A new group of 'health professionals' has recently joined the growing number of 'societies' and 'forums' seeking legal permission for doctors to assist with suicide. (1)
Healthcare Professionals for Change (2) follows Libby Wilson's FATE (3) (Friends at the End), Michael Irwin's SOARS (4) (Society for Old Age Rational Suicide), Philip Nitschke's EXIT International (5) and the Secular Medical Forum (6) (also founded by Irwin) in pushing for a change in the law. Perhaps not surprisingly, HPFC is sponsored by the pressure group Dignity in Dying (formerly the Voluntary Euthanasia Society).
Prominent among the group's supporters are several well known medically qualified campaigners for liberalising the law on assisted suicide and abortion, including former MP Evan Harris, Simon Kenwright, Wendy Savage (who leads a similar doctors' pressure group on abortion (7)), David Paintin and Ray Tallis.
Evan Harris has campaigned for the legalisation of assisted suicide both through the British Medical Association and also as a Liberal Democrat backbencher in Parliament, but without success. Interestingly, he lost his Oxford West and Abingdon seat on a large swing in the general election this year to a candidate who opposed his views on a number of ethical issues.
Ray Tallis held the influential Chair of the Ethics Committee of the Royal College of Physicians (RCP) when that organisation briefly went neutral on the issue in 2005. After he had vacated the chair, and just before the debate on Lord Joffe's Assisted Dying for the Terminally Ill Bill in May 2006, the RCP reverted to opposing any change in the law after seeking the opinions of its members, a position it has held ever since. Responding to the launch, Sir Richard Thompson, (8) currently RCP President, recently outlined eloquently the reasons why a clear majority of the College's members still do not support a change.
They are in good company. Other official doctors' bodies opposing any change include the British Medical Association (BMA), the Association for Palliative Medicine (APM), the British Geriatric Society (BGS), the Royal College of General Practitioners (RCGP) and every other Medical Royal College that has expressed an opinion on the matter. The BGS earlier this year issued a strong statement (9) on assisted suicide about how a change to the law would remove protection from vulnerable elderly people. Christian doctors, in continuing to promote palliative care and oppose any change in the law, need to remember that those doctors who support socalled 'assisted dying' remain only a minority.
