THE MP Kim Leadbeater’s Private Member’s Bill on assisted dying leaves a lot to be desired. Has anyone asked judges whether they can add to their already overburdened case-loads the responsibility of adjudicating whether an application for assisted dying should be granted? How long would it take a judge to come to a firm conclusion one way or the other when he or she will have to rigorously question the relevant relatives and the patient over this matter? There have been many well-documented cases where doctors have given their educated guesses about how long a terminally ill patient is likely to survive, only to be proved wrong. Many patients have exceeded the predicted length of time by a long shot.
Is it likely that one professional will contradict a colleague over such a prognosis? Once such a procedure is legalised, normalisation will settle in to become an expectation whereby eligible patients will be offered the option of that procedure. It will bed itself in as the duty to die – an indirect version of coercion. There is no-one who can safely say that strict safeguards will never slip to widen the scope of such a law .
Pressure groups will no doubt campaign to provide groups excluded under the terms of the original Act with the opportunity of enjoying that option. Dilution of the safeguards will be inevitable. Will the cost of observing such procedures and their execution fall upon the NHS and in hospital settings? How ironic that that will turn out to be within .
