Why we must continue to oppose assisted suicide
Why we must continue to oppose assisted suicide
The law as it stands is not only satisfactory, but safe, writes George Pitcher. Those who push for assisted suicide distract us from what really matters
Whenever anyone with a religious faith – and especially a member of the clergy – expresses a view resistant to a change in the law to allow assisted suicide in the UK, we’re hit with some version of “just because you think life is sacred” or, more ignorantly, that we’re under some divine instruction to make people suffer miserably at the end of their lives.
There is, of course, no such scriptural nor canonical charge. In so far as the Christian faith informs our opinion at all in this debate, we’re called to stand in the corner of those who are dispossessed and vulnerable, marginalised and poor, depressed and desperate, disabled and mentally or terminally ill and defend them from a powerful state that would endorse the notion that their lives are in some way worth less than those of the rest of us. Is that such a bad thing to do?
Entirely secular
Otherwise, my opposition to assisted suicide (which used to be called voluntary euthanasia) is entirely secular and based on legal practicalities. Baroness Meacher is sponsoring a bill in the House of Lords, which awaits its second reading, once again to try to get the law changed.
She told the Daily Telegraph that assisted suicide could be legal in Britain “within 18 months”. She may well be right. Bills such as hers have been defeated by thumping majorities in parliament over recent years, but lobby groups that take possession of the idea of “reform” can build their own momentum.
That’s still no reason to stop resisting them if they’re so patently misguided. After all, assisted-suicide lobbyists lean on evidence that a majority of the population support their cause, just as a majority of the British people support a return of capital punishment. But there’s no chance of parliament voting to re-introduce hanging any time soon. Both remain causes rightly to resist in our legislature.
So let me just rehearse a central, legal and practical argument against assisted suicide. In doing so, I leave aside very many other valid cases against it. Such as: The moral jeopardy of doctors and medical staff, for the first time ever in this country participating in the killing of their patients. The wide margins of error on terminal-illness diagnoses.
Furthermore: The death-cult clinicians who prosper from it. The data from other countries which have adopted assisted suicide (still a very limited number) which show that people can arrange their suicide when they’re simply “fed-up with life” or – God help us – where doctors are empowered to make the decision on behalf of terminally-ill infants.
“Slippery slope” fears
All this is true, but it leads us to where assisted-suicide campaigners want the argument to be conducted – on details rather than principles, so that they can accuse their opponents of “slippery slope” fears, because in the UK, of course, it will all be so very different.
Just this once, let’s not go there. Instead, let’s confine ourselves to these simple and straightforward facts: First of all, not a single assisted-suicide lobbyist has ever claimed that their proposed “safeguards” can eliminate the possibility of a vulnerable patient being coerced into, or wrongly persuading themselves to, request an assisted suicide.
That claim has not even been made by Lord Falconer, who some years ago earned himself the nickname “Proper” Charlie Falconer for chairing a supposedly “independent inquiry” into assisted suicide, which was actually a bunch of assisted-suicide lobbyists cobbled together to rubber-stamp a foregone conclusion. Not even he has claimed that no one would take their own life who, objectively, should not have done so.
So my question to such lobbyists is this: How many such deaths of vulnerable and desperate people do they consider are worth it per year so they can have what they want? One? 10? 100?
This, I suppose, could be caricatured as a straw-man argument were it not for another fact: The irrefutably beneficent way in which existing law, under which it has not been a criminal offence to attempt suicide since 1961, while it remains illegal to assist someone else to take their life, has been applied in recent years.
When a defendant has been able to demonstrate that they have acted in a loved one’s best interests, as proven by the perception of that patient, and motivated only by compassion and in extremis, then they too have been treated with compassion, as well as with leniency, under the law.
Burden of proof
This is vitally important. Because it means that the burden of proof rests with the person who has assisted a suicide, rather than with the Crown to prove that an offence has been committed, as would be the case under an assisted-suicide regime. The latter circumstance would only open floodgates to coercion, abuse and assisted suicides of the clinically depressed.
So the law as it stands is not only satisfactory, but safe.
One last thing: Assisted suicide is a distraction from where our attentions should rightly be focused – the very best care for those in their final months of life.
End-of-life care is one of the most pressing - if not the most pressing - moral issues of our time, as medical advances keep us alive longer, to suffer diseases that in previous generations we would have avoided.
It’s another fact that in countries that have assisted suicide, palliative care withers on the vine – why aspire to be kept comfortable until you die if the law appears to suggest that it’s time to go?
Palliative, end-of-life care in the UK is world-leading and is headed to a destination where no one need die a “bad death” outside trauma. Assisted suicide can only be defeatist in this cause.
It is a hideous inversion of the aspirations of end-of-life care, as well as profoundly illiberal, to allow in law the people most in need of that care to be able to demand that the state assists them in killing themselves, when they have become economically inconvenient.
George Pitcher is a visiting fellow at the LSE and an Anglican priest.