By Lianne Kolirin
The first stage of the assisted dying bill passed has passed through the Commons, but a panel of experts at a Religion Media Centre briefing said this should not be the end of faith groups’ involvement with the issue.
The bill passed by 55 votes on Friday and now moves on for further consideration.
Days before the debate, 29 faith leaders signed a letter saying they were “deeply concerned about the impact the bill would have on the most vulnerable” in society. Allowing the move, they said, would open up “the possibility of life-threatening abuse and coercion”.
Signatories, among them senior Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus and Sikhs, argued that the right to die could “all too easily” end in the most vulnerable in society feeling they had “a duty to die”.
When asked if the passage of the bill signified that Britain was no longer a Christian country, Bishop John Sherrington, lead bishop for life issues in the Catholic church, told the RMC panel it was wrong to “jump to that conclusion” without analysing “how any religious leader has influenced the people who have written to their MPs, or influence the MPs themselves”.
Referring to the letter from faith leaders, he added: “There was a concern expressed together and that was very positive religious dialogue. Similarly, the voices of leaders of faith communities have been significant in shaping, helping people to form their conscience to motivate themselves to write to their MPs, who have had to then discern what they vote according to their own conscience and what they have heard from their constituents. I think it’s been very influential.”
Bishop Sherrington said it was important “to stand back and reflect and reason about the societal consequences of this legislation”. The majority in favour of the bill, 55, “was an indication that there’s a lot more questioning about it”.
He said he hoped to engage in “conversations about the various ways in which the bill is flawed” including the issue of safety, coercion and “the danger of the slippery slope”.
The Rev Professor Douglas Davies, director of the Centre for Death and Life Studies at Durham University, said Britain was “completely mixed” as a religious society and that was why clergy, as well as atheist leaders, “are really important”. The assisted dying issue had been caught up in a “jungle of emotion” which had overtaken the “jungle of logic”.
Emotion was at the heart of the issue, he said, with feelings of trust, fear and even the potential of betrayal by the NHS, which cares from birth to old age but at some point now, will say ‘No’.
“I’m very interested in how our lifestyle influences our death style,” he told the panel. “I think that people are influenced much less by reason than by life experience, what happens in their family.” Many people thought highly of reason, of logic and of rationality, “but in everyday life our guts influence much more”.
During the parliamentary debate, MPs heard many stories of terrible suffering at the end of life, which were extremely emotive. However, Dr Matthew Doré, secretary of the Association of Palliative Care Medicine, told the gathering it was “extremely rare” to die in terrible pain. His main concern was “the misconception of what dying looks like” and the “weighting of the rarity of those events is disproportionate” to the reality that could lead to people “ending their life pre-emptively on something which doesn’t happen”.
The overwhelming majority of palliative care doctors were against the bill, he said, adding that recent surveys estimate that four in five opposed it because they would most often be put in the position of being asked: “Kill me.” The conscientious objection within the bill was not “really that robust”, he said, and doctors would be put in a difficult situation.
That point was of particular concern to Dr Mansur Ali, senior lecturer in Islamic studies at Cardiff University. He said assisted suicide, as outlined in the bill, was a no-go area from an Islamic point of view, which would be hugely problematic because 17 per cent of NHS doctors were Muslim.
Assisted dying, he said, was not the same as switching off life support in cases of brain death. That, Dr Ali considered, was “withdrawal of treatment”.
The economic moral hazard theory also had to be borne in mind. “This theory suggests that if we have a certain kind of insurance, then we tend to act more recklessly,” he said. “For example, now that we have seatbelts, people might feel that they are safe and therefore drive a bit more recklessly.”
The introduction of the bill could, therefore, lead to clinicians not taking as much care as necessary of patients who were unwell, he claimed. “It changes the entire dynamic between the patient and the doctor and how care is seen.”
The Rev Karen Murphy, who has spent many years working as a hospice chaplain, said hospices had striven to change public perception of them and this could be jeopardised by the bill. “We’ve tried hard … to change that mantra: that it is only a place where people go to die,” she said.
“It’s so important just to keep people’s confidence that if they are admitted to a hospice, they are going to get good holistic care, good palliative care, which may mean that their symptoms are well controlled and they’re able to return home and live.” People in the final stages of illness were often fearful of death, which, she said, was often more difficult to endure than physical pain.
It was important to find “creative ways to help people think about what is unspeakable to say: the language of death”. She then told the panel of a very ill patient who was scared of death and spent all Friday watching the broadcast debate. When she asked him about it, he said “I’d want that” but that his family had been distraught at the prospect.
He died the weekend, she said. “We really couldn’t find a way of helping him to find some peace.”
Some hospices were run by religious organisations including the Catholic church, Bishop Sherrington said, which meant they needed to be able to “protect their institutional ethos”.
All the panellists agreed that much more needed to be done on how we talked about death, but also to the palliative care system.
Dr Ali said: “The NHS is, you know … breaking at the seams. I think, rather than spending a lot of money on this new law, more money should be spent on palliative care.”
Wholeheartedly agreeing, Dr Doré said assisted dying would be state-funded, while palliative care was largely covered by charity. “What message are we sending?” he asked. “I’ve spent my life trying to treat suffering, but treating suffering is not removing the sufferer and that distinction is blurred in the assisted dying debate.”
He said it was vital to consider fully the implications of “individual liberty versus societal safety”. The best analogy, he said, was to compare the proposed changes with that of the gun lobby in the United States: while the lobby campaigned for the right to bear arms, there were “societal consequences to having a lethal weapon in the house”.
“There’s more murders, more suicides, more accidental deaths,” he said. “If we introduce lethal medications into the house, there is going to be, I would suggest, the same societal consequences. And the decision society has to come to is whether the right to have assisted dying is enough, that we accept a degree of those incorrect deaths through those consequences.”
