Assisted suicide forces us all to take part

Of all the human tragedies which Christian Pastors have to help people with, there is perhaps none as agonising as the suicide of a loved one. I can think of one man who from his teens has carried a lifelong burden of depression brought on by the suicide of his father; another whose life and career never recovered from the crippling guilt he felt at the suicide of his son. The death of those we love is always terrible. But when that death was self-inflicted, the blow can be unbearable, and the wound all but incurable. 

This needs to be recognised, because the argument for legalising Assisted Suicide is often framed as one of compassion, not only for the person who kills him/herself but for relatives too. When Kim Leadbeater MP, introducing her Private Members’ Bill at its second reading, spoke of “the heartbreaking reality and human suffering that far too many people experience as a result of the status quo”, she was speaking as much of the suffering of family as that of the dying. Esther Rantzen has said that making assisting suicide permissible would “protect everybody involved”; specifically it would protect relatives from the risk of prosecution. And so it would be a sensitive act of kindness to the loved ones of those committing suicide. 

It is hard to overstate how wrong this is. For suicide is deeply cruel to loved ones. I am not suggesting that people suffering from the kind of severe depression or pain which might lead them to want to take their own lives are conscious of this; their agony should rouse nothing but our compassion. But the fact that they may well believe that “everyone would be better off without me”, does not change the reality. Suicide chooses what is perceived as an easy way out for oneself, whilst inflicting awful suffering on those left behind. 

The death of anyone we love always involves immeasurable loss. Jesus wept at the tomb of Lazarus. This was not for loss of his friend, for he knew he was about to raise him; it was for the raw tragedy which death is for all mankind. Death cuts the cord of life, snuffs out all hope, renders our dreams and achievements meaningless. Death violently takes away from us those we love. There is no such thing as a good death. 

For the loved ones of the person who commits suicide there is all this, and something even worse: the knowledge that this tragedy was self-inflicted. That this person whom I loved and valued has chosen this. Chosen to deprive himself of life and his loved ones of love. Chosen to invert the instinct to live, and to cut herself off from me forever. Some may argue that when illness is known to be terminal, this is not true; it is the time, not the fact of death which is chosen. But leaving aside the observations that it is impossible to accurately predict life expectancy, (and that this argument would apply to everyone no matter how healthy, for death comes to us all) it completely ignores the human dynamics of what is happening. To have my life taken from me is a totally different thing to taking it myself. One is a terrible tragedy; the other a self-inflicted act of despair. One treasures the precious gift of life as long as it lasts; the other sees it as so worthless that it is to be thrown away. 

Suicide is selfish, but assisted suicide adds a whole extra layer of cruelty

And so the suicide of someone I love leads to an agonising sense of guilt. Could I not have done something more to help? Why did she not turn to me, why could she not see the love I and others have for her? And also an agonising sense of abandonment. My beloved father, mother, husband, wife, child or friend was not taken from me by the cruelty of death; he cut himself off from me by his own volition. The combination of self-blame at how I let this happen, with anger at how he could do this to us, each feeding off the other, is a terrible mixture indeed.

To inflict this unbearable grief upon others is therefore deeply cruel. It chooses the (supposedly) easy option for me, whilst inflicting pain which will last for a lifetime on those who love me. Much secularism seems utterly blind to this. “The fact is this is my decision, it’s my life, it’s my choice”, says Esther Rantzen; giving voice to the myopic individualism at the heart of the secular creed. For the fact is that our lives are not our own. Humans do not live as disconnected atoms; we belong to God and, under him, to one another. Each human life is knitted into the lives of those around us, especially those bound to us by the love of friends and family. The meaning of human life derives from those relationships of love. And so our choices are not simply about me, my life, my choice; or at least, when they are, we are acting out the terrible human impulse the Bible calls sin. Every choice we make profoundly impacts those around us just as much as ourselves. If that choice is to rip myself out of the fabric of human society, it leaves a ghastly wound which others will carry for a lifetime. Not for nothing has Christian ethics always held suicide to be but one species of murder.

Suicide is, then, a terribly selfish thing to do. But assisted suicide adds a whole extra layer of cruelty.

For it involves enlisting one’s loved ones to put the hand to the knife with you. It appeals to their compassion — who wants to see those we love suffer? — but does so in a deeply manipulative way, asking them to do the very opposite of compassion. It asks them to bear not only the grief of your loss, and the agony of knowing you brought it on them deliberately; it calls them to join in with the act of inflicting it. Even if they are merely present whilst a doctor does the actual killing, to be present and do nothing is to be complicit. It therefore brings on their consciences the guilt of having taken a part in destroying you. It asks them to live forever with the knowledge that my mum, grandad, sister, friend was not “taken from us”, nor only that “she took herself from us”. but rather that I helped to do away with her. Murder, as JK Rowling has Horace Slughorn explain, is an act of evil which tears the soul. To ask others to assist in my suicide burdens them with the lifelong guilt of the worst of all sins against our fellow-man.

If Assisted Suicide is legalised, there will be times — probably often, for no supposed “safeguards” will hold — when relatives and others make manipulative and malicious use of their legal liberty to kill. That is a major reason why we, as a society and a nation, should not go down this route. But even in those cases right at the top of the slippery slope, which are held up as why we should do this — where a person knows exactly what he or she is doing, and chooses this as a way out of suffering — it is the very opposite of an act of compassion. It is, towards the very people who love them the best, deeply, deeply cruel.