Church of England calls assisted suicide plan morally unacceptable

A senior bishop has described plans to allow assisted suicide for the terminally ill as morally unacceptable.
By Martin Beckford, Social Affairs Editor
05 Jan 2012

The Rt Rev James Newcome, Bishop of Carlisle, said the best safeguard for vulnerable people would be to keep the existing law in place.

He also claimed the Commission on Assisted Dying, a group of peers and academics chaired by the former Labour minister Lord Falconer, was a “self-appointed” group that excluded anyone who objected to legalising assisted suicide.

It had “singularly failed” to prove that vulnerable people would be safer under the new proposals than under the existing law, which is rarely used but means anyone who helps another person kill themselves can be jailed for up to 14 years. the rest

In response Bishop Newcome, who speaks for the Church of England on healthcare topics, said in a statement: “The present law strikes an excellent balance between safeguarding hundreds of thousands of vulnerable people and treating with fairness and compassion those few people who, acting out of selfless motives, have assisted a loved one to die.

“Put simply, the most effective safeguard against abuse is to leave the law as it is. What Lord Falconer has done is to argue that it is morally acceptable to put many vulnerable people at increased risk so that the aspirations of a small number of individuals, to control the time, place and means of their deaths, might be met. Such a calculus of risk is unnecessary and wholly unacceptable.”