Following the House of Common’s vote in favour of assisted suicide earlier this 12 months, campaigners against the controversial practice have rested their hopes on the House of Lords potentially blocking the passage of the bill.
With the bill expected to succeed in the Lords on 12 September, one peer has made her concerns on the difficulty abundantly clear.
Baroness Claire Fox has written of her “serious reservations” concerning the proposal, saying that “it would fundamentally change the connection between the state and individuals”.
Of particular concern to Fox is the undeniable fact that many safeguarding proposals made by MPs were voted down by the Commons or not even discussed in any respect.
Fox also questioned the fairness of the parliamentary process, with the committee accountable for examining the laws “stacked with a majority of supportive MPs”. Even the experts called in by the committee to offer evidence got here disproportionately from those already in favour of assisted suicide.
When the laws reaches the Lords, Fox said she could be arguing for an amendment that may allow hospices and care homes to opt out of conducting assisted suicides. “For me, it is a red flag”, Fox wrote in a bit for The Academy of Ideas.
Care home and hospice residents, Fox argues, should find a way to live out their last days in peace without having their supposed carers offer them the prospect to commit suicide.
Rather than normalise suicide, Fox argues that additional resources ought to be allocated to palliative care and hospices. Hospices, she notes offer significant public savings as they raise a whole lot of their existing funding through charitable donations. Additionally, the common cost of a two-week stay in a hospice, per patient, is over £1,000 lower than in an NHS hospital.
Despite the numerous public support for hospices, demonstrated by two thirds of their funding coming from charity, they still remain under-funded.
They also face additional tax burdens. While the NHS is exempt from the rise in national insurance, charity-run and personal health and care providers are usually not. Fox, who’s politically unaligned, said she could be supporting a Liberal Democrat proposal to deal with this discrepancy.
She said that “politically, we should always resist the chilling reality of politicians pushing state-assisted suicide, on the very time when policies designed by parliament are so carelessly denying crucial end of life care and facilities”.
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