New round of celebrity-led cheer-leading for assisted suicide

This story is covered in the Daily Mail and Daily Telegraph. 

Euthanasia season has arrived and the pro-death lobby, aided by their cheerleader and press office, the BBC, are now gearing up for a campaign aimed at forcing the legalisation of assisted suicide through British Parliaments both north and south of Hadrian’s Wall. 

Lord Falconer’s assisted suicide bill had its first reading in the House of Lords in May and Margo Macdonald’s Scottish bill is to be published next month.

Expect no let up for several months as story after supportive story mysteriously fills our television screens and airwaves.

In pushing their cause, this alliance of private campaigners and publicly-funded ‘news’ generators will face four major lines of opposition: parliamentarians, doctors, faith groups and disabled people.

Neutralising these opponents will be their major focus as they seek to build their case around emotive testimonies and celebrity endorsement (See here and listen here for why their ideas should actually be given short shrift).

Their aim will be to find ‘role models’ from each of these ‘problem groups’ willing to become a public voice for their campaign to help create the impression that their proposals of ‘assisted dying with safeguards’ have universal backing.

Dignity in Dying (DID), the former Voluntary Euthanasia Society, has already established a group of retired professors and past medical leaders - originally HPFCbut now rebranded HPAD(Health Professionals for Assisted Dying) - to counter the inconvenient fact that the BMA, all major medical colleges and two thirds of all doctors are opposed to any change in the law. They are now infiltrating the RCGPto try to push it neutral after failing to do the same with the BMA and have support from the editor of the BMJ. HPAD represents a massive 0.25% of doctors (Yes that's one quarter of one per cent).

Gathering a lobby of clerics has proved even more difficult but DID has managed to scrape together a flock of ‘faith leaders’ under the leadership of liberal rabbi Jonathan Romain.Interfaith Leaders for Dignity In Dying (or IFDiD) uses highly unorthodox interpretations of sacred texts to push the view that helping people to kill themselves is consistent with ‘loving one’s neighbour’.

In parliament there is the All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) for Choice at the End of Life chaired by Heidi Alexander, Labour MP for Lewisham East. But their real champion is Lord Falconer, whose sham commission on ‘assisted dying’, stacked full of euthanasia sympathisers, recommended just over a year ago that the law should be changed to allow doctors to be licensed to dispense lethal drugs to mentally competent adults with less than six months to live. His bill currently before parliament seeks to make this a reality.

Disabled people have been much more difficult to pull into line, especially given that all the country’s major disability advocacy groups – SCOPE, Disability Rights UK, Not Dead Yet UK and UKDPC – remain opposed to any change in the law. They, more than anyone, know how easily vulnerable people can be pushed into ending their lives so as not to be a financial or emotional burden to others. 

So the pro-death lobby has been looking for a disabled people’s champion to become the new poster boy for the campaign. And this week they found him –in celebrity scientist Stephen Hawking.

The only missing ingredient was the means of getting international media coverage for Falconer and Hawking. Enter the BBC.

The publication of Hawking’s new book provided the hook for an invitation onto the BBC Breakfast national news programme last Tuesday where Hawking could be asked the question that would elicit the answer required to create the international news story:

‘I think those who have a terminal illness and are in great pain should have the right to choose to end their lives and those who help them should be free from prosecution. But there must be safeguards that the person concerned genuinely wants to end their life and they are not being pressurised into it or have it done without their knowledge or consent, as would have been the case with me.’

Now the stage was fully set for Falconer the next day, on the very same programme, to promote his bill as the solution. But in order for him to do this unimpeded the opportunity for any cross-examination to take place, or contrary position to be put, had to be nullified.

On Tuesday night I received a text from a BBC Breakfast producer asking me, as campaign director of the Care Not Killing Alliance, to contribute to the programme at 0820 the following day:

‘Hi Peter, James at BBC Breakfast here. We’d like you on the show tomorrow morning talking about Stephen Hawking. Are you available?’

I phoned back and accepted. ‘James’ lined me up to speak to camera at the Oxford Street Studios the following morning and said he would ring me back in five minutes to confirm travel arrangements.

