British PM Also Out Of Touch On Physician Assisted Dying

Gordon Brown: don't legalise assisted dying, Feb. 27, 2010.

Writing in the Telegraph, the Prime Minister says that changing the law to permit assisted suicide would run the risk of putting the frail and ill under pressure to end their lives.

His warning comes a day before Keir Starmer, the Director of Public Prosecutions, will set out final guidelines on assisted suicide. He is expected to make it clear that those who help others end their lives are unlikely to face court action if they acted out of compassion. The guidelines, which follow a series of high-profile court cases, are seen by many as effectively decriminalising assisted suicide by the back door.

Mr Brown says that while Mr Starmer should be free to clarify the legal guidelines on assisted suicide, the law itself should not be altered by Parliament.

Creating a legal “right” to die, no matter what safeguards were in place, would put unacceptable pressure on the sick and old, Mr Brown claims.

“Let us be clear: death as an option and an entitlement, via whatever bureaucratic processes a change in the law on assisted suicide might devise, would fundamentally change the way we think about death,” he says.

“The risk of pressures – however subtle – on the frail and the vulnerable, who may for example feel their existences burdensome to others, cannot ever be entirely excluded.”

Two attempts to legalise assisted suicide have failed in the House of Lords in recent years. Mr Brown suggests that, rather than heralding a change in the law, Mr Starmer’s guidance could weaken the case for new attempts to legalise assisted suicide.

“I believe that because of the clarification of the public interest factors now being discussed, and because of some important developments in care over recent decades, the case for a change in the law is now weaker,” he says. “I know in my heart that there is such a thing as a good death. And I believe it is our duty as a society… to use the laws we have well, rather than change them.”

Mr Brown also warns that any move to give doctors and nurses greater freedom to end the lives of the sick and old would harm the medical professions.

“The inevitable erosion of trust in the caring professions – if they were in a position to end life – would be to lose something very precious,” he says.

Mr Brown has consistently opposed legislative changes on assisted suicide, and the strength and timing of his intervention today could be seen as a signal to Mr Starmer not to go too far. Mr Starmer

will issue new guidance on the circumstances in which someone is likely to be charged if they help another person to die. Lawyers have pointed out that there is no precedent for prosecutors to set out in such detail the ways in which people can commit a crime and avoid being charged.

Pointedly, Mr Brown does not express support for Mr Starmer’s decision. “It is for him to clarify his approach and the Government has not made any representation to him,” he says.

Rather than alter the rules on assisted suicide, Mr Brown says that more must be done to address the fears many people have of a slow painful death, or of becoming a burden on their family in old age. “I believe that a duty of government is to minimise the fear of dying badly,” Mr Brown says.

A poll for The Daily Telegraph found last month that four out of five people believed that relatives should be allowed to help terminally ill loved ones take their own lives.

Mr Brown conceded that recent high-profile cases had bolstered public support for a change in the rules on assisted dying.

Earlier this year, a judge criticised the Crown Prosecution Service for bringing a case against Kay Gilderdale, who was found not guilty of the attempted murder of her daughter, Lynn, 31, who suffered from the neurological condition ME.

“Cases now dominating the public arena make harrowing reading and the first and most obvious response is to say that something must be done,” he says.

“But when these complex, individual and distressing cases are considered in detail, a solution that at first seems sensible – the right to die in a manner and at a time of one’s choosing – swiftly becomes less straightforward and more worrying.”

Aiding or abetting another to end their life is punishable by up to 14 years in prison under the 1961 Suicide Act.

Mr Brown said his thinking on the issue had been informed by the work of Dame Cecily Saunders, the founder of the hospice movement who died in 2005.

Her work brought about advances in palliative care, improving the lives of the sick and old in their final days.

Further progress in that area, Mr Brown says, is more important than changing the law to make it easier for people to die.

By James Kirkup, The Telegraph