UK Doctors Face Jail if They Refuse to Euthanize Patients
Pastor Dale Morgan
UK Doctors Face Jail if They Refuse to Euthanize Patients*
By Hilary White
LONDON, November 22, 2006 (LifeSiteNews.com) – In a statement yesterday
Lord Falconer, the Lord Chancellor of England has warned doctors that
they may face prison sentences if they refuse to starve and dehydrate
patients to death. Criminal charges of assault could be laid against
doctors or nurses who refuse to allow patients to die, even by removal
of food and hydration tube.
The Labour government unveiled its new guidelines for doctors to follow
the Mental Capacity Act that is to come into effect next spring.
The guidelines instruct doctors that a patient’s “advanced decision,”
what is often called a “living will,” that includes a request for
cessation of medical treatment must be followed even if it means the
patient will die. To fail to do so, in other words, to take action to
keep a patient alive, could result in criminal charges or heavy fines.
The government’s guidelines instruct doctors, “If you are satisfied that
an advance decision exists which is valid and applicable, then not to
abide by it could lead to a legal claim for damages or a criminal
prosecution for assault.”
British courts, in conjunction with jurisdictions around the world, have
determined that it is sometimes in the patient’s best interest to be
dehydrated to death by removal of feeding and hydration tubes. In many
parts of the world, including Canada, food and hydration is considered
“medical treatment” and as such can be, and frequently is, withheld on
the grounds that it constitutes “extraordinary treatment”.
This was the thinking that allowed the court-ordered killing of Terri
Schindler Schiavo in 2005.
Alex Schadenberg, Executive Director of Canada’s Euthanasia Prevention
Coalition, warned that the Act is a means of installing “euthanasia by
omission.” Schadenberg says the Act allows for the intentional killing
of patients who would not otherwise be dying by withholding food and
fluids or other ordinary medical treatments.
Schadenberg told LifeSiteNews.com that the distinction is often
misunderstood but is simple to grasp. “We’re talking about basic medical
care for patients who are not in imminent danger of dying and need
regular medical care. Withholding this care means death is caused by
that omission, and not by a disease.”
Dr. Peter Saunders, head of the Christian Medical Fellowship, concurs
saying that the worry is not for those dying patients who are already so
close to death that they could not benefit from food and hydration.
“But we are concerned that patients will make unwise and hasty advance
refusals of food and fluids without being properly informed about the
diagnosis. It is too easy for patients to be driven by fears of
meddlesome treatment and ‘being kept alive’, into making advance
refusals that later might be used against them.”
Dr Jacqueline Laing of London Metropolitan University, who called the
measures an obvious “cost-saving” effort on behalf of the National
Health, said the Act “inverts good medical practice by criminalizing
medical staff who intervene to save the lives of their patients with
simple cures and, in certain cases, even food and fluids.”
Schadenberg concurred with objections in the UK that this is a means of
installing legal euthanasia by the ‘back door.’He told LifeSiteNews.com
that he attended an international right-to-die conference in Toronto
this year where the discussions included methods of bringing forward
legal euthanasia by omission.
Schadenberg said “If we are now going to legally force passive
euthanasia to happen, the practice of active euthanasia will quickly
follow. It won’t be long before people watching the death of their loved
ones by dehydration will demand it.”
“Death by dehydration is horrible. It won’t take very long before
someone is saying, ‘why don’t we just give an injection, it’s more humane.’”
While the new Act insists doctors kill patients who might otherwise
live, the reverse determination was not upheld either by British or
European courts. Leslie Burke, a British man who suffers from a
degenerative disease that will one day render him unable to communicate,
went to court to obtain a guarantee that he would not be dehydrated to
death on the orders of doctors.
Mr. Burke argued that British guidelines left too much latitude to
individual doctors to decide when a patient’s life was no longer worth
living. He lost his case in Britain and the European Court of Human
Rights who said that adequate protections for patients already exist in
British law.