CV NEWS FEED // While attending the G7 summit in Italy last week, United Kingdom Prime Minister Rishi Sunak expressed his support of assisted dying “in principle,” according to The Telegraph.
“I’m not opposed to it, in principle, and it’s a question of making sure the safeguards are in place and are effective,” Sunak said, according to the article. “That’s always been the conversation and the debate in the past and that’s where people have had questions in the past.”
The CEO of anti-assisted dying organization Care Not Killing, Dr. Gordon Macdonald, said in the article, “The Prime Minister’s position on assisted suicide and euthanasia hasn’t changed and these new comments do not reflect a change in his stance.”
“What they do show is (that) he recognises the difficulty in drafting robust legislation on this issue, because of what we see in the handful of jurisdictions that have introduced state-assisted killing,” Macdonald said.
Macdonald also said that opening the door to state-assisted dying “would also place huge pressure, real or perceived on terminally ill and disabled people to end their lives exactly as we see in the handful of places that have legalised assisted suicide or euthanasia.”
The Catholic Herald reported that Sunak “has already pledged to make parliamentary time for a free vote on changing the law to allow doctors to assist people to die,” but his statement at the G7 indicates “a further step” personally for Sunak and for “the overall approach by his party.”
Sunak, who has been prime minister since October 2022, is running again in the UK General Election on July 4. Sunak’s opponent for the position of Prime Minister is Sir Keir Starmer, who, according to The Herald, “has already made clear his even firmer support for a change to the law and the way the country handles assisted dying.”
The Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales has expressed its opposition to euthanasia and assisted suicide, and highlights on its website that this opposition has always been Catholic Church teaching.
The Bishops also criticized the use of the phrase “assisted dying” when it is used to replace the term “assisted suicide.”
The Bishops stated:
Replacing the word ‘suicide’ with ‘dying’ conflates the wrongful and intentional act of deliberately ending a life with the natural process of dying, implying that helping to deliberately end a person’s life is as normal and as familiar as assisting somebody by caring for them as they are coming towards the end of their lives.
The Bishops also noted that according to polling, public support of assisted suicide changes depending on the phrase that is used.
In January, the Bishops issued a statement listing 10 reasons that pro-euthanasia and assisted suicide legislation should be opposed, which can be read here.
