It’s time to rethink our dismay over assisted dying
‘It is a highly emotive issue … but we need far more nuanced legislation’
By the time you read this, I will be dead.” It’s a phrase familiar to the point of cliché, the stock scene in the opening minutes of a clunkingly predictable whodunit.
Except this time it’s fact, not fiction. These words, and a great many more, were written by Geoff Whaley in the days – perhaps hours – before he ended his life yesterday at a Swiss clinic, in the arms of Ann, his beloved wife of 52 years.
And the 80-year-old grandfather’s powerful evocation of the fear and misery caused by his treatment, not at the hands of the NHS but the hands of the police, shames us all.
An anonymous whistleblower revealed Geoff ’s plans to social services, who were obliged to contact the police. Wheels were set in motion, wheels that almost crushed the couple. “I want to impress upon you the anguish me and my family have experienced, not because of this awful illness, but because of the law against assisted dying in this country,” he wrote in his open letter to MPS.
“The law in this country robbed me of control over my death. It forced me to seek solace in Switzerland. Then it sought to punish those attempting to help me get there. The hypocrisy and cruelty of this is astounding.”
Geoff, from Chalfont St Peter, Bucks, was interviewed by Thames Valley Police, as was Ann, twice, under caution. She was told that she could face 14 years in jail for her role in “assisting” her husband’s suicide.
This comprised making a few phone calls to Geneva on behalf of her husband, who had lost the use of his hands. The police were apologetic, embarrassed even when they quizzed the couple, but they had to follow procedure.
My focus is elsewhere. I can’t help wondering over and over what could possibly have motivated the whistleblower? Was it genuine concern, self-righteousness, devout religiosity or just plain malice?
It doesn’t look like altruism, and the anonymity aspect fuels my suspicion that their intervention came from a place of petty mindedness, rather than public duty.
The letter of the law and the spirit of the law sometimes, as here, diverge. Who benefits if a distraught old lady is banged up for booking travel tickets or making a hotel reservation? There was no question that Geoff was being coerced. The former accountant was of sound mind, but his body was failing in the relentless, terrifying grip of motor neurone disease.
His wasn’t a decision made in haste or in the throes of mental illness. This case is a world away from the American teenager who sent dozens of text messages urging her depressed boyfriend to kill himself, and who has just been convicted to 15 months in jail for involuntary manslaughter.
Geoff ’s fate was sealed when he was diagnosed in 2016. He thought about the implications, researched the minutiae of MND and concluded he wanted to die with dignity, on his own terms, not wired up to bleeping machines, breathing via a ventilator, fed through a tube when he lost – as he invariably would – the ability to swallow.
Whether or not you approve of assisted dying – and it is a highly emotive ethical issue – this ghastly episode must never be allowed to happen again. The time has come to examine whether we need change in the law and, if so, what that should look like. Suicide hasn’t been a crime in this country since 1961. Assisted suicide and all shades of euthanasia are illegal, but I believe we need far more nuanced legislation.
I’ve written with revulsion about the appalling horror of Gosport War Memorial Hospital in Hampshire, where an independent inquiry concluded that as many as 650 elderly patients, some of whom were about to be discharged, could have died prematurely due to an “institutionalised regime” of prescribing and administering opioids without medical justification. Such nightmarish scenarios quite rightly cause alarm bells to sound when assisted dying is mentioned.
But the law is not so blunt an instrument that it can’t differentiate between the vulnerable and helpless and the terminally ill and resolute.
No couple should ever be subject to the same trauma as the Whaleys. She was informed that the end of her husband’s pain could signal the loss of her freedom.
He devised a plan B, which was to slowly, painfully starve himself by refusing all food. Make no mistake, Geoff Whaley wanted to take his own life – and for entirely logical reasons.
Frankly, if I were ever unfortunate enough to suffer from something as horrendous as motor neurone disease, I would want to the right to die, preferably at home in my bed surrounded by my loved ones, preferably legally.
Other countries have checks and balances, and rigorous standards of medical proof are required in order for a person to be allowed to end their own life. The risk of maintaining the present blanket ban is that a patient afraid of the legal ramifications after death will choose to end their life unassisted. This could be far earlier than they would wish to die, adding an extra dimension of distress.
Geoff ’s widow told the BBC as much in an interview. She could have had more time with him if he hadn’t needed to travel to Switzerland. Where is the natural justice in that?
I hope that Geoff ’s letter makes a difference in Westminster. I also hope that the whistleblower reads it and examines their conscience about a spiteful phone call no one should ever have made.