Stop The Suicide Amendment

John Smeaton writes:

For UK readers: Please telephone and/or email your MP and urge him/her to oppose a pro-suicide amendment tabled yesterday [Thursday] by Patricia Hewitt (former health minister) to the Coroners & Justice Bill.

The amendment (which is a new clause in the bill) will be debated on Monday afternoon (23 March) if selected by the Speaker. The amendment's effect would be to make it lawful to help anyone travel to a country where so-called assisted dying is legal so that they can commit suicide. Although this amendment is primarily aimed at those who are disabled or chronically ill, it applies to anyone who may be suicidal - old, young, depressed, in debt, disabled, etc. It will make all those who may be suicidal easy prey to unscrupulous people. Ask MPs to oppose and vote against the amendment.

MPs can be contacted by email via http://www.spuc.org.uk/mps and/or by telephone through the House of Commons switchboard number 020 7219 3000.

Please tell your friends and pro-life contacts. Please ask clergy to encourage their congregations to telephone their MPs urgently.

For further information contact SPUC by email to political@spuc.org.uk or by telephone on 020 7820 3129.

Responding to the BBC's reportage on the amendment, and Patricia Hewitt's interview this morning on the Today programme, Paul Tully, SPUC general secretary, said:

"This is a reckless and dangerous amendment that could lead to the deaths of many people if MPs do not read the text of the amendment carefully and recognise that it sanctions helping anyone to die - a teenager upset after failing exams or bullied at school, a businessman in debt, or a post-natally depressed mother. The euthanasia lobby have a track record of exploiting people who have lost hope and purpose in their lives. The appropriate response in a caring and civilised society is to help such people to regain their sense of self-worth and overcome suffering, not to tell them that they are right to want to die. But the MPs who have tabled this amendment are threatening the lives of all suicidal people whatever problem they face."

Text of amendment, tabled 19 March 2009 by Patricia Hewitt, Mr Crispin Blunt, Dr Evan Harris, Kevin Barron, Richard Ottaway and James Plaskitt:

"To move the following Clause:-
' (1) The Suicide Act 1961 (c.60) is amended as follows.
(2) After Section 2, insert -
'2ZA Acts not capable of encouraging or assisting suicide
An act by D is not to be treated as capable of encouraging or assisting the suicide or attempted suicide of another person ("T") if the act is done solely or principally for the purpose of enabling or assisting T to travel to a country or territory in which assisted dying is lawful.'."

Ah, yes, Dr Evan Harris MP, scourge of the Act of Settlement. So friend of Catholics? Right?

Catholics should have nothing to do with the machinations of Evan Harris (Honorary Associate of the National Secular Society, Vice-President of the Gay and Lesbian Humanist Association, member of the Board of Social Responsibility of the Church of England’s Diocese of Oxford) or his ilk.

They want to repeal the Act of Settlement, just as they wanted to repeal the blasphemy law, because they want to disestablish the Church of England, disestablish the Church of Scotland, abolish chaplaincies in the NHS and in the Armed Forces, abolish every civic expression of Christianity from Coronations to Remembrance Sunday ceremonies, end Christian RE and collective worship in state schools, and, in short, repudiate Christianity as the basis of the British State.

We must not allow ourselves to become their Useful Idiots.

As for Hewitt, The Daily Telegraph recently exposed what some of us have known, and been saying, for years: that she and Harriet Harman were as thick as thieves with the Paedophile Information Exchange and Paedophile Action for Liberation. Hewitt, of course, went on to be responsible for every social worker in England.

The roots of New Labour are in the academic or pseudo-academic sectarian Left of the 1970s - social, cultural and constitutional, not really or at all economic. There is still a bit of constitutional tidying up to do, but not only has every social and cultural measure been enacted, but they have all, along with the drastic constitutional changes, become a matter of "cross-party consensus". So you cannot vote against them.