Safeguards against coercion in assisted suicide bill are ‘incredibly weak’, disabled academic tells MPs

MPs pushing for the legalisation of assisted suicide have been warned by a disabled academic that protections in the proposed bill that are aimed at preventing disabled people being “coerced” into ending their own lives are “incredibly weak”.

The Commons committee examining the terminally ill adults (end of life) bill – which has a strong majority in favour of legalisation – was taking evidence from Dr Miro Griffiths, one of the few disabled experts asked to give oral evidence.

He told the committee yesterday (Wednesday) of his concern that disabled people who were “struggling in their day-to-day access to sufficient support” would experience “societal coercion” to end their lives, and that the “incredibly weak” mechanisms to prevent coercion would not be able to detect such pressure.

Griffiths, co-director of the Centre for Disability Studies at the University of Leeds, said the lack of advocacy services for disabled people, and the “lack of support for disabled people to have accessible information about their rights”, meant disabled people could feel that assisted dying was their “only choice” when they were unable to access social care and healthcare.

He had told the committee in his introductory statement that he was “overwhelmingly against the principles, but also the various clauses set out within the bill, primarily because of my concerns of how it coalesces with the systemic injustices faced by the disabled people’s communities in the UK”.

The bill aims to legalise assisted suicide for those in England and Wales who are terminally-ill and have less than six months to live.

Griffiths highlighted the “nonsensical division” in the bill – which he said was a “fundamental flaw” – between terminal illness “and what constitutes being a disabled person”, as he said most terminally-ill people were likely to be considered disabled under the Equality Act.

The committee also heard the concerns of Chelsea Roff, a researcher and founder of the US-based charity Eat Breathe Thrive, who had a stroke due to severe anorexia as a teenager, and now works to help others recover from eating disorders.

She co-wrote a research paper that found that at least 60 patients with eating disorders, many in their teens and twenties, had died by assisted suicide in Belgium, the Netherlands, and the United States.

This included Oregon, the US state where assisted suicide is restricted to those who are terminally-ill, just as with the bill the MPs are examining.

She told the committee that the bill as it stands “puts a whole lot of people at risk”.

She warned that the bill makes no distinction between those who are terminally-ill and those whose illness can become terminal if they refuse or cannot access treatment, including someone with type one diabetes.

The bill would not, she said, “prevent someone who chooses to stop taking insulin from qualifying as terminal”, while there was also nothing in the bill to prevent someone who voluntarily stops eating and drinking from qualifying for an assisted death.

She said the same risk would apply to those with substance use disorders, and those with HIV/AIDs.

She told MPs: “Are you okay with a 19-year-old young man who decides to discontinue treatment qualifying under this bill? Those are the questions you have to ask.

“I’m not in principle against this bill, but you have to look at the letters on the page because they will be interpreted after the bill is passed and your constituents are depending on you.”

She added later: “The question before you is, ‘Could this bill have knock-on effects that affect some of your most vulnerable constituents?… How many deaths are you okay with?’

“If the safeguards fail once, that is a human being who maybe in a despairing moment was handed a lethal medication instead of the care and the treatment and the health they need.

“That’s what we’re talking about. So you really have to get this right because those people are depending on you.”

The committee also heard from another disabled academic, Professor Tom Shakespeare, professor of disability research at London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and a strong supporter of the bill because, he said, it was “restricted to terminal illness”.

He insisted that “most disabled people support the bill”, although he accepted that “politically, the disability rights community is against assisted dying, they always have been”, although, he added, “that does not mean that they reflect what ordinary disabled people want”.

He said the bill was “only relevant to people who are dying already” and “defines terminal illness very clearly” and that it gives them “choice and control over their lives” and “removes the fear and the reality of a difficult and unpleasant and undignified death”.

He accepted that some people would seek to coerce terminally-ill people into a decision on assisted suicide but that a clause in the bill that makes this a criminal offence would “scare off people”.

Picture: (From left to right): Professor Tom Shakespeare, Chelsea Roff and Dr Miro Griffiths

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