Church leaders have issued a warning against assisted suicide as proposed laws goes to vote today within the House of Commons.
Sarah Mullally, the Bishop of London and former Chief Nursing Officer for the NHS, has urged MPs to halt the passage of the bill “within the face of significant concerns from the medical occupation, palliative care specialists, and people facing the tip of life”.
She said the potential for abuse was “enormous” and that the bill was “unsafe and unworkable”.
MPs will today either vote Kim Leadbeater’s bill through for further revisions by the House of Lords or reject it altogether.
The bill would make it possible for terminally ailing adults in England and Wales with lower than six months to live to decide on assisted suicide.
Bishop Mullally said MPs have to ask themselves searching questions on the sort of society they wish to live in.
“If enacted, this bill would arrive amidst hugely inequitable access to palliative care and an NHS on life support,” she said.
“The potential for abuse and uninformed or coerced decisions is gigantic.
“This shouldn’t be about so-called progressivism v conservatism, or atheism v religion. This is in regards to the sort of society we wish to live in.
“The vision that this Bill presents is one during which the disabled and vulnerable are made to feel like they’re a burden, as if their lives are price less.
“This is, and has at all times been, an unsafe and unworkable bill. The promise that Committee stage would ‘iron out’ major concerns with the Bill has not been forthcoming.
“Instead, it has presented more unanswered questions, left more doubts, and seen so-called protections crumble away before even coming into law.
“I implore every Member of Parliament to ask themselves whether they honestly consider assisted suicide is true for the society during which we wish to live.”
Cardinal Vincent Nichols, head of the Catholic Church in England and Wales, raised concerns in regards to the way forward for hospices and care homes after the rejection of amendments that will have allowed them to refuse to take part in assisted suicide.
He said that passing the bill because it stands would depart them in a “precarious situation” because the rights of the person to demand assisted suicide were “more likely to trump the mission and values of institutions corresponding to hospices and care homes”.
“In other words, a right to assisted suicide given to individuals is very more likely to turn out to be an obligation on care homes and hospices to facilitate it,” he said.
“We fear that this bill will thereby seriously affect the availability of social care and palliative care across the country.
“Institutions whose mission has at all times been to offer compassionate care in sickness or old age, and to offer such care until the tip of life, may don’t have any alternative, within the face of those demands, but to withdraw from the availability of such care.
“The widespread support which hospices attract from local communities will even be undermined by these demands which, in lots of cases, would require these institutions to act contrary to their traditional and principled foundations.
“This tragedy can only be avoided by the defeat of this Bill on Friday.”
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