The Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill was narrowly rejected, with 286 members of the House of Commons voting against the bill and 270 members voting in favor.
The bill, if passed, would have allowed for patients with less than six months to live to apply for assisted suicide. Then, two doctors and a panel of experts would determine if the patient qualified, Only adults would have been able to apply for assisted suicide. [...]
During debate, lawmaker and cancer surgeon Zubir Ahmed brought up concerns about accurately predicting the timeline of a patient’s prognosis.
“I have to be honest. When I am asked to prognosticate on whether someone has six months to live, I am as often wrong as I am right,” Ahmed, a member of the Labour Party, said. “It is no longer a good enough marker for the DWP to use in discharging benefits for life-limiting conditions, and I do not see why it should be a good enough marker for prescribing death.”
Ashley Dalton, also a member of the Labour Party, said there is no reason to expect that without access to assisted suicide, dying will be a horrible experience.
“In the campaign around this Bill, though, it seems to me that it is being implied that a person with a terminal illness will have a dreadful, painful death unless they have access to assisted dying. That is simply not true; palliative care in the U.K. is excellent,” Dalton said.
“Far too many people do not have access to the palliative care they need, but the idea that it is not possible to alleviate pain and discomfort is false. People have been terrorised—I have been terrorised—with tales of people vomiting up their own feces, as though this is commonplace during death. It is vanishingly rare … It is nothing short of irresponsible to scaremonger people like me into believing our deaths will be horrific when all the evidence suggests that, with access to good palliative care, deaths are, on the whole, gentle.”
by Kamden Mulder, National Review | Read more:
[ed. Shameful. Ask anyone: what are you more afraid of, death or dying? Palliative care can be costly, unpredictable, prolonged, and not just simple pain relief. What about choice, dignity, and the emotional burden on families? We routinely euthanize pets out of sense of love and empathy, so why not humans? From the moment we're born we're taught to control ourselves, then at the end of life the state takes that away. Shameful.]
