Doctors Urge British Parliament to Reject Dangerous Bill Legalizing Assisted Suicide
The United Kingdom Catholic Medical Association, representing Catholic healthcare professionals across the nation, is urging Parliament to oppose a proposed bill to legalize assisted suicide. If it were legalized, the Association warns, the relationship between physician and patient would be at great risk of fundamental change.
“We believe it is wrong for doctors to help somebody to deliberately kill themselves and that such actions have no place in a compassionate society,” CMA President Mike Delany stated Nov. 22.
Delany asserted that assisted suicide is contrary to the Christian belief regarding the sanctity of human life. Further, he commented, assisted suicide harms the perception of what compassion really is.
“Compassion means to ‘suffer with’ another person,” Delany said. “It involves accompanying people, especially during sickness, disability and old age when we know that people are frail and vulnerable.”
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This compassion and accompaniment is a duty that all caretakers and physicians must uphold, the organization continued.
Delany also pushed back on the pro-assisted suicide argument that the practice “does not shorten life, it shortens death.”
“We reject [this language] entirely,” Delany said. “This changes fundamentally how we think about people in the later stages of life who are very much alive and have a right to the care they need to live in dignity.”
The bill would also enable doctors to bring up assisted suicide to patients who are “eligible” for it.
“No doctor should be allowed to initiate a conversation that leads to him or her offering to help a patient kill themselves,” Delany said.
He also warned about the weak provision in the bill regarding physicians’ conscientious objection to discussing assisted suicide with a patient. If a doctor refuses to do so, they will be mandated to recommend the patient to a physician who is willing to talk about it.
“This means that any doctor, upon qualification, will be required by law to co-operate in the deliberate taking of the life of another human being: if not in person, by referral to another doctor,” Delany stated. “No Catholic doctor could do that in good conscience.”
If the bill passes, Catholic hospices would also likely be forced to participate in administering assisted suicide.
“This would create major problems for our Catholic care sector, which has genuine compassion at its heart, and it would undermine further the provision of palliative care in this country,” Delany said.
The Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales published the CMA’s statement on its website, adding to the mounting opposition from Catholic leaders against the bill.
Delany concluded by urging, as the Catholic bishops have, that people contact their members of parliament on opposing the bill.
“On these grounds, and on many others,” he said, “I ask all Catholic healthcare workers to write to their MPs to oppose this bill.”
Parliament’s debate on the bill will take place Nov. 29.
LifeNews Note: McKenna Snow writes for CatholicVote, where this column originally appeared.
