What could be the unforeseen consequences of legalising assisted dying? The repercussions of a change in the law could impact three groups of people in ways that are not being widely considered: those who hold to the traditional values of the Labour party, prisoners and the victims of their crimes and women.
Starting with women, in November 2024, the campaign group Other Half, produced a report titled ‘Safeguarding women in assisted dying’, in which they ‘explore a new risk that assisted dying brings: women coerced into being given death by the state.’
88% of killers are male
In a review of 100 ‘mercy’ killings or suicide pacts in the UK, Other Half found that 88% of killers were male, typically the husbands or sons of the victims. Their report states that the women ‘mostly have no expressed wish to die’ and 78% were not terminally ill, but disabled, elderly and infirm. Other Half found that the killings were triggered by the increased care needs of women and, despite the killers’ protestations that they ‘could not bear her suffering’, they ‘kill with terrible violence, with overkill frequent’.
The case of Tory councillor Douglas Laing bears many of the hallmarks of an anguished husband ending his wife’s misery. In 2022 Mr Laing wrote an emotional letter to the Sunday Times describing how, in 1998, he had given a fatal injection to his wife who was terminally ill with ovarian cancer. Dignity in Dying picked up on Mr Laing’s plight and ‘supported’ him. However, they quickly dropped him when it turned out that in 2017 Laing had bludgeoned his second wife on the head with a hammer, was arrested and jailed for three years. In how many other cases has the public’s sympathy for the perpetrator of a ‘mercy killing’ been misplaced?
An unforeseen consequence of Kim Leadbeater’s bill could easily be that the killing of sick, disabled or elderly women will be masked by assisted suicide laws, with murderous men hiding behind the legislation.
Abused women
Other Half’s remit is to ‘explore policy options that work for women’ and they clearly don’t think that assisted suicide works for women. And particularly not for abused women. They state: ‘women seem particularly vulnerable to the offer of suicide by state (sic). It is impossible not to imagine a scenario that a woman in abusive situations would find it easier to access NHS assisted dying than support to create a new life away from her abuser.’ Such a situation resonates loudly with SPUC, which is only too aware of just how vulnerable abused women are to abortion. We in the pro-life movement see only too clearly how women end up accessing NHS funded abortion because escaping from an abuser seems too difficult.
Cheating justice
How might a change in the law impact prisoners and their victims? A spotlight was trained on this dark corner in May 2024 in an article in ‘Psych’, the bulletin of the Royal College of Psychiatrists; Assisted death for prisoners and forensic patients: complexity and controversy illustrated by four recent cases.
One of the four recent cases cited in this article, began on 14 December 2021 in Spain, when a 45-year old, unmarried security guard, Marin Sabau, shot and injured three staff at his workplace, following an 8-year period of employment grievances. Less than two hours later Sabau was stopped by police, when he shot an officer in the arm. The police then shot Sabau three times. Sabau was unconscious for three weeks and underwent multiple operations, including a leg amputation.
Such were Sabau’s injuries that he requested euthanasia and on 28 July 2022, less than eight months after the shooting, he was killed by euthanasia. Sabau’s victims felt he had cheated them of justice by choosing to end his life before going to trial. A lawyer on behalf of one of the victims said: ‘He has the right to a dignified death, of course, but what about the compensation of the victims?’
This is the sort of tragic muddle which is likely to arise if Leadbeater’s bill reaches the statute book, albeit with prisoners requesting assisted suicide. While the authors of this article say that prisoners should be able to access assisted death on the grounds of equal healthcare rights, they also state that policymakers ‘need to acknowledge and be prepared for large numbers of prisoners seeking this route of death.’ Who is paying attention to this?
‘Withdraw support’
Finally, the Labour leader may come to rue giving his personal backing to assisted suicide. The famous phone call with Esther Ranzen, prior to the election last year, may have seemed to Keir Starmer like a boost to his public appeal. 147 Labour MPs voted against the Terminally Ill (Adults) End of Life bill at Second Reading last November. Party lines were down, with MPs from with very different political views united in their opposition to assisted suicide, most notably Sir Edward Leigh (Conservative) and Diane Abbot (Labour), the two longest serving MPs in Parliament.
At least one trade union sees support for assisted suicide as a betrayal of Labour party values. The General Secretary of the Travel and Transport Union signed a letter jointly with the chair of Disability Labour. In their letter, addressed to the Prime Minister, they call upon Sir Keir Starmer to ‘withdraw support for this legislation’, saying that ‘such legislation raises significant questions about the values we wish to uphold as a party’.
In a final flourish the two signatories state: ‘We call on you and the Labour party to reflect on the moral, ethical and social implications of this bill and to take a stand against it.’ Hear! Hear!
