Legalising assisted suicide in England and Wales could undermine suicide prevention, the government’s suicide prevention adviser has warned.
Speaking to the Guardian, Prof. Louis Appleby, the chair of the government’s national suicide prevention strategy advisory group, said: “I’m worried once you say some suicides are acceptable, some self-inflicted deaths are understandable, and we actually provide the means to facilitate the self-inflicted death.
“That seems to me to be so far removed from what we currently do and from the principle that’s always guided us on despairing individuals, that it’s an enormous change with far-reaching implications.”
Prof. Appleby also warned that the “suicide prevention consensus” is being put at risk by Labour MP Kim Leadbeater’s assisted suicide bill. He added that it wasn’t wrong to refer to such laws as assisted “suicide” rather than “dying”.
Another of Prof. Appleby’s concerns was that the initial “shock of diagnosis and that sense of ‘my life’s already over’” might make patients especially vulnerable to assisted suicide.
“Getting through that first period of shock and despair is something that’s possible. We have to be prepared to try to support the people who can get through that initial despair and get into a period of life which is acceptable to them”, said Prof. Appleby.
The Leadbeater Bill is currently being scrutinised at Committee Stage after MPs voted in favour of the draft law at Second Reading last year. If passed, the law will legalise assisted suicide for terminally ill adults given six months to live.
A similar bill is also being considered for Scotland, and it will be voted on later this year.
SPUC Comment
A SPUC spokesperson said: “Legalising assisted suicide will radically change the societal perception of suicide, sending the terrible message to suicidal people that they are better off dead. This undermining of suicide prevention cannot be underestimated.
“Once suicide is legitimated as a solution to life’s problems, people themselves will soon be made out to be the problem. An option to die will soon become an expectation and pressure to ‘choose’ death, which is no choice at all.
“Bad legislation may be defined as a law that only considers its immediate effect, not the long-term ramifications. The assisted suicide bills currently proposed in England and Wales, and in Scotland, are not only unwise, but they are also demonstrably dangerous to citizens who need care and good counsel, not a premature and needless death.”
