The Bishop of Shrewsbury has denounced the “false mercy” put forward in Lord Falconer’s Assisted Dying Bill and has warned that the sanctity of life is under attack.
Bishop Mark Davies said in a pastoral letter read out at all his parishes last weekend that the bill, due to receive its second reading in the House of Lords on 18 July, could lead to the deaths of large numbers of vulnerable people and will diminish the legal protection for some of the weakest members of society.
He compared its likely impact to that of the Abortion Act, saying: “In 1967, the politicians who legalised the killing of unborn children in limited and exceptional circumstances did not foresee how violating the sanctity of human life would lead to the wanton destruction of millions of lives”.
He described it as “incomprehensible” that politicians are considering a law that will diminish the protection of the aged and seriously ill at a time when there has been widespread concern about conditions in some hospitals and care homes.
“This legislation will be presented as a ‘compassionate’ measure, whose sole aim is to relieve the suffering of the sick and the aged,” he said. But it was “far from compassionate”. The proposed change will license doctors to supply lethal drugs to assist the deaths of those expected to live for six months or less.
“If Parliament allows exceptions to the laws which protect the very sanctity of human life, it would be impossible to predict where this will end,” said the bishop.
However, other religious voices disagreed. Rabbi Dr Jonathan Romain of Maidenhead Synagogue and author of the recently published Assisted Dying – Rabbinic Responses said: “There is no sanctity in an already dying person suffering unnecessarily, and a religious response would be to let terminally ill patients who wish to die without further pain to gently hand back to God the gift of life.”
He also challenged the bishop’s statement about predicting the consequences: “The same system being proposed by Lord Falconer has been in operation in Oregon for the last 17 years, and there has been virtually no change in the numbers opting for it – 0.2 per cent of all deaths or around 75 people – each year. Many people register, because they want to have the comfort of knowing it is an option if the pain becomes unbearable, but few pursue it.”
This week the president of the Faculty of Public Health, Professor John Ashton, said that doctors should be allowed to help terminally ill patients end their lives, and called for a change in law to protect them from prosecution.
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