“We must not undermine the right to life of terminally ill people”, says SPUC, after MPs and campaigners “took advantage” of recent suicide statistics to push an assisted suicide agenda on the grounds of “patient safety”.
Data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) has shown that terminally ill persons suffering from cancers, as well as chronic lung and heart conditions, are much more likely to consider suicide than healthy people.
ONS figures revealed that, of the 17,195 people who died by suicide from January 2017 to March 2020, 455 had chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, 465 had chronic heart conditions and 58 had cancers with a high mortality rate.
Responding to the figures, several MPs and campaign groups promoted assisted suicide as an answer to suicide.
Sarah Wootton, the chief executive of Dignity in Dying, for example, asserted that not legalising assisted suicide “is not only uncompassionate and unequal, but deeply unsafe for our terminally ill citizens, and it must act as a clarion call for Parliament to examine the full impact of the current law.
“This is not simply a matter for debate but of patient safety, of the utmost urgency.”
Similarly, Andrew Mitchell MP, the co-chair of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Choice at the End of Life, framed the statistics as a “damning indictment” of palliative care. He said it is “now incumbent that we act on this new evidence”.
“Disingenuous” abuse of the principles of medicine
SPUC’s Michael Robinson, Executive Director (Public Affairs and Legal Services), said: “The idea that assisted suicide, which kills a patient, ensures ‘patient safety’ is a grossly disingenuous and flagrant abuse of the English language and the principles of medicine.
“While these latest ONS figures are heartbreaking and must be studied carefully, turning to assisted suicide as an answer to suicide is not a solution but a surrender, which also underrates the wonderful work done by palliative care doctors whose efforts have been underplayed.
“As SPUC reported earlier this year, a recent Association of Palliative Medicine (APM) survey found that such doctors were very ‘concerned’ that a focus on ‘traumatic’ and ‘negative’ patient cases was being used to manipulate the British public into supporting assisted suicide.
“It is indeed very troubling that campaigners for assisted suicide are using emotive cases to push an agenda that, far from protecting patients by promoting and improving end-of-life care, would essentially give up on the vulnerable and quickly usher them to a premature end.
“Not only would this set a dangerous precedent for society, creating a culture of expectation (to choose death), thus cheapening life, but it would also contradict the founding principle of medicine, which is to heal, not kill.
“We must take these ONS figures very seriously, of course, but look to improving end-of-life care, as well as treatment for mental illness in general to combat suicide, while also accurately reporting on the successes of palliative care too. Death is not the answer to suicide.”