Campaigners against assisted suicide are demonstrating outside the Welsh Senedd today because it debates a motion asking Westminster to make the practice legal in England and Wales.
The demonstration has been organised by Distant Voices, Christian Concern, the Christian Medical Fellowship, and the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children (SPUC).
They point to countries where assisted suicide is already legal to warn that promised safeguards will “quickly” be eroded.
In Canada, for instance, assisted suicide was originally confined to terminally in poor health people whose death was “reasonably foreseeable”. In 2021, the law was modified to incorporate non-life threatening serious and chronic physical conditions. Today the country is within the technique of expanding access to individuals with mental health conditions.
The same trend has been seen in other countries where assisted suicide is legal. The demonstration today will highlight the case of a 61-year-old man who was euthanised within the Netherlands with hearing loss as his only listed condition, and a 64-year-old Belgian woman euthanised for depression.
Other cases include Canadian Paralympian Christine Gauthier who said she was offered assisted suicide in response to a request for a stairlift.
Lead organiser of the demonstration, Nikki Kenward from Distant Voices, said that assisted suicide “isn’t the reply”.
“The answer is to be cared for with absolutely good, palliative care,” she said.
Kenward suffers from Guillain-Barré Syndrome, which causes the body’s immune system to attack a part of the nervous system, leaving her locked in her own body and at one point she was able only to blink one eye.
She said that at times her life seemed unbearable and that it could have been easy to decide on assisted suicide if it had been available. Now she feels grateful to have seen her son grow up and get married.
“If you’d asked me then, I might have said I’d somewhat not live. Just considered one of my eyes would open and I feel if my family had been asked by the hospital they’d have opted to finish my life. I hadn’t seen my son for months and the considered him being without me broke my heart greater than what was happening to me,” she said.
Campaigners warn that changing the law will lead to some people believing they’re higher off dead.
Alithea Williams, of SPUC, said that the legalisation of assisted suicide “poses a grave threat to vulnerable people across the UK”.
“Any such laws will likely only be the beginning, as we’ve got seen in Canada,” she said.
“Once assisted suicide is permitted, the ethic of drugs, which is to care and never kill, will likely be modified endlessly.
“State-sanctioned death is even advisable in some quarters as a way to save lots of health services money and liberate hospital beds. This utilitarian view dehumanises patients and ultimately seeks to kill them.
“While this proposed law is framed as a matter of ‘selection’, evidence from counties where these methods of killing are lawful shows that patients often select death because they don’t desire to be a burden or because they fear poor treatment – this isn’t any selection in any respect.”
Dr Mark Pickering, CEO of the Christian Medical Fellowship said, “Choice, compassion and dignity are deceptive and slippery campaign slogans … The palliative care movement brings compassion and dignity to all at the tip of life; it gives reasonable selection without false hope.
“The thing that is really cruel and broken about our current situation is that 1000’s of people that die every year without access to the superb palliative care that may transform bad deaths into good ones.”
Andrea Williams, chief executive of Christian Concern said the evidence shows that “the slippery slope is real”.
“Once a rustic legalises assisted suicide, the ‘safeguards’ inevitably get widened and vulnerable [people] feel pressure to finish their lives,” she said.
“Helping people to finish their lives is neither compassionate nor caring. The UK Parliament and the courts have rightly refused to vary the law multiple times in the previous couple of a long time.
“MPs need to determine once more that human life deserves protection and care. We can’t be a society that believes some persons are ‘higher off dead’.”
