IMCA service consultation

INDEPENDENT MENTAL CAPACITY ADVOCATE (IMCA) SERVICE CONSULTATION

AN OPEN LETTER TO THE CONSULTATION COMMITTEE

Dear Members of the Consultation Committee,

As you know the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children, a voluntary organisation committed to the promotion of the legal protection of the right to life of all of members of the human family, has co-operated fully with Parliament and the various government departments in making detailed and soundly based submissions in the development of the Mental Capacity Act. We did so in the hope that serious account would be taken of the overwhelming moral case against the enshrining in statute law of euthanasia by omission.

SPUC supports, and has always supported, the obligation on doctors to remove or withhold medical treatment in cases where that treatment is no longer of medical benefit to the patient. We have likewise supported the legal right of patients to have their non-suicidal requests to decline treatment respected by the medical profession.

Where food and fluids are concerned, we have argued that such provision, however delivered, is not medical treatment but ordinary treatment to which every patient, no matter how attenuated his or her life may be, is entitled assuming only that the patient is able to assimilate that treatment.

We have carefully considered making further submissions to the present IMCA consultation but have decided that no useful purpose would be served in us doing that. The principal terms of this consultation are to assist you in the construction of the administrative framework within which Independent Mental Capacity Advocates will carry out their legal duties. One of those duties is to assist what has always been the central objective of the Mental Capacity Act, the killing by neglect of those whose lives are considered by the individual and/or others to be no longer worth living.

While in strictly legal terms the Independent Mental Capacity Advocate might seem to have limited powers, in practice the provision of these "Advocates" will simply help grease the wheels of the inhuman medical practice of starving and dehydrating patients to death. This will be so because doctors will now be able to assuage any last pangs of conscience they may have about abandoning these patients in the knowledge that they have the support of the Independent Mental Capacity Advocate.

It is undeniable that many doctors, especially in hospitals, have been killing certain of their patients like this for years, and even bullying families into acquiescing in what is on any reading cruel and unusual treatment. Those who have no families will have provided for them, not the unambiguous protection of the law, but Independent Advocates set up under an Act which authorises and even enforces intentional killing by omission. Thus, in practice, will the wheels of euthanasia be greased. And it will all be done in the name of a misguided sense of compassion and a grossly exaggerated emphasis on autonomy. In the light of these developments it is not surprising that the consensus among British doctors against administering a lethal injection to a patient has been so eroded that the recent BMA representative meeting was steered into a "neutral" policy on the issue of active and direct euthanasia. So much for the Hippocratic Oath, an Oath which was once so proudly espoused and guarded by the medical profession.

We note that the budget for the IMCA scheme will be "around £6.5m per annum". This will be a mere drop in the ocean compared to the amount of money the NHS stands to save by getting rid of the "bed blockers", those consumers of the resources of the NHS who are the bane of the health economists.

SPUC asks those in the Department responsible for this consultation exercise to advise the government to think again. The consequences of the implementation of this Act, notwithstanding all the "good things" it contains, will be catastrophic for the UK because the Act is rotten at its core. More and more vulnerable people will be deprived of their lives in Britain at the hands of doctors. The right to choose death by omission will become the duty to die by starvation and dehydration. And when people see what a nasty way this is to die, the ground will have been prepared for Parliament to abandon its protection of the weak and the vulnerable and authorise active euthanasia by lethal injection.

SPUC does not wish to cooperate with a consultation whose role it is to assist a Parliament which has lost its moral compass, nor will we contribute in any way to the development of structures which will have the practical effect of facilitating immoral killings of the innocent. On the contrary, SPUC will continue to campaign for the repeal of those sections of the Mental Capacity Act which give legal protection to euthanasia by omission.

SPUC warns the Department of Health and the community as a whole that the implementation of the Mental Capacity Act, together with all of its window dressing which includes the provision of Independent Mental Capacity Advocates for the friendless indigent, represents a significant and decisive shift away from the values of a civilised society and ushers in a new barbarism built upon the eugenic impulse to rid society of its unwanted burdens. And God help the medical professionals who have so degraded and undermined their profession by participating in and promoting the killings of the weak and the vulnerable.

Paul Tully, General Secretary,
on behalf of the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children

30 September 2005