Chair of Jersey assisted suicide service wrote that it harms people

The new chair of Jersey’s Assisted Dying Assurance and Delivery Committee has previously written an article saying that “assisted suicide does harm others”.

Dr Sarah Wollaston was announced as chair of the new service by the Jersey Government earlier this year. She spent 24 years working in hospitals and primary care, and was MP for Totnes in Devon from 2010 to 2019.

Back in 2012, while serving in Parliament, Wollaston wrote a piece for the Guardian on the debate about assisted suicide. Reflecting on the recent decision to put down her family’s dog, she said that “as terrible as human suffering can be, there is of course no meaningful comparison to be drawn between the morality of ending the lives of animals and people except perhaps for this: how relatively easy it is for us to convince ourselves that we are doing the right thing.”

“I have no faith banner to raise,” she admits, “and as a former doctor I know there are conditions for which I might at some point wish to end my life. Despite this, I don't believe I should have a right to make a doctor complicit in that decision.”

People should have a right to make decisions, she argues, but not when those decisions harm others. She continues: “Assisted suicide does harm others: it harms the doctors who take on the responsibility for killing their patients… If society normalises such decisions about life and death, how easy would it be to slide from believing it acceptable to allow doctors to prescribe lethal cocktails for their patients in exceptional circumstances to feeling it strange or even immoral that such patients be allowed to live? There is also an unacceptable risk that a right to die could lead to the seriously ill or severely disabled feeling that they had a ‘duty’ to die rather than burden their family or carers.”

Wollaston has said that she is “honoured” to have been appointed chair of Jersey’s Assisted Dying Assurance and Delivery Committee. “I want to make sure that this new service for the residents of Jersey is compassionate and lawful, with well-trained and supported staff, and that everyone involved keeps patients and their loved ones at the heart of everything we all do,” she said.