Page 3519 - Week 12 - Wednesday, 12 October 1994
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I would insert in parenthesis the seven to two result in the opinion poll in which people said that it is appropriate for treatment to be withheld. Lord Goff goes on:
As I see it, the doctor's decision whether or not to take any such a step must (subject to his patient's ability to give or withhold his consent) be made in the best interest of the patient. It is this principle too which, in my opinion, underlies the established rule that a doctor may, when caring for a patient who is, for example, dying of cancer, lawfully administer pain killing drugs despite the fact that he knows that an incidental effect of that application will be to abbreviate the patient's life. Such a decision may properly be made as part of the care of the living patient, in his best interests; and on this basis, the treatment will be lawful. Moreover, where the doctor's treatment of his patients is lawful, the patient's death will be regarded in law as exclusively caused by the injury or disease to which his condition is attributable.
He goes on:
The question is not whether the doctor should take a course which will kill his patient, or even take a course which has the effect of accelerating his death. The question is whether the doctor should or should not continue to provide his patient with medical treatment or care which, if continued, will prolong his patient's life.
It is a restatement of the proposition that, where you are providing pain-killing relief which has the incidental effect of hastening a death, it is not regarded as causing it. There is a distinction between that and the lethal injection which proponents of active euthanasia would support. Proponents of active euthanasia would say that you should have the ability to say, "I want a lethal shot". There is no question that, as the law stands and as the Act as passed by this Assembly stands - if it is passed in the form the Government is supporting - it would be murder to give a lethal pain-killing injection.
But the doctor may provide reasonable pain relief under the principle of Adams's case. Mr Francis correctly cited that case but questioned whether it was affected by clause 22. Given the most recent reaffirmation of Adams's case by the House of Lords in the 1993 decision in the case of Bland, which Mr Francis does not cite, and given the extent to which in a court case somebody may look at these speeches, it is clearly the intention of the Government, as I said when we first introduced these amendments and as Mr Francis cites in his opinion, to seek to lock in that principle of double intent. We are seeking to draw a very clear distinction between an injection which is administered for the purposes of pain relief but which may clearly have the effect of hastening death and the giving of a lethal injection. That distinction is, in my view, very clearly established in law, as Mr Francis says it is. He refers back to the 1957 House of Lords decision. I would say that that decision is further strengthened by the 1993 reaffirmation of that principle and further strengthened, to the extent that there is any doubt, by the very clear views of the proponents and the opponents of this Bill that that is what we are intending to do here.
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