Life and Death Matters: Disability Rights and Incapacity Date: Monday 29 March 2010

Barristers and solicitors are entitled to claim 6 CPD points for attendance.

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Dr Jacqueline Laing: Tel: 0207 320 4930
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Claire Keefe: Tel: 0207 320 4950
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Statement by ALERT Against Euthanasia

GOVERNMENT END OF LIFE CARE STRATEGY

Open to misinterpretation?

From reliable evidence, including official enquiries, it seems that some hospitals and care homes sometimes get things wrong where the elderly are concerned. The government's new "Quality Markers" have been sent out for consultation. Could they be misinterpreted, perhaps by staff influenced by the new official spokesman for the elderly, Joan Bakewell, who thinks that there are too many of them?

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Commenting on Baroness Warnock's latest proposal, a spokesman for ALERT said today (Friday 19th September):

"Baroness Warnock will make life worse for people with dementia.  She is encouraging them to see themselves as useless eaters, and to seek death in order to benefit society.

"Should her policy be put into action, there would be a moral hazard for NHS workers.  They would have an incentive to let people with dementia feel miserable and helpless, rather than helping them, because that would encourage suicide requests and so free up beds."

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It seems compassionate to support a woman dying of a progressive illness who doesn't want to leave it too late to commit suicide. In fact, it is compassionate to no-one but ourselves to promote her death instead of the good care which helpless people deserve. We are not really doing ourselves a kindness, either, by deciding that a human life has no value. If Debbie Purdy, and others like her, can be put on the list of people society can do without, so can we all.

In a statement today, Elspeth Chowdharay-Best, Hon. Secretary of Alert said:

"'Dignity in Dying' (formerly the Voluntary Euthanasia Society) has sent out advice with their new Advance Decision by which signatories refuse 'treatment' in hospital if they should lose capacity.

"They say correctly that in order to ensure that an existing Living Will is binding under the Mental Capacity Act 'you must write the following statement in the section referring to the refusal of life-sustaining treatment: The decisions set out in my living will apply, even if my life is at risk as a result.'

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Where are we going?

The General Medical Council yesterday condoned the actions of a consultant neonatologist, Dr Michael Munro, in giving a drug to stop the breathing of two sick babies who refused to die.

Elspeth Chowdharay-Best, Secretary of ALERT, commented today: "We know from the history of the last century that highly civilised countries can turn to barbarism in a short space of time. In Nazi Germany the descent was led by the medical profession.
"The General Medical Council seems to have decided, like the Nazi doctors, that disabled babies have no right to live. We need to look harder at where we are going."

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By Richard Lamerton
Hospice of the Valleys
Tredegar, Wales

In Switzerland, if a person of sound mind requests help to commit suicide because they have an incurable physical illness, it is legal to kill them. Now the Swiss Federal Court has decided that someone with a mental illness can make a similar demand.

There are no safeguards or concerns for vulnerable people who may be pressurised to get out of the way. The person must only be able to make their own decision. A psychiatrist's opinion that the condition is incurable is enough.

One the killing of ill or depressed people becomes normal, the door is open for a culture which makes them feel they should not be a burden. That it is only decent to ask to be eliminated. An obligation to die will arise, and eventually it will be imposed on the weak and vulnerable and those who are perceived as being too stupid to recognise that their life is not worth living.

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The BBC assert that "most support voluntary euthanasia" based upon results from the British Social Attitudes Survey.

In response Dr Peter Saunders, campaign director of the Care Not Killing Alliance, said: "This opinion poll, which purports to show that a large majority of people would favour a change in the law to allow euthanasia, is misleading as it has been based on reflex answers to a yes/no question.

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17th November 2006

Commenting on "A guide for people who work in health and social care", issued by the Department of Constitutional Affairs, a spokesman for ALERT said today:

"The Government has outlined a one-way street towards death.

"This was created when the Appeal Court reversed the Munby judgment in the Leslie Burke case, at the behest of the Department of Health, and was codified in the Mental Capacity Act 2005.

"Patients' advance decisions must be respected if they refused treatment, but need not be heeded if assisted feeding and hydration ('treatment'), are requested. If there is no advance directive, the patient may still be deprived of fluid in his or her 'best interests'.

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Press Release 13th November 2006

"The Bishop of Southwark's submission to the Nuffield Council on Bioethics on the subject of sick babies may have been reasonable, but it was not harmless," said a spokesman for ALERT today (Monday, 13th November).

"It have already been taken to mean more than it did. In present circumstances, with hospital trusts under strong pressure to save money, and utilitarian medical ethics being preached from Princeton, it could lead to desperately worried parents being told 'There is nothing to be done for your child' when that was not true.

"In a recent Communicate Research opinion poll, 60% of the public were against leaving premature babies to die. We have not adopted the Nazi attitude to disabled children yet, but it needs to be fought all over again."

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