Little Tafida and the case against assisted suicide

As expected, Labour MP Kim Leadbeater on Wednesday introduced an assisted suicide Bill into the House of Commons. The stage is now set for a vote at Second Reading on November 29 which could lead to a change in the law.

The central safeguard of the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill is the rule that the only patients eligible for a cocktail of lethal drugs are those with a prognosis of a year or less to live. Of course, if the UK follows the pattern of every jurisdiction to legalise either assisted suicide or euthanasia, as it surely will, those goalposts will be shifted sooner rather than later and the criteria will be rapidly broadened to include proliferating categories of people whose suffering is considered so grievous as to warrant death at the hands of their doctors. In the Netherlands that includes girls who are depressed because they have been sexually abused and in Canada disabled people who complain that they want a ramp for their wheelchair.

There are stacks of evidence to demonstrate that the safeguard of a 12-month prognosis of death is worthless.

Essentially, it is a false concept because no doctor can, with any degree of accuracy, predict when a patient will die until death is practically imminent. There is no evidence base to ascertain scientifically that a person will die within 12 months. The diagnostic tool to determine the time of death has yet to be invented. To assert such knowledge is to practise quackery. It is nothing more than guesswork.

Having experienced how such lethal guesswork can be applied in practice, London lawyer Shelina Begum has announced that she is “strongly opposed” to the Bill and will be campaigning against it.

In 2019, she fought a successful High Court battle to remove her daughter Tafida Raqeeb for treatment in Italy after doctors at the Royal London Hospital gave the five-year-old two weeks to live following a bleed on the brain caused by arteriovenous malformation, a rare and undiagnosed condition involving an abnormal tangle of blood vessels.

Although disabled, she is making “slow but significant progress”. She has been able to breathe without a ventilator since arriving in Italy and can communicate with her parents. Now 10 years old, she is effectively in rehabilitation. Yet it could have been so different.

“The doctors were firm in their prognosis,” recalled Shelina at an event in the House of Lords this week for the Tafida Raqeeb Foundation, a charity she set up to establish a brain injury rehabilitation centre in Britain for children denied treatment.

“They insisted that within a fortnight she would be gone and they urged me to give my consent, to agree to their plan,” she said.

“They had written to the courts, justifying their stance, stating with certainty that my daughter’s life would end in a matter of days.

“We are fast approaching the six-year mark and my daughter is still here, proving every single prediction wrong.

“It is staggering to think about the contrast between what was foretold and where we are today. This isn’t just a story about one child — it’s a reflection of how wrong even the most certain medical opinions can be.

“It highlights the kind of false information that, if accepted without challenge, could have ended Tafida’s life prematurely.”

She continued: “Another significant issue is how the medical community in the UK can sometimes operate.

“Once one doctor gives a prognosis, many others rally around it. It becomes the accepted truth, and no one steps forward to question it. There’s a reluctance to go against a colleague’s decision, even when lives are at stake.

‘In our case, it was foreign experts who stepped in, offering a different perspective, and had they not done so, I believe Tafida would not be with us today.

“My message is clear: to the medical professionals, do not blindly follow your colleagues. Medicine is not an exact science, and human lives depend on more than just adhering to the decisions of others. Be courageous, be independent, and question when needed. Don’t make the same mistakes again and again. Lives like Tafida’s hang in the balance.

“Doctors in the UK gave Tafida no hope, advising us to let her go. But as her mother, I could not accept that my child’s life was over. My family and I fought not just for her life but for the right to continue her care elsewhere.”

Shelina said she believes an assisted suicide law will not give patients more choice but, on the contrary, will take it away by putting pressure on sick, elderly and disabled people to end their lives prematurely.

Indeed, her daughter’s case demonstrates how doctors can get prognoses of death spectacularly wrong and with potentially lethal consequences.

Perhaps being way off the mark with a prognosis is a consequence of the guesswork inherent in the system.

Perhaps it is because some doctors succumb to a temptation to offer a prognosis of imminent death they know to be false when they have privately arrived at a judgment, say, about the patient’s quality of life, or about the cost and paucity of resources.

What this means more broadly is that the safeguard in the Leadbeater Bill of a prognosis of death within 12 months is so meaningless and open to abuse as to be manifestly unfit for purpose.

It is scant consolation that, should the Bill win the support of Parliament, such a safeguard will not be there for long.

Surely it will be removed altogether or replaced by something far worse as Britain goes the way of Canada, Belgium, the Netherlands and all other countries were the seemingly bright idea of assisted suicide and euthanasia rapidly becomes an uncontrollable juggernaut hurtling toward a deadly dystopian nightmare in which no one will be safe.

(Courtesy of TCW: Defending Freedom/ Photo courtesy of Shelina Begum)

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