A letter signed by 1,689 doctors has told Health Secretary Sajid Javid that “we would not take patients’ lives – even if they asked us to”. Opposing Baroness Meacher’s Assisted Dying Bill, “for the sake of us all, and for future generations, we ask that the law remains unchanged”.

SPUC’s Michael Robinson, Executive Director (Public Affairs and Legal Services), said: “This is a vital intervention by doctors who work with patients every day and have profound knowledge in palliative care for the sick and terminally ill. Government and the House of Lords must listen.”

Nearly 1,700 doctors say they will refuse to help patients end their lives. “The shift from preserving life to taking life is enormous and should not be minimised”, they said in a letter sent to Mr. Javid yesterday.

They also warned that “it is impossible for any government to draft assisted suicide laws which include legal protection from future extension and expansion of those laws”.

“Any change would threaten society’s ability to safeguard vulnerable patients from abuse”, the letter continued. “It would undermine the trust the public places in physicians, and it would send a clear message to our frail, elderly and disabled patients about the value that society places on them as people…

“The cruel irony of this path is that legislation introduced with the good intention of enhancing patient choice will diminish the choices of the most vulnerable.”

Notable signatories to the letter included Professor Johann de Bono, a professor in experimental cancer medicine at the Institute of Cancer Research, as well as Professor David Galloway, the former president of the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow.

Significant opposition to Bill

Baroness Meacher’s Private Member’s Bill is due to have its second reading in the House of Lords on Friday.

The Bill, opposed by SPUC, would allow terminally ill persons to receive assisted suicide if approved by two independent doctors and a High Court judge. The individual seeking to die would be prescribed lethal drugs, which they would take themselves.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson is said to be against the Bill, as reported by SPUC.

A similar bill in Scotland is currently undergoing a consultation, which ends on 22 December. It has been slammed by SPUC as “dangerous” and “irresponsible”.

Disabled MSP Pam Duncan-Glancy has warned Scots that persons such as herself will feel pressurised into choosing assisted suicide if any such bill is passed into law.

Labour peer Lord Philip Hunt has also come out against assisted suicide, also reported by SPUC, believing that Baroness Meacher’s Bill will also pressurise the vulnerable into choosing death.

“A monstrous shift from care to killing”

SPUC’s Mr. Robinson said: “Such dramatic interventions, from doctors and others who have first-hand experience of caring for the terminally ill, must be heeded, especially when assisted suicide is increasingly a looming threat in the UK.

“We must not underestimate the radical transformation of medicine and society that this Bill will impose on doctors and patients, and indeed on us all – a monstrous shift from caring to killing.

“‘For the sake of us all’, we must not sign the death warrant of the vulnerable. We must not turn doctors into executioners.”