Advocates of assisted dying should not gloss over what has happened in Canada

SIR – I was not convinced by Dame Esther Rantzen’s response (Letters, March 15) to Michael Deacon’s reservations about euthanasia in Canada (Features, March 14).

Just one of many disturbing pieces of evidence is the report of the UN special rapporteur on the rights of people with disabilities, which expresses the rapporteur’s extreme concern about the operation of the Canadian law, including worrisome claims about people with disabilities being pressured to request a hastened death. The Dutch slid down euthanasia’s slippery slope. Canada is virtually skiing.

Professor John Keown

Kennedy Institute of Ethics Georgetown University Washington DC, United States

SIR – Michael Deacon states: “If Keir Starmer legalises assisted suicide, I fear we will all live to regret it.”

He cites Canada’s experience since 2016, when the Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID) legislation was enacted into law for those whose death was “reasonably foreseeable”.

Mr Deacon’s argument is that, since then, the option has become available for too many others. The expansion in the categories eligible for MAID has been seen as a “slippery slope”. This was also argued in a submission by the Church of England to MPs, in opposition to the legalisation of assisted dying in England and Wales.

Yet in Canada it has not been an irresponsible slide down a slippery slope. It was evolutionary and found to be necessary because the original law was too tight in its limitations.

The widening of the categories of ill people eligible for assisted dying was largely a result of challenges in courts of law, which found for the petitioners. This incremental process is normal across the whole spectrum of human activity, not least in science, the law and the church. It is a modifying function and not to be feared. Britain has an advantage in knowing and understanding the problems experienced in other jurisdictions, which should enable our parliamentarians to avoid such problems here.

Dr John Wells

Amersham, Buckinghamshire

SIR – Assisted dying is such a conundrum.

My father would have given his last breath to have kept his dying wife (an Alzheimer’s sufferer of 20 years) alive. However, when at 91-and-half years old he had a terminal diagnosis, all he wanted was to be with her by whatever means possible.

Sadly, he had a wretched death in hospital. Wretched for me, too.

Jill Harris

Lavenham, Suffolk

SIR – The assisted dying question is a clear example of when representative democracy needs to be put to work.

It is a complex, emotive and challenging policy area. Members of Parliament should be asked to consider it from technical and philosophical perspectives, and then be given a free vote. Any suggestion of a referendum (Letters, March 15) is foolish and dangerous.

Phil Stewart

London SW14 sir – Given how divisive the last referendum was, I shudder at the thought of another.

Richard Molyneux

Abingdon, Oxfordshire