The Assisted Dying for the Terminally Ill Bill.

In 1998, the Royal College of Physicians (RCP) and the Royal College of General Practioners (RCGP) established a joint working group on euthanasia chaired by Sir Stephen Tumin. The resulting position statement, which was approved by the RCP council but not by the RCGP,1 concluded that there was no reason for abandoning the profession’s established view that acts motivated by a clear intention to end a patient’s life could not be justified on ethical grounds. In particular, the working group rejected any change in the law on assisted suicide. However, it was accepted that ‘there is a wider professional and lay view on this topic that requires continuing review’. The requirement for such a review came earlier than perhaps the RCP might have expected when, in 2003, the internationally respected human rights lawyer, Lord Joffe, introduced a Bill which, if enacted, would legalise assisted dying. The Bill is currently being considered by a Select Committee of the House of Lords and the RCP was invited to give both written and oral evidence. Written evidence was submitted in September 2004 and the authors of this paper gave oral evidence in October 2004. 2 Over the last 18 months or so, the RCP Committee on Ethical Issues in Medicine and the RCP Council has been considering this Bill. It has appeared in two versions: the Patient (Assisted Dying) Bill of 2003 and the Assisted Dying for the Terminally Ill Bill of 2004. The first version was unanimously opposed by both the Committee and by Council. The second version of the Bill, which has taken account of criticisms from many quarters, including some observations made by the Ethics Committee, evoked a more divided response. While there has been extensive discussion of the two versions of the Bill in both the Committee and Council, there has been little opportunity to engage the College fellowship as a whole. The purpose of this article is to promote this wider debate. It is timely because, whatever the recommendations of the Select Committee, the outcome will almost certainly be a further Bill, modified in the light of the recommendations of the Select Committee, which will be brought before Parliament in due course. The Bill