Ten minutes later I was dumped by text:

‘Thanks for speaking to me just now. Afraid we’re not going to talk to you on the programme on this occasion. Sorry for the hassle. James, BBC Breakfast.’

I was naturally interested to see who they had in my place. But next morning, it was a one-to-one interview with Lord Falconer that was heavily billed throughout the programme.

So how did our national broadcaster provide ‘balanced coverage’ on this contentious issue?

Basically we had the extract from Hawking interview the previous day followed by the presenters, Bill Turnbull and Susannah Reid, offering Falconer an open goal to say what he wanted in order to promote his bill.

Falconer understandably grasped the opportunity with both hands and waxed lyrical about how wonderful things were in Oregon and will be here too once his bill was passed - far safer than at present when we all have to go off to Switzerland where there are no ‘safeguards’. There was no serious challenge and no opposing view put.

Why did they drop me? One can only speculate. I suspect that BBC cheer-leading played a part, but I suspect also that Falconer, possibly remembering our last debate on the Radio Four Today programme, might have said that he would prefer to speak unopposed and they deferred to his requests. 

I guess we will never know – unless someone truly in the know speaks out.

But this is just the latest in a long line of episodes of BBC cheerleading for various forms of euthanasia.

Yes, I’ve written to the Director General of the BBC about it and have encouraged others to complain. But I am not holding my breath.

In the meantime I have been privy to a conversation this week of angry disability rights leaders wondering what they have to do to get their voices heard in the media. My advice is not to try the BBC. 

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Panorama highlights liberal interpretation of abortion law by British doctors

Last Monday I took part in the BBC Panorama programme ‘The Great Abortion Divide’ (watch it on I-Player).

It was presented by Victoria Derbyshire (pictured) and produced by Elizabeth Byrne.

Although extremely controversial it has had very little coverage in the media with only the BBC, Guardian and Times (£) so far reporting on it.

The programme was billed as follows:

‘Abortion is more controversial than ever, with pro-life activists challenging pregnant women as they try to enter clinics. Doctors in most of the UK are signing off terminations on questionable mental health grounds, while in Northern Ireland women and doctors risk life in prison over abortion. So is our legislation hopelessly outdated?’

Victoria Derbyshire, in an article for the Times, (£) asked how it can be so easy to terminate a pregnancy in Croydon, but criminal to do so in Belfast.

This highlights the little known fact that abortion is still effectively illegal in Northern Ireland but there is a situation tantamount to abortion on demand in the rest of the UK where there were over 200,000 abortions last year, 98% on mental health grounds.

I was filmed for an hour last autumn from which they used four sound bites for this programme but I was happy with what they took and felt they put my case well.

The programme was originally due to be screened last December but was held over due to other priorities and I suspect because they also wanted to make reference to the Savita case.

The main point I made in the programme, which I had made previously on the Radio Four Today Programme, is that 98% of abortions in Britain are technically illegal.

This is because they are carried out on grounds that continuing with the pregnancy constitutes a greater risk to a mother’s mental health than having an abortion does.

But in fact a comprehensive study carried out in 2011 by the Royal College of Psychiatrists found that there was no evidence to show that having an abortion posed less risk to mental health than continuing with an unwanted pregnancy.

So when doctors sign an abortion authorisation form (a statutory document) saying that it does I believe they are in effect committing a form of perjury.

Dr Clare Gerada, chairwoman of the Royal College of General Practitioners, said in response to this on the programme however that the current interpretation was realistic as there is no way to predict the impact of continuing a pregnancy on a woman's mental health. She was in effect giving the benefit of any doubt to the mother. Here words were as follows:

‘What we have is what the woman tells us. It is not for me to judge her or be moralistic, it is for me to explore potential other options, but to take her at face value.’

So in other words if the mother thinks that continuing with the pregnancy poses a greater risk to her mental health than having an abortion then she is right, regardless of what the medical evidence actually shows. I wonder if Gerada applies this same diagnostic principle to conditions other than mental health problems.

