None of us likes to imagine such a terrible fate, but this much I do know: If I am ever in a coma I would like to be treated by Muslim or Catholic doctors, because if they’re in charge, at least I know I will not be starved to death.
How extraordinary to think that in doing so – in the simple act of keeping me alive – they could be breaking the law.
From the beginning of October, the Mental Capacity Act comes into force, making criminals out of doctors if they insist on feeding coma patients who have earlier said they’d rather die.
It will be a black Monday for healthcare in the UK.
The only glimmer of hope is that the Islamic Medical Association has now followed the Catholic Church’s earlier response in saying that its doctors should break the law, rather than enact so-called ‘living wills’, in which patients have – at some point in their past – left written instructions requesting that doctors should allow them to die if they suffer a medical condition that appears beyond recovery.
It seems to me that Muslims have got this one right, and I’d certainly rather be in their hands than in those of a lawabiding medic waving a bit of paper which I had once signed when feeling a bit low.
I want someone to be in charge of my feeding tube who is wiser than I was then.
If he thinks he gets that wisdom from a hotline to the Almighty, so be it.
For once, the dogma and the ideology is coming not from the world’s faiths, but from rationalists such as the British Medical Association and the British Humanist Association who have actively campaigned for living wills to be made legal.
They both support the new act, which not only allows patients to instruct doctors not to try to save them but also allows patients to give powers to a relative or friends to instruct doctors to starve such a patient to death.
‘Doctors’ own religious convictions should never be allowed interfere with patients’ rights,’ says the British Humanist Association.