Assisted dying and coercion

[ArabellaScott]

This is live right now, so I'm not sure how well linking to it will work. Copy-pasting below, aswell.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/cy5k0qyled2t

'Rachel Clarke, a palliative care doctor, opts to answer a question about coercion and whether some MPs are right to feel concerned about this when considering the bill. (Earlier, MPs heard how medical and clinic staff are trained in safeguarding, though a retired GP acknowledged coercion was hard to spot.)
Clarke says she'd "strongly push back" on the suggestion coercion is something all medical staff are trained in spotting.
"I'm the kind of doctor who believes there is nothing to be gained by sugar-coating reality...about shortcomings, failings, areas where my profession the rest of the NHS are getting things wrong", she tells MPs.
"It is my clinical experience that not only are the majority of doctors not necessarily trained in spotting coercion explicitly, they're often not trained explicitly in having so-called advanced care planning conversations with patients around the topic of death and dying."'

I'm not sure why you think it's relevant whether you agree with it or not, I don't agree with it either.

But that is the argument behind this legislation.

It's rather rude to say I'm talking rubbish because you think you don't agree with the legislation.

You asserted that a state's obligations to the people include helping them to kill certain others (outside of war), Tempest. It sounds like a matter of opinion to me.

I've now realised you're setting yourself up as some kind of arbiter, with undeserved authority, on what may be said and in what ways. I don't need to know whether you approve of me, so will try and remember not to reply to you in future.

This is very disturbing look at the situation in Canada. (At least a year old so some things may have changed.)

https://www.aljazeera.com/program/fault-lines/2023/11/17/do-you-want-to-die-today-inside-canadas-euthanasia-program

Labour splits over assisted dying debate heat up ahead of crucial vote

Rows over ‘conscience issues’ of assisted dying and decriminalising abortion appear to be causing deeper splits within the Labour parliamentary party.

Ms Leadbeater had tweeted and quoted an article by Sharnee Rawson in The Guardian highlighting how her grandparents in Australia ended their lives together not long after their 70th wedding anniversary.

Ms Leadbeater pulled out the touching quote: “When they chose to die together, my grandparents wrote the final chapter of a love story spanning 70 years.”

But in a warning Mr Waugh responded: “I have the utmost sympathy for this family. But this article is precisely why more MPs are turning against the Assisted Dying Bill. Neither of the couple involved appears to have had a terminal illness, yet their deaths went ahead despite ‘strict’ eligibility rules.”

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/labour-splits-assisted-dying-kim-leadbeater-b2766055.html

That's about where things are now.

The important thing to understand is that initially, there were all kinds of rules and safeguards. These have been eaten away, often, though not exclusively, due to judgements from the courts.

Similarly to what you see with other issues, there is a strong lobby element, which receives quite a lot of funding from the government themselves, as well as some very large donors, they have huge campaigns to affect the public perception on these issues..

Similarly to what you see with other issues, there is a strong lobby element, which receives quite a lot of funding from the government themselves, as well as some very large donors, they have huge campaigns to affect the public perception on these issues..

That is so sad and disturbing, and in the UK whether or not lobby groups infiltrate and influence, the other real problem is the UK is no longer able to operate and scheme properly and with due safeguards.

A few days I posted a link about a women with a number of disabitilies who could just no longer face the incompetent and uncaring system that stopped her get the benefits she was more than due given her health.

Its the same with housing benefit.

So the idea that some private company will be outsources to run this system because UK Government are now wedded to this idea the private in cheaper and better is beyond frightening.

Too often the private model is the use of zero contract workers with little or no training, who are alienated from the work place to the extent that the people who should be their "clients" are just an irritating burden.

And as to the concept of safeguarding let alone empathy.

I am afraid I have not got the heart this morning to read the article from Canada but I will do.
Regarding the couple with the seventy year marriage, of whom neither had a terminal illness, again I am not reading the article just now, but we live in a context of gendered inequality (which I used to mean socially imposed hierarchies based on sex) and this was even more the case seventy years ago when this couple got married. Without a context of absolute equality, then I would always be concerned about a situation where both a man and a woman have taken an assisted dying (suicide) path. How much autonomy is in that decision? And yet, from the quote, it’s being presented as the logical end of a love story.

I do personally know of a case in Canada where an elderly man and woman applied to die together. The man was ill, the woman wasn't. In the end the woman died unexpectedly first, and ... the man withdrew his application and went on to live very happily with his children for another 10 years.

I don't understand how couples could apply to die together, if one of them isn't terminally ill.

It seems to undermine the 'strict criteria' argument. The likelihood of both of them being simultaneously in terrible terminal health seems very low.

It's just a suicide pact at best (at least one of them being coerced at worst) let's not romanticise it.

I don't want to live in a country where couples suicide is promoted as a sensible and fitting end to a life well lived. It's sick, and it's a far cry from 'only in cases of terrible terminal illness' that we're being sold.

Yes, it's a suicide pact, Aston. And you can tell it's romantic by the heart emoticon Leadbeter posted. Suttee/sati is also considered romantic, by some, I suppose.

Hear, hear.

I'm actually quite liberal on the idea of suicide myself. Even state assisted suicide.

What absolutely terrifies me, and the reason this Bill should be burned to ashes, is the further implications: for care and what we expect of it, for how society views ill and disabled people, for errors, for coercion, and for murder, to be quite frank.