In saying this I believe Gerada is actually misinterpreting the law. In signing an abortion authorisation she is making a statement that as a doctor she believes in good faith ‘that the pregnancy has not exceeded its twenty-fourth week and that the continuance of the pregnancy would involve risk, greater than if the pregnancy were terminated, of injury to the mental health of the pregnant woman’.

She is not actually being asked to make a moral judgement but a medical judgement.

Imagine if we were to substitute another condition for ‘mental health’:

‘I believe that the continuance of the pregnancy would involve risk, greater than if the pregnancy were terminated, of (ovarian cancer, schizophrenia, heart disease) to the pregnant woman.’

This would be a medical opinion subject to a test of evidence – as is also danger to mental health.

I see that BPAS (£), Britain’s leading abortion provider, has since leapt to Gerada’s defence. BPAS has since said that doctors are 'not circumventing or breaking the law; they are complying with the law, exercising their clinical judgment and caring for their patients'. Well that is not actually for BPAS to decide.

And if authorising the deaths of 196,000 living human beings is 'caring for their patients' then doctors have moved some distance from the Hippocratic Oath and Declaration of Geneva which actually forbid them performing abortion.

Will the fact that 196,000 abortions are being carried out in the UK every year on these spurious grounds (98% of the total) be at any point the subject of a court case, a police investigation, a GMC inquiry, a parliamentary inquiry, or perhaps even a parliamentary question? We will have to wait and see.

To carry out an abortion on grounds outside those listed in the Abortion Act is still a crime in Britain – and a crime subject to a custodial sentence.

So is perjury – and knowingly making false claims on a statutory document (like an abortion authorisation form) is a form of perjury under the Perjury Act of 1911.

These acts are crimes because abortion is a serious matter, involving as it does the ending of a human life. And as I said on the programme, no one is more innocent, more vulnerable and killed in greater numbers that the preborn baby. Abortion now accounts for 27%, over one in four, of all human deaths in Britain.

One more thing - the programme claimed, without supplying any evidence, that hundreds of women died every year in Britain from illegal abortions prior to the introduction of the Abortion Act. This is patently false as I have argued previously on this blog.

It was good to see the issues around abortion aired again but deep questions still remain, mostly about the abuses by doctors of the current law.

I wonder if anything will be done about this practice which has now been defended on national television by the chair of the Royal College of General Practitioners.

I am not holding my breath.

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Ten questions you never hear asked on the media

I was on the Radio Four Today programme earlier this week debating Lord Falconer (listen here for Radio Four and here for Radio Five Live and ) on whether or not assisted suicide should be legalised in the light of ten years of British people going to the Dignitas facility in Switzerland to end their lives.

Prior to our debate the programme ran a prime time recorded interview with Win Crew, wife of one of the first Britons to die there which I listened to in the taxi on the way in.

It was typical of such interviews. The usually robust Evan Davies
(pictured), rather than giving her a challenging and searching cross-examination, instead reverted to slow underarm bowling in the apparent hope that she might hit each question over the boundary in the cause of legalisation.

She, not understandably, made the most of being given an international media platform to propagate her views effectively unchallenged.

The BBC later gave the interview huge prominence in keeping with their ‘assisted suicide cheerleader’ policy whilst our debate was relegated to the graveyard slot just prior to 9am.

In the light of this not atypical experience I was interested to see this post on Life Site News on the not unrelated issue of abortion – another where the liberal elite who dominate the media do what they can to ensure that really searching questions are never asked.

I have virtually never heard these ten questions asked (or answered) on media but invite anyone with a prochoice position to attempt to answer them either here or elsewhere.

They come from over the pond in the lead up to the US presidential election but apply equally well here.

Here’s some food for thought then from Trevin Wax at thegospelcoalition.org blog — ‘Ten questions you never hear a pro-choice candidate asked by the media’.

1. You say you support a woman’s right to make her own reproductive choices in regards to abortion and contraception. Are there any restrictions you would approve of?

2. In 2010, The Economist featured a cover story on “the war on girls” and the growth of “gendercide” in the world – abortion based solely on the sex of the baby. Does this phenomenon pose a problem for you or do you believe in the absolute right of a woman to terminate a pregnancy because the unborn fetus is female?

