Financial Times shines light on Exeter Fellow and assisted dying debate
Exeter College Supernumerary Fellow Professor Charles Foster featured in an in-depth article in the Financial Times on Saturday, 16 November. ‘The lawyer at the heart of the ferocious debate over assisted dying’ was published in the FT Magazine supplement and is now available to read online (subscription required).
A barrister, part-time Crown Court judge, Visiting Professor at Oxford’s Law Faculty, former vet, and prolific writer, Professor Foster has been the subject of media attention before – notably for his bestselling books Being a Beast (Profile, 2016) and Being a Human (Profile, 2021), for which he survived in the wild as if he were a beast (badger, otter, fox, red deer, and swift) and a prehistoric man (Palaeolithic and Neolithic) respectively.
More recently, he has made headlines appearing as an expert witness in debates around assisted dying.
Journalist Nicola Davison visited Professor Foster at Exeter College and at his Oxford home prior to a trip to the Isle of Man, where Professor Foster spoke to the House of Keys, the equivalent of Westminster’s House of Commons, about their assisted dying bill.
The wide-ranging FT article explores aspects of Professor Foster’s childhood, family life and career, as well as his reasons for speaking against legalising assisted dying – which include concerns about the impact on the doctor-patient relationship, normalisation of assisted dying, coercion, and legal issues concerning potentially conflicting elements of the European Convention on Human Rights, which prohibits the taking of life (Article 2) and gives an individual the right to live their life the way they want (Article 8).
A better approach, contends Professor Foster, is to value palliative care appropriately. Professor Foster believes palliative care that ameliorates both the physical and psychic pain a terminal diagnosis can bring would reduce calls for assisted deaths. Addressing the House of Keys, Professor Foster said: ‘If palliative care is properly in place, the worries which are expressed on all the placards of unbearable suffering at the end of life just don’t happen.’
‘The lawyer at the heart of the ferocious debate over assisted dying’ is available to read on the FT website (log-in required).
