12 hours ago
Everywhere assisted dying is introduced, the safeguards never prove effective
The emotion of watching the progress of the assisted dying Bill through Parliament will differ for every person watching it. For some, it will elicit grief or perhaps fear. For others, hope. For me, watching from afar, it's déjà vu.
Before assisted dying was legalised in New Zealand three and a half years ago, it was me speaking in Parliament against its passage. And the debate here is all too spookily reminiscent of what we saw.
We, like British MPs, were promised that the eligibility criteria would be tight and that claims of a slippery slope were a 'fallacy'.
My work on this issue began when I chaired the New Zealand Parliament's Health Committee inquiry into assisted dying. It was the largest inquiry ever undertaken by the New Zealand parliament and was our nation's most detailed public discussion on this topic.
Again and again, I asked questions and probed for the details of how proposed safeguards, which promised to ensure no mistakes were made, would in fact do so. Each time, I was assured that the laws would function to ensure horror cases simply could not occur, that the criteria would never be relaxed, and that this law would be the safest in the world.
Listening now to the UK debate, the lines from supporters here are redolent of what I heard back then. Kim Leadbeater, were it not for her broad Yorkshire tones, could well play a Kiwi parliamentarian, breezily dismissing the concerns voiced by my Committee and me.
And, if the language matches closely, the proposed 'safeguards' are near-identical. Central to the safeguards in the Kiwi law was the introduction of a body called: 'The End of Life Review Committee'. It broadly mirrors Leadbeater's proposals for a supervisory review body following the removal of the High Court safeguard.
In New Zealand, three experts – two health practitioners and one medical ethicist – sit on this Committee. Their role was to review assisted deaths and to scrutinise complex cases where something may have gone wrong. But things did not work out as they were supposed to.
One of the Committee's original members resigned over serious concerns about its ability to supervise the implementation of assisted suicide and euthanasia. Another member was pushed out, it is thought, because she was raising too many concerns about the operation of the new law. Two out of three members were gone.
Both subsequently went public and stated that the Committee's oversight of the law was so limited that wrongful deaths could go undetected. They said they were 'extremely concerned' about how little information they received relating to patients' deaths, leading to them feeling 'constrained to the point of irrelevance'.
In one deeply troubling case, the Review Committee was able to establish that a dementia patient, who did not speak English, was approved for assisted dying despite not having an interpreter present for their assessment.
The New Zealand experience is closely mirrored in every country where similar laws have been introduced in recent years. In our Antipodean neighbour, Australia, several states have legalised assisted dying in the last few years. Queensland's law was said to have taken extra time to progress through parliament to make sure the law would guarantee that every death was 'truly voluntary', 'without coercion', and with the strictest safeguards.
In fact, patients there have killed themselves with others' drugs and, in a scathing judgement, a coroner ruled that it was in fact 'not a well-considered law', but rather had 'inadequate' safeguards that had taken just '107 days to be exposed'. In another case, a woman appeared in court last week, charged with her husband's murder, having admitted to her family that she had administered him three lethal doses of drugs after he told doctors he wanted to 'go on' rather than die via assisted dying. She denies murder, and the case continues.
Meanwhile, Oregon – one of the first jurisdictions to legalise assisted dying – has seen its eligibility criteria stretched to include patients with anorexia, diabetes, or arthritis. Around half of those opting for assisted suicide now cite feeling like a 'burden' on others as a motivating factor.
None of the parliamentarians voting for those laws did so believing that they were dangerous. In New Zealand, my colleagues certainly did not do so. They had repeatedly been assured that the safeguards were absolute, inviolable, and complete.
But, if the experience of those who have passed these laws is anything to go by, British parliamentarians should think very carefully before passing the assisted dying Bill. Safeguards so often promised have proven so rarely effective.
If British MPs are not certain that they will work here, my urgent advice, having seen this play out before, would be to reject this Bill today.
