| THE Archbishop of York, Dr Sentamu, said this week that pressure to legalise assisted suicide could eventually lead to the killing of disabled people. Speaking on The World at One on Radio 4 on Monday, he said that Parliament had twice rejected the legalisation of assisted suicide. MPs’ postbags had been full of letters from their electorate opposing a change in the law.
“I agree with Baroness Campbell of Surbiton, who is very severely disabled, saying that once you begin to open this particular door it won’t be long before you start having these mercy killings on the ground that somebody really can’t live with [disability].”
Baroness Campbell was “a most wonderful person to articulate the needs of disabled people”, he said. “I would rather listen to her than the voices of celebrities and the voices of 1000 in an opinion poll.”
Dr Sentamu said that the Church might not be saying clearly enough that “the individual person, however sick, however disabled, however poor — they are the most valuable person there is.
“They have got dignity, and . . . we should really care and look after them, and then go on to say ‘maybe medicine sometimes has intervened far too far’ when a natural death would otherwise have occurred.”
The novelist Sir Terry Pratchett, in his Richard Dimbleby lecture on BBC1 on Monday, called for tribunals to be established that would grant legal permission to individuals to be assisted to end their lives. An opinion poll of 1000 people, published on Panorama on BBC1 before the lecture, found that 73 per cent said family or friends should not face prosecution for assisting a suicide. An opinion poll of 2053 people by YouGov found 80 per cent were against prosecution.
The director of Care Not Killing, Dr Peter Saunders, said opinion-poll results were coloured by media reporting, “especially when (as here) emotive cases have recently featured in the news”.
Baroness Finlay, a professor of Palliative Care, said on the Today programme on Radio 4 on Monday that there were dangers in providing a “Get out of jail free” card from a tribunal. Patients and those who cared for them had “good days and bad days, and their circumstances could change between the time a licence was issued and when it was activated”. All the patients she had treated had told her that they had not believed how much quality of life they could regain.
The Crown Prosecution Service received 4500 responses to draft guidelines on the prosecution of an assisted suicide. They would become operational on 10 March, and a summary of the responses would be published, a spokesperson said.
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