News from the Assisted Suicide Bill Committee room - an eight hour session, which began with a warning we might have to sit through the night in future to make the deadline the Bill’s backers have set. I regret the haste we’re going at. Anyway, here’s what happened today.
(I’ll be careful because it’s been suggested my tweets are stirring up a hate mob against colleagues on the committee. To be clear: I like and respect the backers of the Bill; their intentions are as good (or bad) as mine, and they don’t deserve any personal abuse.)
Amendments to help stop ‘doctor shopping’ - i.e. re-applying for AS till you find a doc who’ll approve - were voted down. The committee removed the requirement for docs to examine ‘all’ medical records, in favour of just those the doc ‘considers relevant’.
The committee rejected an amendment requiring the doctor to ask the simple question: why do you want an Assisted Death? As one MP put it, ‘it’s none of their business’.
The committee accepted a useful amendment to require the doctor to explain how the drugs would work.
But amendments requiring discussion of what docs should do if the ‘assisted death’ goes wrong were rejected. As I said here, it’s not clear whether the patient should be revived (against the purpose of the exercise), left alone to suffer (inhumane), or killed (illegal, for now).
We’re now onto the big debate about scrapping the High Court stage of the process - which over 60 MPs cited as a reason for supporting the Bill at Second Reading - and replacing it with an ‘expert panel’ which has judicial powers without judicial safeguards.
https://x.com/CNKAlliance/status/1899526390170415285
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