Hansard has published the full text of yesterday’s debate in the House of Lords. You can read it all, starting here
and, after a short unrelated business item, continuing here.
The speeches by bishops can be found as follows:
Bishop of St Albans
Bishop of Oxford
Lord Carey of Clifton
Bishop of London
Lord Habgood
and a short intervention by the Bishop of Winchester
Having read the speeches of the Lords spiritual, I wonder why they concentrate so much on the matter of autonomy, as though absolute autonomy is what is at issue in the question of assisted death. Surely, this is an exaggeration. No one is claiming absolute autonomy for anyone, nor is there, so far as I can see, a denial of responsibility for others in the proposal to allowed a limited form of self-determination in regard to the time of death. Indeed, I should have thought that that is precisely what such provisions would do — that is, express our responsibility… Read more »
The problem is that I never hear an alternative, given that the advance in medical care, and the known limitations of palliative care relief will lead this situation to become ever more frequent.
Yet again, the Church is utterly out of touch. No wonder it so often is ignored.
Having looked not only at the statements of the Lords Spiritual, but at several other statements to which they were responding, the focus is on autonomy because the debate has been about autonomy. No one seems to question the moral call for compassion, nor for the best possible pain control. The issue as debated is whether the rights of the patient to compassion include the rights to ask (and some would say to demand) this final step of another, specifically the health care professional. As a practicing hospital chaplain in the US, I can say with conviction that in most… Read more »
I couldn’t agree more.