow" euthanasia in the UK. Dr. Adrian Treloar, psycho-geriatrician and senior lecturer at several hospitals, has said that the so-called "Liverpool Care Pathway" is currently being used to kill patients through deep sedation combined with withdrawal of fluids.