Kim Leadbeater’s assisted dying bill – the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill – is one of the most high-profile reforms to be proposed in decades, said The Independent; few issues touch people’s lives more “profoundly”. So the Labour MP’s decision to significantly alter the bill’s terms has inevitably caused disquiet.
Originally, the assisted dying bill required that cases not only be approved by two doctors, but that a High Court judge also sign off on it. Leadbeater insisted that this extra layer made her bill’s protections the most robust in the world. But it turned out that the provision had a major flaw: High Court judges wouldn’t have time to do more than rubber stamp each case. So the plan now is for applications to be reviewed instead by a panel made up of a senior lawyer, a social worker and a psychiatrist. This idea has merit: the panel’s broader range of skills could make the system yet more robust. But you wonder why all this only occurred to the bill’s sponsors at this late stage. What does it tell us about their decision-making until this point?
I’d say it has been “slapdash”, said Rachel Clarke in The Sunday Times. Whatever form the bill takes, it is vital it has checks to ensure people are not coerced into ending their lives. To this end, its sponsors came up with the ill-conceived judge-based safeguard – and overlooked a far better one: a multidisciplinary team (MDT) made up of experts who are already involved in the patient’s care, convened as soon as the patient asks to die.
MDTs are often used when it is unclear what is in a patient’s best interests. But what is now being proposed is not an MDT, because no one on the panel will be familiar with the patient – and its review will come at the end of the process, not the start, when the person is likely to be most vulnerable to coercion. Critics of the bill note that the MPs scrutinising it at committee stage have not even heard from an expert in coercive control, said Jamie Gillies on UnHerd. A sense is growing that this bill is being pushed through too hastily.
What is actually happening, said Polly Toynbee in The Guardian, is that the bill’s ideological opponents are not trying to improve it (which is the point of the committee stage) but to kill it, by gumming up proceedings with amendments and misleading MPs about its provisions.
With the panel, the bill will still have the strongest safeguards in the world, said Camilla Cavendish in the FT. And it is so narrowly drawn, a lot of sick people will still have to travel to Dignitas in Switzerland if they want help to die. MPs may feel the issue is so fraught, it is easier to do nothing; but the status quo – in which many terminally ill people end up starving themselves to death to escape their agony – is “indefensible”.