Lord Falconer: Assisted Suicide Law Fails To Protect Or Punish
1st January 2012
Martin Beckford | The Telegraph
The peer and barrister, who served as Tony Blair’s Lord Chancellor, writes in The Daily Telegraph that the rarely used law against aiding suicide only favours those terminally ill people with the money and support to see their final wishes carried out.
Meanwhile others are being forced to take their lives early rather than facing the worry of their loved ones being arrested for helping them if they became incapable.
He says that even if “patchy” care for the terminally ill were improved in hospitals and hospices around the country, there would still be some who wanted to die at the time of their choosing “rather than face a period of reduced function and independence in their final illness”.
But Lord Falconer, who has chaired the independent commission on assisted dying that reports on Thursday, says that his experts “did not like much of what they saw” at Dignitas, the Swiss clinic where more than 160 Britons have been given legal help to die in “alien surroundings” over the past decade.
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Lord Falconer: Assisted Suicide Law Fails To Protect Or Punish
1st January 2012
Martin Beckford | The Telegraph
The peer and barrister, who served as Tony Blair’s Lord Chancellor, writes in The Daily Telegraph that the rarely used law against aiding suicide only favours those terminally ill people with the money and support to see their final wishes carried out.
Meanwhile others are being forced to take their lives early rather than facing the worry of their loved ones being arrested for helping them if they became incapable.
He says that even if “patchy” care for the terminally ill were improved in hospitals and hospices around the country, there would still be some who wanted to die at the time of their choosing “rather than face a period of reduced function and independence in their final illness”.
But Lord Falconer, who has chaired the independent commission on assisted dying that reports on Thursday, says that his experts “did not like much of what they saw” at Dignitas, the Swiss clinic where more than 160 Britons have been given legal help to die in “alien surroundings” over the past decade.
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