THE TABLET

THE INTERNATIONAL CATHOLIC WEEKLY FOUNDED IN 1840

ASSISTED DYING

‘THOU SHALT NOT KILL’

If someone gives a lethal dose to a person who asks for it, knowing it will kill them and with that intention, they are guilty of a crime. However, if their only motive is compassion and they do not stand to gain from that person’s death – and provided they are not professionally involved in that person’s medical care – it is very unlikely they will be prosecuted. This is the present state of the law in England and Wales, as interpreted by the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), with equivalent laws in the rest of the United Kingdom. But a bill is being introduced in Parliament on 16 October that, if passed, would stand the law on its head – it would allow a doctor to kill a patient if that patient, terminally ill yet of sound mind, requests it. And the odds at the moment suggest that this change will go through.

administer to them what is, unmistakably, a concoction of poison. Those who decline to take the poison on offer would be placed in the position of having made a deliberate choice to struggle and to suffer.

This would be a radical change of culture, and it would have profound consequences. Why let the sick be a burden to the healthy, to their families, their carers and to society, if they do not want to be? Why finance and recruit a network of nursing homes so that people coming to the end of their lives can be lovingly cared for? Sick and disabled people who could have chosen to end their lives have instead opted not to die. So why spend millions of pounds of money adapting public facilities so these people can access them on an equal basis? They are the cause of their own misfortune by refusing to die: they must endure the consequences. Yet while they are only a minority in the present, they are representatives of the entire population, all

“Assisted dying”, as campaigners call it, has become the apotheosis, the highest goal, of all contemporary progressive causes. To oppose it is not just cruelty in practice, it is argued, but the essence of cruelty: deliberately subjecting someone to unbearable pain and gross indignity, and denying them the means to escape from it. Why should someone terminally ill not regain control of their own body, restoring the personal autonomy so cruelly robbed from them by illness?

of whom must eventually reach a point when they become terminally ill.

‘Assisted dying’, as campaigners call it,

In the dozen or so countries where assisted suicide has been made legal, the initial restrictions have not withstood the test of time. If someone who has been given less than six months to live by doctors has the right to die at a time of their choosing, as the proposed legislation would allow, why does someone with seven months to live not have that same choice? How could a doctor even know? How do they know, indeed, if a serious illness is really terminal or not? What about mental illness, especially when wanting to die is a symptom of the illness?

has become the highest goal of all contemporary progressive causes

At first sight, the case looks overwhelming. But examined in more detail, it starts to crumble. When similar proposals have been brought before Parliament in the past, the longer and more intense the debate, the more voices are heard and the more the objections mount up. What begins to emerge is a difficult balancing of the rights and freedoms of the individual against the interests and freedoms of the whole. It is a more subtle argument than it first appears, which is why it takes longer to digest. And those who have digested it the longest are people with permanent disabilities, many of whom see the legalisation of assisted dying as a threat to their very existence.

As Jane Campbell, crossbench member of the House of Lords, a long-term campaigner on disability equality and human rights, and founder of Not Dead Yet UK, points out: “It is unsurprising that some patients develop suicidal thoughts, which perhaps will be endorsed by family, friends and members of the medical team. A change in the law would thus permit the focus to switch from preserving life to ending life. It is harder to think of a more fundamental change in the doctor–patient relationship. For disabled people this is profoundly worrying …”

Disability rights is also a popular progressive cause, and it may be that this will be enough to decide the outcome. But this “fundamental change” would not only affect disabled people. In the name of compassion, it would swing an axe to the very roots from which compassion grows. The essence of suffering, and why the sight and sound of it evokes visceral empathy and a surge of emotional solidarity from those who see and hear it, is that it is unwilled, inescapable and, in the circumstances, inevitable. But that defining characteristic is removed once the sufferer is allowed the option to stop it, by permitting others to

“Thou shalt not kill” is not an injunction unique to religion; it is a safeguard for the living, a red light that should never be crossed. The second clause of the 1961 Suicide Act, which made assisting someone else’s suicide an offence after clause one had abrogated the crime of suicide itself, was wiser than anyone realised at the time. But it created an anomaly in the law that the pro-assisted suicide lobby regularly tries to exploit, namely that it is a criminal offence to help someone else commit an act that is not an offence in itself.

The Suicide Act was strongly motivated by religiously inspired compassion for people whose endurance had reached its limit. But the concern in religious circles was not only about shaming the dead but – even more so – about those who survived an attempted suicide, and the illogicality, in their state of misery, of adding to it by prosecuting them. It is no coincidence that the Samaritans, as remarkable a voluntary organisation as any that exists, was founded two years before the Act and contributed to the climate in which it became possible. Equally remarkable, and equally inspired by Christian compassion, was the hospice movement that began when Dame Cicely Saunders founded St Christopher’s House in London in 1967, and which revolutionised palliative care. That is where society’s energy now needs to be focused. Voting for assisted suicide might save money. But it would be wrong. The CPS guidelines are sufficient as they stand.

2 | THE TABLET | 12 OCTOBER 2024

For more features, news, analysis and comment, visit www.thetablet.co.uk