This afternoon, MPs will have scarcely five hours to debate an issue that not only has life and death implications for countless individuals, but the potential to shape British society profoundly — and permanently. It is not the first time such terrible responsibility has fallen on parliament, but it comes at a moment of unique mistrust in our institutions.
This issue is coming before a uniquely untested body of parliamentarians, with 335 new MPs entering the commons in July; a number unprecedented in modern history. Nor is this a coincidence. With appalling cynicism, Kim Leadbeater and her allies have attempted to instruct MPs with doubts about the bill that they should vote for the legislation on the second reading, which is not far off telling newbie MPs to take the first right out of the chamber if they disagree. With equal shamelessness, they have been naming the vote a once in a generation opportunity, despite this being their eighth swing of the legislative battering ram since 2010.
Nobody should have to weigh their own life in their hand, and decide if it’s worth keeping.
Details of the law were themselves shrouded from public view until the eleventh hour. There is no ambiguity as to why: those supporting a change in the law do not wish to invite close scrutiny, and hope a young, inexperienced and progressively-minded parliament will blithely support a badly drafted bill.
And it is a more than badly drafted bill. It is auto-destructive. The requirement for individual judicial review would be unworkable in any system, let alone our hopelessly backlogged courts. Likewise a de facto “right” for the terminally ill to make use of this process could generate considerable expense, and fall upon a health service administration that is even more catastrophically overstretched. Not only must supporters know this law is unsustainable, many, I suspect, are counting on it.
By putting an impossibly narrow and vague bill in front of a novice Parliament, the next step, should it pass, will be for the law to unravel. Having quickly hit administrative limits, backlogs of desperate patients will build up and die in pain waiting for courts and doctors to provide life-ending drugs. Outcry will ensue, resources will be poured into creating an apparatus to facilitate euthanasia — a National Death Service, if you will — and the unwieldy safeguards will be torn up in the name of compassion. Equalities law will be invoked to extend the right to die from the terminally ill to include the severely disabled, and after them, the mentally ill. These attempts will undoubtedly succeed, and Britain will soon be where Canada and the Netherlands are today.
Opponents are regularly criticised because, it is said, there is no safeguard that would reassure them of a process they intrinsically oppose on ethical or religious grounds. In an astonishing bit of sophistry, those with pragmatic objections are told to leave all that to the committee stage, and vote for the bill, whilst those with principled objections are also instructed to step aside lest they impose their beliefs on others. Indeed, the only side, apparently, pure in word and deed are the pro-euthanasia campaign.
I will lay all my cards on the table — my stance is rooted in religion, and I don’t respect individual choice in every circumstance. Indeed, my contention is that choice is not the same thing as freedom, and that some “choices” are astonishingly cruel, and nobody should ever be forced to make them. One such choice is that of taking your own life — nobody, let alone the sick, disabled or dying, should have to weigh their own life in their hand, and decide if it’s worth keeping. The greatest danger in this situation comes not from doctors deciding patients are better off dead or from pushy relatives waiting for an inheritance. It comes from patients themselves. Inevitably, those who come to believe that they are a burden on their families will be tempted to take their lives — the instinct of familial self-sacrifice is profound, and when given social sanction, is likely to be acted upon. A person may wish to live on — their family may earnestly want them to live on — but, by a tragic logic, that person may still kill themselves, thinking they are doing what is right.
This sadistic “freedom”, which transforms the inviolable relationship between patient and doctor, and pollutes the trusting bonds of family life, is already being unleashed on many countries around the world. In places where assisted suidice is legal, parents, siblings and children can disappear without a word — and as a private act, even a right, the feelings of friends and family are set aside as nothing. When people reach extremes of pain, poverty and despair, they can simply and conveniently die.
There is one honest man on the pro-euthanasia side — Matthew Parris, who has said that it will mean a society in which costly, unhappy people will simply remove themselves from the picture, to their great benefit and everyone else’s. In one sense assisted suicide is an example of the last great triumph of individualism; the final, ultimate act of self ownership. Yet for many Britons, who are collectively minded, respectful of authority, sentimental about suffering yet impatient with a growing population of dependents, it may appear as a tool of social democratic renewal.
Christian civilisation is unique in its refusal either to deny the horror of suffering, or to offer an easy solution to it
It is hard to avoid, whispering around the edges of this question, not high-handed debates, but a certain strain of desperation. Everywhere, Britain is creaking and falling apart. Roads are crumbling. Trains are late, delayed, cancelled. Crowds surge with fixed desperation on uncertain journeys. Delayed appointments with doctors, dentists and surgeons go from annoyances, to agonies, to death sentences. Police don’t solve crimes, courts are impossible to access, prisons are too full to hold all the criminals. Every year things are more expensive, every year people are poorer, every day doubts multiply, and trust depletes.
In this context, anything that would relieve some pressure from the system, or hand back some apparent control to those caught in it — however cruel and notional it might be in practice — might seem like a mercy. At this vulnerable moment of peril and crisis, we are being offered a terrible temptation: an apparently easy solution to individual and national agonies.
Embracing euthanasia would diminish us as a nation, and cut us off from the roots of our civilisation, which are inescapably Christian. It would, like suicide itself, be an act of collective despair, the last illusory “mercy” offered to a dying culture. Growing, vital, confident civilisations do not embrace death, but celebrate life. Euthanasia is, as Viscount FitzAlan of Derwent said in the first parliamentary debate on this subject, “contrary to the law of nature”.
The greatness of a civilisation is in large part in its collective ability to confront the most fundamental challenges of human existence with dignity and courage. There is no satisfactory answer or solution to the problems of evil and suffering. Christian civilisation is unique in its refusal either to deny the horror of suffering, or to offer an easy solution to it. Whether or not you believe, the dynamism and genius of Western culture to this day is rooted in this original and ongoing insight. In the same way are greatest failures and follies have come from losing this insight. The hundreds of millions of dead in the wars and pogroms of the 20th century were victims, every one, of leaders who sought to deny or solve the problem of human suffering.
Euthanasia is nothing but the promise that liberalism can solve the problems of pain and mortality, dignifying our deaths with the gift of the final freedom. If liberalism pursues this path, it is taking its first step on the road to totalitarianism that it so nearly trod one hundred years ago, when sterilisation and euthanasia were employed against the “unfit”, and humanity was lowered to the status of cattle, to be culled and castrated.
We have forgotten this lesson that we promised never to forget. We have forgotten because evil is coming, as it so often is, clad in the guise of compassion and mercy. But make no mistake — horrors lurk on the right hand side of the division lobby today.
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