Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Wednesday, 22 November 2017
Joint Oireachtas Committee on Justice, Defence and Equality
Right to Die with Dignity: Discussion
9:30 am
Professor Penney Lewis:
The empirical evidence does not bear out that disabled people are discriminated against in terms of assisted dying. There is not a greater prevalence of disabled people accessing assisted dying in regimes that have been studied as in Oregon in the United States and the Netherlands. The most famous study has been carried out by Professor Margaret Battin, which I mentioned in my briefing paper.
Having said that, I recognise that our health care systems, and my only experience has been of those in the UK and Canada, are not perfect when it comes to providing health care overall but, in particular, for people with severe disabilities. It is important, if one is contemplating legalising, to think about what else one needs to put in place to ensure that any choice that is provided is a real choice. A couple of jurisdictions that have legalised have done so in conjunction with Bills that provide rights to palliative care provision, for example. Belgium and Luxembourg are the ones to which I refer. If someone is contemplating the end of his or her life he or she can make a real choice between palliative care and euthanasia. In Belgium, euthanasia is often embedded in palliative care practice so it is not necessarily a choice. One might well have quite a lot of palliative care and then eventually reach a point where one decides to avail of euthanasia and one's palliative care provider might be the one who provides one with euthanasia. One must think about legalisation within the context that one lives. It is up to the members to decide whether more needs to be done in order to ensure that disabled people have a real choice. Similarly, one must ensure that people who are terminally ill can make the choices they want about how they want to end their life and are not making that choice because palliative care is not available to them.
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