13 December 2024
Physician-assisted suicide should be the preferred term rather than ‘assisted dying’ when discussing the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill, writes Professor John Keown, senior research scholar in the Kennedy Institute of Ethics at Georgetown University, in this week’s NLJ.
The distinction matters, as he points out, and lawyers, in particular, should ‘eschew fuzzy euphemisms which conflate practices that are morally and legally distinct’. Professor Keown, who is the author of a book on euthanasia, ethics and public policy, sheds light on the arguments and legal and ethical dilemmas involved and recalls Baroness Meacher’s very similar bill, introduced in the House of Lords in 2021.
On the requirement to have less than six months to live, for example, he writes: ‘A young adult with diabetes and a normal life expectancy could evidently bring themselves within the Bill simply by deciding to stop their insulin.’RELATED ARTICLES
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