CAMPAIGNERS warned yesterday that the new Bill on assisted dying is “being rushed with indecent haste” after a group of nurses urged MPs to embrace a “historic opportunity” to change the law.
MPs will debate Labour MP Kim Leadbeater’s Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill on November 29 — the first such debate in the Commons in almost a decade.
The wording of the proposed legislation is expected to be published within days.
Seven current and former nurses sent a letter, published by campaign group Dignity in Dying, to MPs — urging them to support the Bill.
The signatories, including two palliative care nurses, a general nurse and a senior nursing assistant, said: “We are joined by a single wish — all of us want choice.
“For most, palliative care in hospice, hospital or at home will help them have the death that they want.
“But we feel we have to speak up for those for whom palliative care cannot relieve suffering, or provide the peaceful and painless death that everyone deserves.”
Care Not Killing chief executive Dr Gordon Macdonald, however, insisted MPs must reject the Bill, saying “the safest law is the one we currently have.”
He said: “This Bill is being rushed with indecent haste and ignores the deep-seated problems in the UK’s broken and patchy palliative care system, the crisis in social care and data from around the world that shows changing the law would put pressure on vulnerable people to end their lives.
“Indeed, the problems in end-of-life care, which have been chronicled in great detail in numerous academic and official reports, have been explicitly recognised by our new Health Secretary and many other parliamentarians, who want to fix the system, not change the law. We agree with them.”
Ms Leadbeater said the draft laws will feature the “strictest protections” against coercion anywhere in the world, with the Bill potentially running to more than 40 pages.
All countries which have legalised assisted suicide have subsequently loosened the criteria for eligibility, with children now euthanised in the Netherlands and Belgium, mental illnesses including depression and anorexia forming justifications for such deaths in the Netherlands and the US state of Oregon, and poverty driving patients towards medically assisted dying in Canada.