A Morally Acceptable Answer?

Yuan Yi Zhu writes:

In January 2023, television presenter Dame Esther Rantzen was diagnosed with lung cancer. By May, her cancer had reached stage 4, and by the end of that year she had joined Dignitas. The next year, she extracted a promise from Sir Keir Starmer that he would allow time for an assisted suicide Bill to be debated in Parliament.

Like many cancer patients, Dame Esther did not expect to survive very long. In 2023, she told a journalist that: “I thought I’d fall off my perch within a couple of months, if not weeks. I certainly didn’t think I’d make my birthday in June, which I did, and I definitely didn’t think I’d make this Christmas”. Certainly she had reason to think her time on earth was short: the average life expectancy for stage 4 lung cancer is one year.

Yet she is still with us today, more than two years after her diagnosis, thanks to Osimertinib, a decade-old “wonder drug” which inhibits the growth of her cancer. As she wrote last Christmas, despite the constraints imposed by her condition, “my own life is still worth living and enjoyable”.

If enacted, Kim Leadbeater’s Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill, which Rantzen has been assiduously promoting since its introduction late last year, will deprive many of the additional time she has enjoyed thanks to modern medicine. This is because the Leadbeater Bill would make assisted suicide available to patients whose death, as a result of a terminal illness, “can reasonably be expected within 6 months”.

But as Rantzen’s own case shows, to predict how long a patient has to live is a notoriously difficult – if not impossible – task. According to a 2017 study, doctors’ predictions that their patient was likely to die in 6 to 12 months were wrong 54 per cent of the time; their prognoses were less accurate than a coin toss.

All the Leadbeater Bill requires is that doctors should believe in their own assessment of a patient’s life expectancy. This is despite the evident unreliability of such predictions.

Moreover, if they are wrong and the patient undergoes assisted suicide as a consequence, there are no recourses – if the patient is dead it will obviously be impossible to ever know if the doctors’ assessments were right or not.

Even more worryingly, experts have warned that the Leadbeater Bill would allow those who suffer from severe eating disorders to be eligible for assisted suicide; they can claim it because refusing food and water would bring down their life expectancy.

Amendments introduced by MPs to prevent this dire possibility have been rejected by the pro-assisted suicide majority on the parliamentary committee in charge of the Leadbeater Bill.

How many wrongful deaths are we prepared to tolerate as a society? In the case of capital punishment, society’s answer has been “one is too many”. But the Leadbeater Bill’s promoters seem to be willing to tolerate a great many such deaths.

According to the MP, Jack Abbott, who supports the Bill: “there is no safeguard that we could possibly put in... that would 100 per cent make sure that there will never ever be any mistakes”. His colleagues must decide whether this is a morally acceptable answer.