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The Observer, UK
Dec. 5, 2004
Jamie Doward and Jo Revill
observer.guardian.co.uk

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ReligionNewsBlog.com • Item 9636 • Posted: Tuesday December 7, 2004  

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Four-fifths seek legalisation of euthanasia for the terminally ill, reveals a poll that suggests a big change in British attitudes

One of the final barriers to legalising euthanasia in Britain was shattered last night as it emerged that four-fifths of disabled people want the law changed so they can be helped to die if they become terminally ill.

The surprising finding is from a new opinion poll that suggests there has been a huge change in British attitudes to mercy killing.

For years disabled rights groups have fiercely resisted any move to legalise euthanasia, saying it would put their members at risk of abuse. Some even said such a change would encourage the disabled to commit suicide.

Now, however, the poll of 2,000 disabled people by research firm YouGov found that 80 per cent would back a bill allowing a rational disabled person with a terminal disease to be helped to die.

The poll’s publication comes after a High Court judge refused to intervene last week to stop the husband of a woman with a degenerative brain disease taking her to a clinic in Switzerland for an assisted suicide, even though the man could be committing a crime. It emerged yesterday that the 46-year-old woman committed suicide with an overdose of barbiturates at the Dignitas clinic in Zurich the following day.

According to the poll, 77 per cent of disabled people say the law on suicide discriminates against them, chiefly because they may be physically incapable of ending their lives on their own.

Anyone helping another person to commit suicide can now be prosecuted under UK law, though a ban on anyone attempting suicide was scrapped in 1961.

The poll, commissioned by the Voluntary Euthanasia Society (VES), is a key plank in the case of campaigners backing Lord Joffe’s private member’s bill to allow doctors to help the terminally ill to die.

The campaigners say it shows huge popular support for relaxing the law. ‘More than four in five disabled and older people support the Bill, and they believe the law discriminates against those who are least able to exercise choice,’ said Deborah Annetts, the society’s chief executive.

‘That is why some are tragically driven to take their lives abroad. That is no sort of choice to face.

‘This survey has removed the last objection to changing the law in this country – and it explodes the myth that the elderly and the disabled cannot speak for themselves. The people of Britain are demanding the law gives them more choice.’

But a spokeswoman for the Pro-Life Alliance, which campaigns against euthanasia, questioned the survey’s validity and said society needed to focus on ways of making the last months of the terminally ill bearable rather than examining ways to help them die.

‘In a compassionate society there must be correct mechanisms of support in place. If you see someone standing on a bridge considering suicide you don’t push them off. Euthanasia is giving them that push,’ she said.

Last week’s case made headlines when Mr Justice Hedley lifted an injunction banning the unidentified couple from going to Switerland, and left it to the police to decide what action to take.

Tara Flood, of the Disability Awareness in Action (DAA) group, told the parliamentary select committee studying the Joffe bill that the idea of Britain adopting similarly relaxed, Swiss-style laws on euthanasia was deeply troubling and could ‘potentially create an open season for the killing of disabled people’.

She said a database kept by her group had recorded 16,300 violations against disabled people since 1990, nine per cent of which violated the right to life. Foreign companies offered assisted deaths to the terminally ill were running ‘modern day death camps for disabled people’.

This week, a group of peers will visit the American state of Oregon to study a law which allows assisted dying. Terminally ill patients who are mentally competent can take a lethal dose of barbiturates in their home.

The Oregon Death with Dignity Act was passed six years ago and is seen as a model for the Joffe Bill. Peers examining the Joffe proposals will meet doctors and politicians in Oregon on Friday.

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