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Michael Henry Knox Irwin (born 5 June 1931) is a British doctor, formerly a GP and a Medical Director with the United Nations. He is a humanist and secular activist, campaigning in particular for voluntary euthanasia and doctor-assisted suicide.
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Michael Henry Knox Irwin (born 5 June 1931) is a British doctor, formerly a GP and a Medical Director with the United Nations. He is a humanist and secular activist, campaigning in particular for voluntary euthanasia and doctor-assisted suicide.
Irwin was trained at St. Bartholomew's Hospital Medical College, London (graduating in 1955), and at Columbia University, New York. He was awarded a master's degree in public health from the latter in 1960.
He worked at Prince of Wales Hospital, London, from 1955 to 1956. In 1957 he became Medical Officer at the United Nations. In 1961 he worked with the UN in Pakistan, returning to his Medical Officer post in 1963 and rising to become Medical Director of the United Nations in 1969. He became Director of Personnel at the United Nations Development Programme in 1973. In 1977, he was the UNICEF Representative in Bangladesh. From 1980 to 1982, Irwin was the UNICEF Senior Adviser on Childhood Disabilities. In 1982, he returned to the United Nations to become Medical Director again. In 1989 and 1990, he was the Medical Director for the World Bank and the IMF.
He was struck off by the UK General Medical Council in 2005 after openly admitting travelling to the Isle of Man in October 2003 to assist fellow campaigner Patrick Kneen to end his life. Irwin was arrested by the Isle of Man police for this activity in December 2003, but he was never charged.
In April 1990 Irwin resigned from the World Bank. He wrote an article for The Wall Street Journal which detailed his complaints about the Bank. He cited in particular "the Bank's bloated, overpaid bureaucracy, its wasteful practices, and its generally poor management."
Returning to the UK in 1993, Irwin became the Vice-Chairman of the United Nations Association in 1995, and its chairman from 1996 to 1998.
Irwin is an active supporter of euthanasia, humanism and secularism. He was interviewed by Ritula Shah about such matters in the BBC Radio 4 series One to One on 21 May 2013.
From 1995 to 2003, Irwin was either the vice-chairman or the Chairman of the Voluntary Euthanasia Society (now, renamed Dignity in Dying).
In November 1999 Irwin stood as a "Campaign for Living Will Legislation" candidate in the Kensington and Chelsea parliamentary by-election occasioned by the death of MP Alan Clark. Polling took place on 25 November, and Irwin gained 97 votes, putting him 9th out of 18 candidates. Michael Portillo was elected.
Irwin was President of the World Federation of Right to Die Societies from 2002 to 2004, and a Director of that organisation from 2004 to 2006.
In December 2009, Irwin established the Society for Old Age Rational Suicide (SOARS) which is promoting a discussion on the possibility of elderly, competent individuals, who are suffering from various medical problems, having a doctor legally end their lives, if this is their persistent request. From 2009 to August 2015 he was the Coordinator of this organisation. In October 2015 he was made a Patron of SOARS.
Since 2005 Irwin has accompanied four individuals from the UK to Switzerland to witness their doctor-assisted suicides there. In 2009 he was arrested for partially financing the trip of Raymond Cutkelvin to Dignitas, but after a year on bail, he was not charged.
Irwin is a Patron of Humanists UK and an honorary associate of the National Secular Society. [1]
Since 2005 Irwin has sponsored the National Secular Society's £5000 Secularist of the Year award, which is known as the Irwin Prize. In 2006 he founded the Secular Medical Forum and was its Coordinator for three years.
On 15 September 2010, Irwin, along with 54 other public figures, signed an open letter published in The Guardian , stating their opposition to Pope Benedict XVI's state visit to the UK. [2]
Irwin's father was William Knox Irwin FRCS, a surgeon and author of medical textbooks. Michael Irwin married Elizabeth Naumann in 1958; the marriage was dissolved in 1982. He married Frederica Harlow in 1983. He later married Patricia Walters in 1994 – they divorced in 2000. His current partner is Angela Farmer. He has three daughters.
Euthanasia is the practice of intentionally ending life to eliminate pain and suffering.
Secularism is the principle of seeking to conduct human affairs based on secular, naturalistic considerations.
Assisted suicide is suicide undertaken with the aid of another person. The term usually refers to physician-assisted suicide (PAS), which is suicide that is assisted by a physician or another healthcare provider. Once it is determined that the person's situation qualifies under the physician-assisted suicide laws for that location, the physician's assistance is usually limited to writing a prescription for a lethal dose of drugs.
Murad Jacob "Jack" Kevorkian was an Armenian American pathologist and euthanasia proponent. He publicly championed a terminal patient's right to die by physician-assisted suicide, embodied in his quote, "Dying is not a crime". Kevorkian said that he assisted at least 130 patients to that end. He was convicted of murder in 1999 and was often portrayed in the media with the name of "Dr. Death".
The National Secular Society (NSS) is a British campaigning organisation that promotes secularism and the separation of church and state. It holds that no one should gain advantage or disadvantage because of their religion or lack of it. It was founded by Charles Bradlaugh in 1866.
