A disabled Peer in the U.K. fears she is already “on the list” of those likely to be offered assisted suicide in the future, as Parliament is set to debate Lord Falconer’s controversial bill later this year.
Baroness Campbell, who is a wheelchair user and has a degenerative genetic disease, warns against the “elasticity” of Belgium’s euthanasia law “that no one could have imagined a few years ago.”
She highlights a report from Lord Falconer published in January 2012, which said assisted suicide should not be offered to disabled people “at this point in time.”
“This sent a shiver down my spine,” Baroness Campbell says.
“At the moment they say they want assisted suicide for people who are terminally ill,” she continues, “but for how long will that last, and who decides what is terminal? If terminal illness, why not chronic and progressive conditions?
“And if chronic and progressive conditions, why not seriously disabled people?”
“I am already on the list,” she says.
Baroness Campbell questions whether the U.K. really wants to be considering assisted suicide for children in 10 years time, a route which Belgium has gone down.
Belgium legalized euthanasia in 2002, and earlier this month the king signed into law a bill extending the practice to children who are terminally ill.
“The existing law on assisted suicide rests on a natural frontier,” Campbell explains. “It rests on the principle that we do not involve ourselves in deliberately bringing about the deaths of other people.”
“What the proponents of ‘assisted dying’ want is to replace that clear and bright line with an arbitrary and permeable one,” she adds.
Lord Falconer’s assisted suicide bill, which is expected to be retabled in the House of Lords later this year, would allow doctors to help people who have less than six months to live to kill themselves.
Earlier this month, the minister responsible for care for elderly and disabled people, Liberal Democrat Norman Lamb, said he would vote in favor of the bill.
He told Sky News he feels the current system is “cruel” to people who want to assist in the suicide of a loved one without fear of prosecution.
