Dr Lucy Thomas raises some interesting points in her defence of the House of Lords’ behaviour on assisted dying (Letters, 26 November). But it is a stretch to suggest that the 1,000 amendments that peers have tabled to the bill represent effective independent scrutiny.
What possible justification can there be for requiring every dying person – including a 90-year-old in their final weeks with advanced metastasised cancer – to provide a negative pregnancy test before their request is approved (amendment 458)? I am sure there are many peers who want to scrutinise the bill in a sensible way, but they are being thwarted by a handful who seem intent on stopping law change at any cost.
The bill as currently drafted – which MPs have amended and approved – is safer than any other in the world, including in its protections for doctors. Clause 31 ensures that if Dr Thomas doesn’t wish to support her patients with this option, she would be under absolutely no obligation to do so. There are many doctors, like me, who take a different view and feel that it is deeply unethical to rob dying people of their agency at a time when it matters most to them. Healthcare professionals who want to be involved will have an important part to play in the process.
I see a sad parallel between some in the medical profession trying to dictate what choices people should and should not be able to make at the end of their lives and a vocal minority in the House of Lords who think they know better than Westminster’s democratically elected chamber. Dying people are depending on parliament to find a way through this logjam.
Dr Jacky Davis
Chair, Healthcare Professionals for Assisted Dying; consultant radiologist
Simon Jenkins’s article on the assisted dying debate (Unelected Lords are blocking assisted dying: that’s a democratic outrage) and the correspondence that has followed illustrate the confusion that a handful of hardline opponents in the House of Lords are taking advantage of in order to wreck Kim Leadbeater’s bill.
However, as Dr Lucy Thomas points out, what is needed is legislation to permit terminal assistance to patients in indefinite and unbearable pain or distress. The bill now being dismembered by a group of peers makes the mistake, like its predecessors, of trying to meet the opposition halfway by limiting assistance in dying to those believed to have six months or less to live.
The consequence, as Dr Thomas says, is without logic and is giving doctrinal opponents a field day. If passed, it may be better than nothing, but it will do nothing for patients such as Tony Nicklinson, left by a stroke with nothing but the ability to ask to die, and denied that elementary mercy by the supreme court, which in 2014 decided it was a matter for parliament.
What is needed now is a responsible act of government. In exchange for Leadbeater’s well-intentioned bill, with its substantial Commons majority, ministers should promote a new assisted dying bill that drops the arbitrary life expectancy test and allows doctors to help patients who need and want it to bring a life of indefinite suffering to a close.
Stephen Sedley
Former appeal court judge
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