The assisted-dying bill brings shame on parliament
Proponents have resorted to Orwellian doublespeak and outright misinformation to defend the indefensible.

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As the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill has worked its way through the committee stage, we have seen just how low the pro-assisted-dying contingent is willing to stoop in order to ram this legislation through parliament.
The committee of MPs is supposed to rigorously scrutinise the bill, which would legalise assisted suicide in England and Wales. Yet despite the obvious gravity of this, scrutiny and dissent have been kept to a bare minimum.
The committee stage has been stacked massively in favour of the assisted-suicide lobby from the start. Kim Leadbeater, the Labour MP who introduced the bill and has made assisted dying her pet cause, ensured that the MPs who sit on the committee are disproportionately on side. As Conservative MP Nick Timothy has pointed out, 61 per cent of the MPs sitting on the committee voted in favour of the bill, versus the 55 per cent who voted for it in November at its second reading in the Commons. Even then, as former MP Tom Hunt noted on spiked last week, the ‘opposition’ MPs selected by Leadbeater tend to be ‘the softest-of-the-soft opponents’ and lacking in parliamentary experience.
The expert witnesses, who were called to give evidence in parliament this week, were also carefully selected to deliver the party line. Of the nine legal experts who testified, all of them are in favour of the bill. The same is true of the eight expert witnesses called from countries where assisted dying is already legal. Incredibly, there were no witnesses from Canada at all, despite Canada’s Medical Assistance in Dying programme being widely recognised as a cautionary tale. Presumably, Leadbeater is aware that stories of elderly, disabled and impoverished people being encouraged to take their own lives rather than ‘burden’ the authorities wouldn’t help her case.
Unsurprisingly, the approved experts all painted a rosy picture of assisted dying in their home countries. When Labour MP Sean Woodcock asked Australian doctor Meredith Blake about patients wanting to end their lives as a result of feeling like a burden, she breezily claimed this wasn’t a problem. ‘That is not the evidence that we have got’, she claimed. When Woodcock then quoted official statistics showing that 35 per cent of people who died by an assisted suicide in Western Australia did indeed feel like a burden, she changed tack. This was just ‘part of their autonomous thinking’, she said. In other words, who really cares if elderly or disabled people feel pressured to end their own lives?
Alex Greenwich, MP for Sydney in the New South Wales Legislative Assembly, took the mental gymnastics even further. He insisted that legalising assisted dying is actually ‘a form of suicide prevention’. He nonsensically argued that ‘If someone wishes to end their life, voluntary assisted dying is not the process they are going to take’. He then tried to claim that palliative care can benefit from legalising assisted dying. Tory MP Danny Kruger, one of the few opponents of assisted suicide to have been admitted to the committee, had to remind Greenwhich that, in his state of New South Wales, the palliative care budget was cut by $249million AUD in the same year that assisted dying got a boost of $97million AUD.
If this wasn’t bad enough, Leadbeater has even tried to silence opponents to the bill. Not only did she minimise the critical voices sitting on the committee, but she also attempted to exclude the Royal College of Psychiatrists (RCP) from giving evidence. This likely had something to do with the fact that it has previously expressed concern over the contents of the bill, as well as because almost half of psychiatrists in the UK either oppose or strongly oppose legalising assisted dying. Leadbeater left the RCP off the list of witnesses, until fellow Labour MP and committee member Naz Shah raised an objection. Leadbeater eventually relented under pressure.
Even during the committee hearings, Leadbeater attempted to shut down criticism of the bill. At one point, Dr Sarah Cox, the president of the Association for Palliative Medicine, said the discussion around the bill had painted a picture of dying as ‘inevitably ugly and horrific and dramatic’, causing needless anxiety to palliative-care patients. Leadbeater responded by talking over her, insisting those dramatic, horrible deaths ‘do exist’.
Despite the blatant attempts to shut critics out of the discussion, many experts did thankfully manage to raise some alarm bells. A professor of Psychological Medicine, Ethics and Law at King’s College London asked important and difficult questions about how the law will determine who can and cannot consent to dying. Michael Mulholland, honorary secretary of the Royal College of General Practitioners, pointed out that the majority of GPs don’t want to be involved in the assisted-dying process. Legal expert Laura Hoyano said that the role of the courts and the appeals process envisaged by the bill needs to be ‘completely rethought’, as patients can only appeal when a request for an assisted suicide has been denied, while there is no mechanism for preventing an assisted death once it has been approved.
Will MPs take any of these concerns on board? The behaviour of the bill’s backers so far doesn’t exactly inspire confidence. In the committee stage, we have seen Leadbeater and her supporters employ Orwellian doublespeak, spread outright misinformation, and stack the witnesses and MPs in their favour. A scandal is unfolding in plain sight.
Lauren Smith is a staff writer at spiked.
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