3. In many states, a teenager can have an abortion without her parents’ consent or knowledge but cannot get an aspirin from the school nurse without parental authorization. Do you support any restrictions or parental notification regarding abortion access for minors?

4. If you do not believe that human life begins at conception, when do you believe it begins? At what stage of development should an unborn child have human rights?

5. Currently, when genetic testing reveals an unborn child has Down’s Syndrome, most women choose to abort. How do you answer the charge that this phenomenon resembles the “eugenics” movement a century ago – the slow, but deliberate “weeding out” of those our society would deem “unfit” to live?

6. Do you believe an employer should be forced to violate his or her religious conscience by providing access to abortifacient drugs and contraception to employees?

7. Alveda King, niece of Martin Luther King, Jr. has said that “abortion is the white supremacist’s best friend,” pointing to the fact that Black and Latinos represent 25% of our population but account for 59% of all abortions. How do you respond to the charge that the majority of abortion clinics are found in inner-city areas with large numbers of minorities?

8. You describe abortion as a “tragic choice.” If abortion is not morally objectionable, then why is it tragic? Does this mean there is something about abortion that is different than other standard surgical procedures?

9. Do you believe abortion should be legal once the unborn fetus is viable – able to survive outside the womb?

10. If a pregnant woman and her unborn child are murdered, do you believe the criminal should face two counts of murder and serve a harsher sentence?

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BBC and Guardian leap to defence of abortion industry

The abortion industry has been under a lot of pressure in recent weeks – first with revelations about illegal abortions for sex selection, then with a Care Quality Commission (CQC) report showing breaches of the law in 20% of 300 ‘clinics’ examined and more recently with peaceful prayer vigils run by ‘40 days for life’.

It is not surprising therefore that they have been attempting to fight back with the assistance of sympathetic journalists working for the BBC and the Guardian.

First we had the publication of a ‘secret’ letter from CQC chairman Dame Jo Williams complaining to the Department of Health that carrying out the inspections meant ‘a total of 580 inspections foregone and a total of 16 inspectors being utilised on a full year basis at an estimated cost of £1.0m’. Ann Furedi, Chief Executive of the British Pregnancy Advisory Service was given a free BBC platform on the Today Programme to tell us that it was ‘absolutely wrong for the government to order the CQC to abandon all of the other work, in order to prioritise inspections of 500 clinics’. (See Cristina Odone’s commentary)

The BBC, unsurprisingly, did not however report the Health Secretary’s response. One commentator described the incident as follows:

‘A newspaper uncovers widespread criminality in health clinics. The minister responsible requests an immediate investigation, which takes only three days and costs a mere £1 million — less than one ten-millionth of the Health Department’s £105 billion budget. The scandal is stamped out, the guilty face punishment . . . and instead of patting the Health Secretary on the back, the BBC swoops down on him like an avenging angel, flaming with wrath.’

Pre-signing batches of abortion forms to authorise abortions on women that have not even yet been assessed, as doctors at these ‘clinics’ allegedly did, is perjury and it is quite right that both the police and the General Medical Council are currently carrying out an investigation.

Next we had the Guardian running a story about a US ‘charity’ paying for UK medical students to have elective ‘experience’ in BPAS abortion centres, on grounds that the government is not providing enough training for doctors to do late abortions. 'Medical Students for Choice' plans to set up summer 'externships' with BPAS for UK and Irish students to groom a new crop of abortionists. Expect the BBC to pick up the story soon.

I have already argued on this blog that the main reason more doctors don’t do late abortions is that they find it profoundly distasteful to be killing and then dismembering what is so obviously a baby.

Abortion also runs contrary to the Hippocratic Oath and every existing historic code of medical ethics. It is therefore not surprising that so many doctors, of all faiths and none, do not want to be involved in a procedure which they believe should not be part of medical care.

Sadly, the inclusion of abortion as a routine component of Obstetrics and Gynaecology is in large part responsible for many new graduates choosing not to enter that specialty today.

In 1947 the British Medical Association called abortion ‘the greatest crime’.

The fact that the BMA now defends current practice of 200,000 abortions a year in Britain, mostly carried out by its own members, is a measure of how far we have fallen as a profession.

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