Voluntary Euthanasia Society claims medical backing
A new survey from the Voluntary Euthanasia Society (VES) claims shows that 56 per cent of British doctors would support the legalisation of assisted dying under stringent safeguards.
Today’s survey suggests that 27 per cent of doctors have been asked by a patient to assist in suicide or voluntary euthanasia, and 45 per cent believe that some health professionals in the UK currently accede to those wishes.
56 per cent said they believe that stringent legislation covering assisted dying would be the best way forward.
However, some of the later survey results appear somewhat contradictory, with 53 per cent saying there are no circumstances where doctors should be permitted to directly help patients who wish to die.
The poll comes on the day the British Medical Association (BMA) and the General Medical Council give evidence to the House of Lords committee considering Assisted Dying for the Terminally Ill Bill.
Lord Joffe’s Bill would give terminally ill patients the right to request medical assistance to die, providing they are a mentally competent adult.
The BMA will be speaking against the Bill, it points out that the issue has been debated many times at its conferences, and members have always come down against a legalisation of euthanasia.
Dr Evan Harris, Liberal Democrat MP and member of the BMA’s ethics committee is calling on the BMA to look at the issue again. He said: “I am not surprised that so many doctors want assisted dying to be properly regulated. When more than a quarter of doctors are being asked for help to die, and around half of doctors are willing to act on these requests, it demonstrates that the current law is both cruel and in part ineffective.”
Chief executive of the VES, Deborah Annetts, said: “This is an important survey. It puts beyond doubt the fact that the current law victimises both compassionate doctors and dying patients. Doctors are faced with the awful choice of either respecting the wishes of their terminally ill patients and helping them to die in the full knowledge that they could be prosecuted and face imprisonment, or abandoning their patient to yet more suffering at the end of life.”
