Poll Claiming 50% of Brits Would Assist Suicide Skewed and Misrepresentative

LONDON, September 9, 2004 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Britain’s Voluntary Euthanasia Society (VES) has conducted a “poll” in preparation for testimony that begins Thursday before a House of Lord’s Select Committee on Lord Joffe’s Assisted Dying for the Terminally Ill Bill. The poll claims that nearly half of the public would break the law to “help terminally ill loved ones die.” Britain’s Campaign Against Euthanasia is urging people not to accept the claim.  The VES poll asked 790 adults about their opinions on euthanasia. The poll claimed to find that 82% of Britons want a change to the law; while only 11% remain opposed to a change in the law. Also, 47% claimed they would help a family member to obtain euthanasia if they were suffering, while 35% would not. The poll also suggested that more than half, 51%, would seek euthanasia for themselves if suffering unbearably, while 37% said they would prefer to let nature take its course.  Campaign Against Euthanasia’s Alison Davis, said “Typically the VES’s polls are presented in the media in distorted language to give them a pro-euthanasia bias. The VES do not say what they mean when drawing up the questions, which is actually that they want terminally ill and disabled people to be able to ask a doctor to kill them.”  Davis herself experiences severe and often uncontrollable pain on a regular basis, and was once thought by doctors to be terminally ill. At one time she did want to die and took active steps to end her life. She has spina bifida, hydrocephalus, emphysema and osteoporosis, and is restricted to a wheelchair. Had euthanasia been legal then, she would have qualified under the terms of Lord Joffe’s Bill. She says she would have thus been denied the opportunity to recover the will to live.  “The VES claim that 82% want the law to change to allow terminally ill people ‘medical help to die,’ but what they actually want is for doctors to be allowed to kill such people,” Davis maintains. “They do not say what they really mean because they know that people would not support a question saying ‘do you think doctors should be allowed to kill their patients?’ Yet this is what they really seek to legalize.”“The VES imply that the choice is between an agonised death or euthanasia. However, what vulnerable people like me really need is access to the best possible palliative care which will enable us to have a truly peaceful and dignified death when our time comes,” Davis concluded.  Read the related LifeSiteNews.com report:  UK Mulls Legalized Euthanasia – Committee Investigates Possibilities, which revealed that half of doctors surveyed had never had a patient request euthanasia.  https://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2004/jan/04011504.html   tv