The right to die is a concept based on the opinion that human beings are entitled to end their life or undergo voluntary euthanasia. Possession of this right is often understood that a person with a terminal illness, incurable pain, or without the will to continue living, should be allowed to end their own life, use assisted suicide, or to decline life-prolonging treatment. The question of who, if anyone, may be empowered to make this decision is often the subject of debate.
Voluntary euthanasia (VE) is the ending of a person's life at their request in order to relieve them of suffering. Voluntary euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide (PAS) have been the focus of intense debate in recent years.
Euthanasia in the Netherlands is regulated by the "Termination of Life on Request and Assisted Suicide Act" which was passed in 2001 and took effect in 2002. It states that euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide are not punishable if the attending physician acts in accordance with criteria of due care. These criteria concern the patient's request, the patient's suffering, the information provided to the patient, the absence of reasonable alternatives, consultation of another physician and the applied method of ending life. To demonstrate their compliance, the Act requires physicians to report euthanasia to a review committee.
Euthanasia is currently illegal in all 50 states of the United States. Assisted suicide is legal in 10 jurisdictions in the US: Washington, D.C. and the states of California, Colorado, Oregon, Vermont, New Mexico, Maine, New Jersey, Hawaii, and Washington. Its status is disputed in Montana, though currently authorized per the Montana Supreme Court's ruling in Baxter v. Montana that "nothing in Montana Supreme Court precedent or Montana statutes [indicates] that physician aid in dying is against public policy."
Dignity in Dying is a United Kingdom nationwide campaigning organisation. It is funded by voluntary contributions from members of the public, and as of December 2010, it claimed to have 25,000 actively subscribing supporters. The organisation declares it is independent of any political, religious or other affiliations, and has the stated primary aim of campaigning for individuals to have greater choice and more control over end-of-life decisions, so as to alleviate any suffering they may be undergoing as they near the end of their life.
The legality of euthanasia varies depending on the country. Efforts to change government policies on euthanasia of humans in the 20th and 21st centuries have met limited success in Western countries. Human euthanasia policies have also been developed by a variety of NGOs, most notably medical associations and advocacy organizations. As of 2022, euthanasia is legal in Belgium, Canada, Colombia, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Spain and all six states of Australia. Euthanasia was briefly legal in the Northern Territory between 1996 and 1997, but was overturned by a federal law. In 2021, a Peruvian court allowed euthanasia for a single person, Ana Estrada.
David Moor (1947–2000) was a British general practitioner who was prosecuted in 1999 for the euthanasia of a patient. He was found not guilty but admitted in a press interview to having helped up to 300 people to die. He was the first doctor in Britain to be tried solely for the mercy killing of a patient.
Euthanasia became legal in New Zealand when the End of Life Choice Act 2019 took full effect on 7 November 2021. It is illegal to "aid and abet suicide" under Section 179 of the New Zealand Crimes Act 1961. The clauses of this act make it an offence to "incite, procure or counsel" and "aid and abet" someone else to commit suicide, regardless of whether a suicide attempt is made or not. Section 179 covers both coercion to undertake assisted suicide and true suicide, such as that caused by bullying. This will not change under the End of Life Choices Act 2019, which has provisions on coercion of terminally ill people.
Assisted suicide is suicide with the aid of another person. In the United States, the term "assisted suicide" is typically used to describe what proponents refer to as medical aid in dying, in which terminally ill adults are prescribed and self-administer barbiturates if they feel that they are suffering significantly. The term is often used interchangeably with physician-assisted suicide (PAS), "physician-assisted dying", "physician-assisted death", "assisted death" and "medical aid in dying" (MAiD).
Active euthanasia is illegal in the United Kingdom.
Euthanasia in Canada in its legal voluntary form is called medical assistance in dying (MAID) and it first became legal along with assisted suicide in June 2016 to end the suffering of terminally ill adults. In March 2021, the law was further amended by Bill C-7 which permits assisted euthanasia in additional situations, including for certain patients whose natural death is not reasonably foreseeable, subject to additional safeguards. In 2021, more than 10,000 people died by euthanasia in Canada.
Raphael Cohen-Almagor is an Israeli/British academic.
Ronald A. Lindsay was president and CEO of the Center for Inquiry and of its affiliates, the Council for Secular Humanism and the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. He held this position June 2008 – 2016.
My Death, My Decision (MDMD) is an organisation that campaigns for the legalisation of assisted dying in England and Wales. The group was founded in 2009, in order to campaign for a change in the law and advocate on behalf of adults of sound mind, who are either terminally ill or incurably suffering.
Assisted suicide is the ending of one's own life with the assistance of another. Physician-assisted suicide is medical assistance in helping another person end their own life for the purpose of relieving their suffering, and voluntary euthanasia is the act of ending the life of another, also for the purpose of relieving their suffering. The phrase "assisted dying" is often used instead of physician-assisted suicide by proponents of legalisation and the media when used in the context of a medically assisted suicide for the purpose of relieving suffering. "Assisted dying" is also the phrase used by politicians when bills are proposed in parliament. Assisted suicide is illegal under English law.
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