Former British prime minister Gordon Brown has come out strongly against assisted suicide just a week before a crucial vote in the House of Commons. Source: Catholic Herald.
Mr Brown, who succeeded Tony Blair in 2007 and served until 2010, said that he instead favoured investment in good quality health care for people at the end of their lives.
His opinion, he said in an article for The Guardian, was informed by the loss of his daughter Jennifer, who died from a brain haemorrhage just 11 days after her premature birth in 2002.
Mr Brown described the final days he and wife Sarah shared with their baby as the “most precious” of their lives, convincing them of “the value and imperative of good end-of-life care”.
The Labour grandee said assisted suicide was “not the only option available, nor even a good option when set against the palliative support that could be available in ensuring a good death”.
He said the “experience of sitting with a fatally ill baby girl did not convince me of the case for assisted dying; it convinced me of the value and imperative of good end-of-life care”.
He warned readers of the danger of a “slippery slope” and the existing reality of a “postcode lottery” of high-quality palliative care.
“With the NHS still at its lowest ebb, this is not the right time to make such a profound decision,” Mr Brown said.
“Instead, we need to show we can do better at assisted living before deciding whether to legislate on ways to die.”
His intervention comes just a week before the House of Commons votes for the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill, which was introduced by backbench Labour MP Kim Leadbeater to legalise assisted suicide.
The free vote on Friday will be the first on assisted suicide since 2015, when a bill introduced by Labour MP Rob Marris was rejected by 330 votes to 118.
The bishops of England and Wales have called on Catholics to actively oppose the bill by urging their MPs to vote against it.
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Former Labour PM Gordon Brown urges MPs to throw out assisted suicide Bill (By Simon Caldwell, Catholic Herald)
