‘Thousands of doctors’ helping patients to die

We should be grateful, insists peer

THOUSANDS of doctors who secretly and illegally help patients die every year deserve thanks for their compassion, the head of Britain’s leading euthanasia group said last night.

Dignity In Dying chairman Baroness Meacher said doctors were ‘risking their freedom’ to ease people’s ‘unbearable’ suffering.

She also criticised the ‘inhumanity’ of a situation in which terminally ill people have to travel abroad to end their lives on their own terms.

But opponents warn of a slippery slope, claiming pro-euthenasia laws have been abused in other countries.

Last month it emerged a Dutch woman in her twenties was allowed to die because of mental health problems caused by sexually abuse as a child.

Baroness Meacher said: ‘We know that thousands of doctors do help patients who are terminally ill and who are [mentally] capacitous and who want to die. Thousands of doctors every year do help those patients to die.

‘They have sufficient compassion that they cannot bear to see their patients continue to suffer unbearably, and so they are prepared to risk their own freedom to help their patients – and I would say thank you to every one of those doctors.’

MPs voted on legalising assisted dying last September – with a majority rejecting it.

But surveys have suggested a significant number of doctors break the law to help patients die, and there is widespread public support for euthanasia.

Baroness Meacher told The Sunday Times she would arrange for her own assisted death in Switzerland if she had a terminal illness, adding: ‘I don’t say that with any relish at all. To have to get on a plane to take your own life in a strange place feels inhuman to me.’

She said personal experiences made her push for new legislation, including a friend in her seventies who ended her life 18 months ago by refusing food and water. ‘For her to have decided it was worth depriving herself of water tells you how much she wanted to die,’ she added.

Baroness Meacher said she was also driven by her mother’s ‘horrible death’ at the age of 92, adding: ‘Any amount of palliative care would not have alleviated her situation. She would have been much better off if she had been able to avoid the last two weeks.’

At least 166 Britons travelled to the Dignitas clinic in Switzerland to end their lives in the six years to December 2014, Dignity In Dying claims.

Former director of public prosecutions Sir Keir Starmer said last year the rules he helped devise on assisted dying needed softening to stop people having to ‘traipse off to Switzerland’.

His guidelines from 2010 prevent doctors helping people to die – although a family member or friend can avoid prosecution.

But of more than 100 files received by the CPS since 2013, only one led to a conviction. The charge carries a 14-year jail term.

He said the law ‘does not strike the right balance between allowing those with a “voluntary, clear, settled and informed wish to die to be assisted by someone acting out of compassion” and protecting those vulnerable to being pressured to kill themselves’.

Alistair Thompson, of the campaign group Care Not Killing, said calls for assisted dying to be legalised had been ‘overwhelmingly rejected’ by the British Medical Association and the Royal Colleges, adding: ‘They know such a move would have a devastating effect on the trust of the doctor-patient relationship.’

‘ Settled and informed wish’