United Kingdom: don’t resuscitate!” “

A law by which an invalid or very sick person may sign a warrant, delegating to a proxy the power to decide on his or her behalf, in the event of coma or the deterioration of his/her disease, whether he/she should be allowed to die of hunger or thirst or whether the drugs that enable him/her to live should be suspended: the proposal, which has already become law under Scottish legislation, forms part of the political programme of the Labour Party of Tony Blair, but has not yet been presented to Parliament at Westminster. While awaiting the bill, passive euthanasia in Great Britain has already been practised since the Nineties, thanks to a sentence of the Court of Appeal. By the “ Bland sentence“, the Court of Appeal and the House of Lords – Britain’s highest judicial authority – authorized the suspension of the drip-feeds and water that had kept Anthony Bland alive: the 17-year-old Bland had been in a state of coma ever since the brain damage he had incurred during the Hillsborough football stadium disaster in 1989. The “Bland sentence” has given carte blanche to at least a score of cases of “passive euthanasia” each year. On the other hand, active euthanasia, or the practice by which the death of terminally ill patients is directly induced, still remains illegal in the UK. According to the pro-life Movement, the cases of passive euthanasia are a good deal more frequent than generally supposed. It’s enough for the staff of a hospital to agree to leave a patient to die. In 1985, in a court case known as “the Doctor Arthur case”, John Pearson, a child suffering from Down’s syndrome, was rejected by his mother at birth. Dr Arthur, the paediatrician whose patient she was, prescribed a sedative to the baby that sedated him so heavily as to make him forget to eat. The child died after two days. Dr. Arthur was acquitted of the accusation of murder because the court ruled that he had limited himself to prescribing a medicine that has indirectly caused the death of the child, but had not incurred liability for an act of active euthanasia. The pressure groups that would like to legalize euthanasia argue that, since suicide is no longer a crime, anyone should be able to die with dignity and without pain. A physician may administer a strong dose of sedatives, morphine for example, to a patient, which may cause that patient’s death without the doctor being incriminated. This is the so-called “dual effect principle”, since the physician’s intention was allegedly to alleviate the patient’s suffering and not to kill him. In many hospitals it has now become common practice to write “Don’t resuscitate” on the clinical files of more chronically ill patients. Nurses and doctors will not try to reanimate them so as not to cause them further suffering. Yet the UK Court of Appeal rejected the plea for assisted suicide presented by the gravely ill Diane Pretty who would like her husband to help her to die. Although the issue in this case is assisted suicide, the Diane Pretty case is supported by many organizations that are campaigning for the legalization of euthanasia. The woman has now appealed to the European Court of Human Rights. If her case is accepted, the right to die, rather than to live, would for the first time be recognized as a human right. In the front line of the battle for the right to life in the UK are the Christian Churches, especially the Catholic Church and the Anglican Church. The “ Pro-Life Movement” groups together various organizations. One of the most active of them is the “Society for the Protection of the Unborn Child” (SPUC), closely linked with the evangelical wing of the Church of England. “Transforming human life into a consumer commodity which one can pick and choose as one likes will have very serious consequences for society as a whole”, explains Paul Tally, spokesman of SPUC: “We may seem compassionate by allowing people in a state of coma to die, but in this way we generate a mentality that marginalizes the elderly, the weak, the handicapped and the depressed. By the legalization of euthanasia, anyone seriously ill or in need of care could feel himself to be a burden and so ask to die”.