Rachel Gilmour
MP for Tiverton and Minehead
Dear Rachel,
Terminally Ill Adults Bill (End of Life)
I live in Wootton Courtenay on Exmoor and I am writing to you as my MP to express deep concern about the above bill. I believe that life is sacred and that each person is special, unique and gifted: it is the role of the state to help us all live full lives until the time of our death, rather than help us die prematurely. I am sure you will be receiving a lot of correspondence on this matter and so, for the sake of brevity, I will list the reasons for my concerns but will only develop them if they are not widely articulated elsewhere.
By way of personal background, I am a Church of England Bishop who has retired from full-time ministry but I am an honorary assistant bishop in Bath and Wells Diocese. Before retirement, I served both in the UK and abroad as Bishop of Tonbridge, a vicar and a teacher of theology. Part of my work as a vicar and a bishop has been with people facing death. I have lost count of the number of funerals I have conducted both from my time in Zambia, where I officiated at as many funerals for children as I did for adults, and also from my work in England where the majority of funerals have been for adults. I am very clear from this experience that nobody should have to die in pain and agony, which is one of the reasons I am opposed to this Bill. Here, I move to my first concern.
1. If focus is required on assisting people to die, then we divert our resources, attention and energy from ensuring that high quality palliative care is available to all who need it in order to avoid dying in pain. I was not surprised to hear recently that Wes Streeting is calculating how much of the NHS budget allocated to his department will be required to fund assisted suicide. The UK must have some of the most advanced research on palliative care in the world, though it is badly funded and poorly distributed. It would be a travesty if some of this much needed funding is diverted away from palliative care towards assisted suicide.
2. There will be more pressure, spoken and unspoken, on the disabled and elderly giving them the impression that they are ‘drains’ on the nation’s finances and that funds used on them could better be used on other, more pressing needs. I will return to this below (point 6).
3. The argument that the UK will have the most stringent safeguards in the world to prevent people being pressured into opting for assisted suicide has been shown to be unenforceable in the long-term. The proposed safeguards are impressive (though knowing the pressures which the judicial system as well as the medical profession are under makes one wonder how this extra load will be managed, let alone financed) but parliament can change laws, as has been shown in the Netherlands, Belgium and Canada.
4. The medical profession’s accuracy in predicting how long a person has to live is very mixed and places unfair pressure on health care professionals. A close friend of mine was discovered to have prostate cancer which had spread. Being told that he had a maximum of one year to live, he opted for palliative care rather than chemotherapy. He asked if I would preach at his funeral. That was eleven years ago – and he walks several kilometres a day even now.
5. The department of Health and Social Care is in the process of a far-reaching review and reform. I would hope the review would include the funding of hospices and acknowledging their contribution both in palliative care and in their articulation of the relationship between life and death in society. Our wonderful (in my experience) NHS is working hard to manage and even eradicate disease in order that we can live more healthily for longer, at the same time we, as a culture, need a mature discussion of death and dying and the hospice movement can offer significant insights. When I was training for my ministry in the 1970s, I had the privilege of spending a month on a training course in St. Christopher’s Hospice in South London. Dame Cicely Saunders, founder of St. Christopher’s and the pioneer of the modern hospice movement, worked from the hospice and led some of my training programme. Each life was valued and the hospice worked to enable each patient to live as fully and pain-free as possible until the point of death. In my last role as Bishop of Tonbridge, I had a close relationship with local hospices which maintain Cicely Saunders’ core values, appropriately adapting them to the contemporary context. If passed, the bill currently before parliament would diminish or even remove the need for this.
6. Finally, I have a deep concern about the way the bill changes the relationship between the State and the Citizens it serves: I am also concerned about the political context in which this debate is being held. ‘Growth’ is the buzzword emblazoned into the hearts and souls of all political parties. Economic growth takes priority over everything else. All that threatens growth needs weeding out and, significantly, the amount of growth that is achieved will determine who will hold the reins of power after the next general election. It is within this febrile atmosphere of economic growth that a new and relatively inexperienced parliament will, in a short, five hour debate, seek to answer one of the most important moral and political questions its MPs will probably ever have to face: should the state have the power to sanction the death of its citizens, a large number of whom are not economically productive? This will add to the pressures alluded to in my point 2 and place MPs in a dilemma. The role of the state is to enable its citizens to live fully, not to die prematurely. The passing of this bill will potentially give enormous power to the state which will ring alarm bells for many.
Thank you for your work as our MP. You carry a particularly heavy responsibility on your shoulders, especially at this time. You are in my thoughts and prayers.
Yours sincerely,
Image 1 – John Herzog.
Image 2 – Window by Marc Chagall, Tudeley Church, Tonbridge Kent.
Bishop Brian Castle 