The law on dying

SIR – Accounts of suffering experienced by terminally ill patients and those close to them are deeply moving, as I know, having been a volunteer hospice chaplain. But hard cases really do make bad law.

Apart from the philosophical arguments and the urgent priority of making good palliative care generally available, there is, as John O’Donnell suggests (Letters, December 8), the profound difficulty of putting in place effective safeguards. In this respect, the Assisted Dying Bill, which had its second reading in the House of Lords in 2021, may be said to be a triumph of form over substance.

The Bill – which, if enacted, would enable terminally ill adults to request specified assistance to end their own life – puts a great deal of trust in doctors, some of whom are strongly in favour of assisted suicide. But the certifying doctors, who may never have met the patient, simply cannot carry out the inquiries necessary to establish that a patient’s decision to end their life has been made “without coercion or duress”: such issues are not primarily medical. Doctors do not have the resources or expertise to conduct forensic investigations. Where, for example, is the border between a decision made under “duress” and one made under “influence”?

As a protection, the consent of the High Court is a chimera. The courts are already overburdened. Applications could become one-sided, box-ticking procedures. Even if there were some sort of formal, live hearing, who would be present and what would happen? The Bill does not allow for the involvement, at any stage, of the patient’s loved ones. No provision is made for opposition, nor even for entitling anyone (who?) to give notice of an application. Unless there were some obvious procedural flaw, in reality applications would be granted as a matter of course. His Honour Charles Wide KC Peterborough

SIR – In the early 1990s, for the law and medical ethics part of my degree, I had to write a dissertation on assisted death.

While gathering material, I came across a letter in the press from a retired GP. He stated that, for the whole of his career, he was resolutely against any form of intervention in end-of-life cases. Then his wife died of cancer, and he changed his mind. Jack Crawford Solihull