Date published: 2006/05/12
The BBC says:
The progress of a controversial bill which would allow terminally ill people to be helped to die has been blocked by the House of Lords.
Lord Joffe's bill would give doctors the right to prescribe drugs that a terminally ill patient in severe pain could use to end their own life.
But peers backed an amendment to delay the bill by six months by 48 votes.
Lord Joffe said the move was intended to end the debate, but pledged to reintroduce his bill at a later date.
The government has said it will not block a further hearing of the bill.
Peers had spent the day in a passionate debate on whether or not it was right to allow people who were terminally ill to be given drugs they could then use to end their life.
Lord Joffe had told the house that patients should not have to endure unbearable pain "for the good of society as a whole".
The crossbench peer said: "We must find a solution to the unbearable suffering of patients whose needs cannot be met by palliative care."
But Lord Carlile said the bill would end with doctors giving lethal drugs.
The Lib Dem peer said: "Everybody in your Lordships' house knows that those who are moving this bill have the clear intention of it leading to voluntary euthanasia.
"That has always been the aim and it remains the aim now."
The bill, which had its second reading on Friday, proposed that after signing a legal declaration that they wanted to die, patients could be prescribed a lethal dose of medication to take.
Only people with less than six months to live, who were suffering unbearably and were deemed to be of sound mind and not depressed would be able to end their life under Lord Joffe's proposal.
It's hard to see this bill becoming law anytime soon. There are just far too many control freaks in the world (and in this particular case, religious control freaks), who somehow see it as their duty to make people suffer a horrible death. Joffe is wrong that patients endure pain "for the good of society as a whole". How can it be described as good for society that people are effectively tortured to death. Somehow we can figure out the right thing to do when it comes to cats and dogs, but not humans.
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