The BBC reports that at the British Medical Association this week: "Doctors are demanding that NHS staff be given a right to discuss spiritual issues with patients as well as being allowed to offer to pray for them". Earlier this year, an NHS Trust suspended a nurse for offering to pray for a patient. She was later re-instated. By way of contrast, under the British Government's Mental Capacity Act, doctors who refuse to kill their patients, in certain circumstances, may face litigation and possibly criminal conviction; and anti-life politicians such as Evan Harris MP and Baroness Warnock are exploiting the current legal regime - in Mr Harris's case, to justify lethal dose assisted suicide and, in Baroness Warnock's case, to argue that people with disabling conditions have a duty to die prematurely. As she put it last year: "If you're demented, you're wasting people's lives – your family's lives – and you're wasting the resources of the National Health Service."
British visitors to my blog who are concerned that their friends and relatives may be at risk of euthanasia by neglect should contact Patients First Network (logo, right) which seeks to enable ordinary people to mount a bedside resistance to a premature and distressing death for their loved ones.
