The incoming Archbishop of Canterbury, Dame Sarah Mullally, has warned that plans to legalise assisted suicide would put vulnerable people in danger and present individuals with a false selection.
Dame Sarah was being interviewed by former Conservative Prime Minister Theresa May, who was acting because the guest editor for the BBC’s Today Programme.
Prior to her clerical calling, Mullally served as England’s chief nursing officer. She spoke of how she had witnessed the ultimate moments of many individuals in each her medical and spiritual capacities and that even with supposed safeguards, an assisted suicide law wouldn’t “protect essentially the most vulnerable in our society”.
She echoed the thoughts of one other former Prime Minister, Labour’s Gordon Brown, who has warned that by providing a completely funded suicide service, while still neglecting and underfunding palliative care, those with terminal illness wouldn’t be presented with a real selection.
Mullally said, “Those who support the bill discuss selection. I’m undecided we now have selection – we do not properly fund palliative care, we do not properly fund palliative-care research … I’m frightened that folks may make a choice for assisted dying because they are not having the appropriate palliative care or the appropriate social care.”
Theresa May has spoken out against assisted suicide within the House of Lords. During a debate last yr she said it made little sense for the federal government to have a suicide prevention strategy while at the identical time facilitating suicide via the NHS.
In Britain there are two separate pieces of laws proposing legally assisted suicide, one in Westminster and the opposite in Scotland’s Holyrood parliament.
The Westminster bill is currently being considered by the House of Lords, while in Scotland their bill is at Stage 3, meaning that a final vote on the problem could happen there as early as March, following further amendments and debate.
In a Lords debate on Kim Leadbeater’s Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill last September, Dame Sarah said the proposals were “deeply flawed” and that “to vary the law is to vary society”.
“Any law that introduces selection for a couple of will not be limited in its effect to only those few. If passed, the bill will signal that we’re a society that believes that some lives should not value living,” she said.
“The bill would grow to be our state-endorsed position, and our NHS can be lively in its delivery. It is the role of the House to scrutinise, but there aren’t any amendments to the bill that would safeguard us completely from its negative effects.”
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