The committee hearings for the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill got started this week, and not without controversy. Mainly that, so determined to keep out any organisations with legitimate concerns, Leadbeater has had to relent not once, but twice to allow experts and disability activists to be able to provide evidence after initially denying them.
Many things have been discussed within the Assisted Dying Bill committee, including how the proposed bill wouldn’t protect against coercion and the state of palliative care.
One thing that struck a chord with me though was a comment from Dr Sarah Cox, president of the Association of Palliative Medicine, about how the hearings have portrayed death.
Assisted dying bill has made people fearful of an ‘ugly and horrific’ death
She told the committee:
I would also make a very brief point about the discussion about what dying looks like that this bill has raised and the fact that the stories that have been told have suggested to many of the public that death is inevitably ugly and horrific and dramatic.
She continued:
Actually that has made many people fearful, who have been emailing me and saying “I’m now afraid of dying and I wasn’t before” and they may then choose assisted dying before they need to because they have had a fear instilled in them that death is inevitably horrible and dramatic.
Dr Cox was cut off by Leadbeater who insisted:
but those deaths do exist
While this is just another example in a long list of how much Leadbeater disrespects and tries to silence voices that oppose the bill, she’s also sadly right.
Death on a large scale is ugly and horrible. Having just supported both of my grandparents in the end of their lives, this something I witnessed and experienced first hand. But it’s only this way because of how bad of a state the NHS is in.
Chopped up NHS is why death is often traumatic
I always had a sense of how badly chopped up and sold for parts the NHS had been, but this really drove it home. The big issue we had with getting my grandparents’ problems taken seriously in treatment, pain relief, and the support they needed, was that all the services are not only underfunded, but massively disconnected from each other – there’s no cohesion and very little effective communication.
We’d be told one treatment route by an on-call doctor from my grandparents’ GP surgery, only for when the district nurses came to administer the treatment to find that they hadn’t been sent any of this information, or had the paperwork signed off. Things would be missed, and our pleas to help our dying loved ones ignored by staff who didn’t have the authority to do what we were asking.
One particularly traumatic moment involved waiting hours for an on-call district nurse to give Granda IV drugs, and neither of the two who eventually showed up knowing how to put a cannula in.
Palliative care were great, but there’s a long road between your loved one being terminally ill and actively at the end of their life to the point that they start receiving palliative care. That road is littered with gaps in services, uncooperative doctors who treat you like you’re drug-seeking and often ill, and an NHS that is so chopped up and disconnected that there’s no cohesion or consistency in services.
Assisted dying won’t give dignity in death
The Assisted Dying Bill was always going to be a hard one to cover, but having it take place whilst both of the people who raised me died slow, agonising deaths made it even harder.
It’s easy to see why so many who’ve supported loved ones at the end of their life are pro assisted dying. Nobody should have to comfort and try to talk down someone they love most in the whole world when they’re screaming out in agony and begging for relief.
We shouldn’t have to live with the trauma of hearing our relative screaming in our heads in the middle of the night, but due to an underfunded NHS system, we’re forced to.
The main argument for assisted dying is that everyone deserves dignity in death, and that’s something I massively agree with, but assisted dying won’t do that.
When my grandparents eventually passed, it was peacefully in their sleep, thanks to palliative care and their medical teams being able to administer sedatives and pain relief alongside the drugs. They were able to have this peaceful death due to the great work of palliative nurses.
But assisted dying isn’t like that. In the bill there’s no mention of either of those things alongside the drugs to end peoples lives (although many of the AD drugs are sedatives in themselves). There’s no way to confidently know that assisted suicide would be painless, as reporting from providers is so low.
Also, although it’s being ran on a platform of easing pain and suffering, there’s nothing in the bill that mentions using assisted dying as a means to relieve the pain or suffering of dying, and there’s also no requirement that the patient will have received any prior care.
First step should be properly funding the NHS, not assisted dying
The bill is proposing assisted dying as the first step when it should be the last resort.
The reason so many suffer at the end of their lives is because of an underfunded, carved up NHS system, not because they aren’t allowed to end their lives.
Allowing assisted suicide is a quick fix, when really, Labour should be doing the work to ensure that all people who are dying have more dignity and a greater level of care.
There’s a reason so many who’ve watched their loved ones die support assisted suicide, and it’s because we would do anything to take back the hours they spent crying in pain.
Everyone deserves a good death free from pain, but assisted suicide that poses a risk to disabled lives shouldn’t be the answer. More funding for an NHS that supports terminally ill people is.
Featured image via the Canary
