The Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill is a monumentally poor piece of drafting, unbecoming of the issue which it seeks to address. If we assume the point of principle is decided in favour of permitting ‘assisted dying’, the Bill proposes a framework which, insofar as it is comprehensible, is both unworkable and unethical. The following issues need to be addressed by Parliament.
Self-administration
If enacted in its current form, the Bill will make it permissible for a doctor to assist a person to ingest or otherwise self-administer the substance which will bring about the end of life; but it will not be legal to actually administer it. There is a modest attempt made to expand on this: it will be lawful for a doctor to ready the substance for administration; to ‘prepare a medical device’ to enable self-administration; and to ‘assist [the patient] to ingest or otherwise self-administer the substance’. The Bill seeks to establish a legal distinction between, for example,
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