CHURCH figures have expressed concern after the primary steps towards making assisted dying legal in England and Wales were taken on Friday.
MPs voted for the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill to progress to committee stage, after a debate punctuated with personal stories, but with few explicit invocations of non secular arguments (News, 29 November).
In a press release shortly after the vote, the Bishop of London, the Rt Revd Sarah Mullally, said that she had been “deeply moved watching proceedings unfold within the House of Commons today. My prayers are with all those that have been affected, who’ve shared and heard their stories, and facilitated this debate.”
Bishop Mullally, who’s the C of E’s lead bishop for health care and a former Chief Nursing Officer for England, said: “The Church of England believes that the compassionate response at the tip of life lies in the supply of top of the range palliative care services to all who need them.
“Today’s vote still leaves the query of how this might be implemented in an overstretched and under-funded NHS, social care, and legal system. Safeguarding probably the most vulnerable should be at the center of the approaching parliamentary process; today’s vote isn’t the tip of the controversy.”
The Archbishop of York was reported within the Guardian as saying: “I regret this decision. It changes the connection between the state and its residents, between doctors and their patients, and inside families between children and their terminally in poor health relatives. Once begun it’s going to be hard to undo and control.”
On social media, the Bishop of Norwich, the Rt Revd Graham Usher, wrote that the results of the vote was “bleak for all who feared this, including the vulnerable, disability groups and people working in palliative care. The state shouldn’t be sanctioning death. Instead, higher palliative and hospice care, so we will die with care and dignity.”
In a press release posted in a while the diocese of Norwich website, Bishop Usher referred to other countries where assisted dying had been legalised, and the scope of those eligible later expanded.
“Concerns about how it’s going to work in practice haven’t disappeared. When the Bill eventually reaches the House of Lords, I’ll wish to see the way it has been amended from what MPs had before them today,” he said.
The former Archbishop of Canterbury Lord Carey has been one among the few outstanding C of E voices in favour of the introduction of assisted dying. On Friday, he was quoted in The Times as saying: “Now isn’t the time for celebration from supporters but for serious work across the House to get this law right so it protects the vulnerable, in addition to reducing pain, suffering, and indignity on the very end of life.”
He told The Sunday Express that he hoped that peers within the House of Lords wouldn’t use “dirty tricks” to stymie the Bill, but would show that it respected that the Commons had “spoken clearly”. He said that improving palliative care shouldn’t be disregarded, and called on the Government to take a position within the hospice system.
Several Roman Catholic bishops expressed their dismay on the Bill’s passing its first parliamentary hurdle. The Roman Catholic lead bishop for all times issues, the Rt Revd John Sherrington, an auxiliary bishop within the archdiocese of Westminster, said that the Bill was “flawed in principle, and in addition incorporates particular clauses which are of concern.
“We ask the Catholic community to hope that Members of Parliament may have the wisdom to reject this Bill at a later stage in its progress,” he said.
The RC Bishop of Shrewsbury, the Rt Revd Mark Davies, was quoted within the Catholic Herald on Friday saying that it was “a dark day for our country when the Christian witness to real compassion and the worth of human life is more needed than ever”.
The RC Bishop of Portsmouth, the Rt Revd Philip Egan, said: “I’m really sorry this has happened, though in a way it was not unexpected. It leaves me sad as it’s going to put an intolerable pressure on the elderly and the terminally in poor health, and undermine the trust normally placed in doctors and carers.
“I fear, too, the ever growing expansion of eligibility to other categories of individuals. Britain has now crossed a line: things is not going to be the identical again. May God help us.”
The chief executive of the Evangelical Alliance, Gavin Calver, said on Friday that the Bill would “normalise suicide in our society as a positive option and places probably the most vulnerable prone to abuse and coercion”.
He said that the Evangelical Alliance would “proceed to work to be certain that the Bill doesn’t grow to be law”.
