No They Don’t, Ray

George Pitcher writes:

I don’t believe Ray Gosling, the veteran documentary maker who claims to have suffocated a lover in hospital in his final stages of dying from Aids. His story just doesn’t ring true – how he just asked the doctor to leave him alone with his dying lover for a moment, how he then despatched him by suffocating him with a pillow (not easy), how there was no autopsy or investigation of the suspicious circumstances of the death. Gosling sounded like a fantasist, making bits of it up as he went along, saying “doctors are doing this all the time” and inventing this parallel universe in which “doctors leave some extra morphine in the drawer”. No they don’t, Ray.

Now he’s been arrested, he needs to put up or shut up. By which I mean that Gosling needs to say that he invented the story or provide details, such as the man’s name, the hospital at which it occurred and the date – and face the consequences. Or he needs to save police time by withdrawing the story. If he wants to support the assisted-dying lobby, he needs to provide some evidence for what he did. He is in the unusual position of having to prove to the police that he did it. Or we have to presume he didn’t.

As to his claims that “doctors are doing this all the time”, Gosling has done serious damage to an assumption that pro-euthanasia groups, such as Dignity in Dying, like to be made: That they simply wish to legalise something that already goes on. Firstly, doctors don’t suffocate people.

Secondly, Gosling has usefully focussed attention on the idea that doctors bring a patient’s life forward with the administration of morphine. The excellent Dr Victoria Wheatley was on the BBC’s Today programme, to tell an apparently astonished Evan Davies, who was unable to maintain the BBC’s pro-euthanasia line, that this allegation is nonsense. She calmly listed three myths: That death is a necessarily horrendous process; that because it’s horrendous, drugs should be used to end life prematurely; and that doctors believe these things and euthanise accordingly. In fact, Dr Wheatley said, responsible use of end-of-life medication doesn’t so much shorten life as mean that patients tend to live longer and die more peaceful deaths.

This is hugely important testimony. Because one of the things that lobbyists for assisted dying, such as Lord Falconer and Dignity in Dying, don’t want Parliament to consider is who will have to do the killing if they get their way. The answer is that the people that will have to do it, on behalf of everyone from the scheming inheritor to the “compassionate” lover, are doctors and medical staff, who don’t want to and, as importantly and as Dr Wheatley demonstrated this morning, don’t believe there’s any need to.