It's actually enraging for any supporter of euthanasia or assisted dying that Leadbeater/the government have made such a fucking offensively awful hash of the Bill, because I do think it had the potential to be a compassionate thing, and necessary. But instead they've created a monster. And failed to listen to constructive criticism.

https://www.newstatesman.com/comment/2025/06/the-loophole-in-the-assisted-dying-bill-that-no-one-wants-to-talk-about#Echobox=1749453200

'this isn’t careful legislation. It’s a patchwork of half-truths and political shortcuts. Leadbeater has shrugged off international evidence, ignored warnings from the Royal College of Psychiatrists, and repeatedly misrepresented her own bill, not just to the public, but to her colleagues. Two clear loopholes were identified. Two targeted amendments were brought forward. The House didn’t find time to debate either.
The tactics are familiar: deflect, dismiss, delay. In committee, Dr Simon Opher MP advised colleagues not to “get too hung up” on anorexia. Kit Malthouse MP told them not to “labour under the illusion” that people with anorexia would “wander up and suddenly ask for an assisted death.” One witness dismissed the known deaths of women with anorexia, some just 18, as a “red herring” and “just one or two girls.”

https://news.sky.com/story/its-simply-not-safe-a-thousand-doctors-write-to-mps-urging-them-to-vote-against-assisted-dying-bill-13380847

'The letter says that while a debate is needed on end of life care, "this bill is not the answer".
It raises concerns that not enough evidence has been heard from doctors, people with disabilities and other marginalised groups.
"This bill will widen inequalities, it provides inadequate safeguards and, in our collective view, is simply not safe," it goes on to say, calling it a "deeply flawed bill".'

"We wouldn't consider banning abortions because someone might be coerced into one."

That's a bit of a disingenuous comparison.

While awful, being coerced into an abortion doesn't lead to an adult losing their life against their will (I know some believe the foetus also has equal right to life, but that's a separate argument).

As others have said, it's not just the potential for coercion that's so concerning, it's the government's apparent refusal to consider how to prevent it that is so worrying.

So because a minority may be coerced, many more must end their lives in intolerable pain?

Because of one person's pain others must suffer being coerced into dying?

I'm someone who is probably looking forward to a pretty grotty end with an escalating condition and who would quite possibly want to take advantage of such an option eventually, but it has to be done right or not done at all. As pp said, even when started with all the safeguards and the provisos and the careful thinking, it is obvious (particularly to FWR with their long experience of all this) how very quickly those are torn away, boundaries are pushed and the inch given ends up being a thousand miles taken.

Disability rights are in the process of being radically withdrawn. Kids with SEND are in the process of being stripped of funding (and their families much more likely to end up unable to work with those kids unable to go to school as a result.) Many are going to end up unable to afford the last couple of decades of their lives because they couldn't live and save a massive pension pot and benefits and pensions won't be there or enough. This needs thinking through. Are we really open to seeing a lot of people forced to escape poverty and unmet need through state death? People with no other options? To this being an answer to overcrowding and not enough money to go around?

Let's at least be honest about it and do some hard thinking before we open a door marked 'nice intentions with a lot of sentiment'.

TheOtherRaven · Today 15:38

Because of one person's pain others must suffer being coerced into dying

Hardly one person’s pain.

How many people would be acceptable collateral damage? Put a number on it.

But please don't do it in my name, because I would not take this option at the expense of someone else being essentially killed so I could exit via the NHS when I chose.

Who says intolerable pain is the only other option? In any case, individuals can already kill themselves - this is specifically about assisting someone to do it. They still have to eg take the tablets themselves. And that's not easy to do.

It's the coercion a lot of us are worried about. Like this I've been trapped in a hospital for NINE YEARS and staff tell me the way out is killing myself mol.im/a/14776139 via https://dailym.ai/android

How do you know it won't be the other way round?

Another criticism I'd level at it was that it probably as it stands won't actually help all that many people. '6 months or less' is an arbitrary and hazy criteria. So of course, this will need to be expanded. And then? How long will it take to extend to depressed people, as has happened in Holland, Canada, Australia? How long before people who ask for state disability benefits are given a pamphlet on assisted dying and encouragement to put themselves out of misery?

Meanwhile, so many of the the touted safeguards have been swept aside. This Bill has ignored anorexia, mental health issues, coercion, poor palliative care, concerns from disability groups, doctors, and legislators, questioning the way its been written and moved through parliament.

We could feasibly end up with huge scope for malpractise, further loss of the 'safeguards' they've bothered to put in - they've already scrapped the requirement for a judge to oversee it, which was supposed to be one of the founding principles. There's scope for private medicine to profit from assisting people to die. Leadbeater appears to want to glorify suicide pacts. The Bill will quite literally rewrite the NHS' founding document.

It's a travesty, manipulating the very real and tragic circumstances of people suffering, and it makes me feel ill the way they've done it.

I think in fact they've made such a hash of it that it is quite likely to be voted down, and that will be the loss of the best opportunity there has been in a long while to actually create a sensible, robust, properly and rigorously tested law.

In my experience, it has been.

Palliative care, wonderful in theory. Not in reality.

Paralysed people obviously cannot kill themselves.

But that's the point - where is the campaign for better palliative care? Instead it's all about assisted suicide.

My dad died recently. 91. He had a place in an NHS end of life facility under continuous care and he was incredibly well looked after, with great pain management at the end.

I'm very sorry for your losses, both of you.