ESTABLISHED 1888 HERALDCATHOLIC Opposing a culture of death At the end of this month, on 29 November, MPs will debate Kim Leadbeater’s “Choice at the End of Life” bill to allow assisted suicide for those with “unbearable suffering” and a limited time to live. It is, she says, “stringent” and includes a cooling-off period of an unspecified duration. The measure sounds reasonable and moderate, and ver y different f rom the sit uation in Belgium, where those with dementia may be euthanised, or Canada where the provisions for assisted suicide have recently been extended to those suffering solely f rom a mental health condition. cynical but apposite here. There is a difference in kind between killing someone and allowing them to die. And the choice we should be offering the dying or the suffering is in how to die well and with as lit tle pain as possible. As All Souls Day reminds us, we shall all die in the end. The description of euthanasia as the “right to die” is a misnomer, for that is a r ight we all have in God’s good time. But the distinction between helping someone to die well and helping someone to commit suicide is critical. As Cardinal Nichols says, the consequences of an assisted-suicide law will fall especially on the selfless, those who do not wish to be a burden to their families and who are conscious that their care is costly and may come at the expense of their family’s financial well-being, their It is still wrong in principle and would be dangerous in practice. As the Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Vincent Nichols, has pointed out, echoing the late Cardinal Basil Hume, if the bill becomes law, the r ight to die would swiftly become a duty. In Scotland, where the Assembly is considering similar proposals to allow those over 16 to obtain assisted suicide, the bishops are similarly clear that such a law would introduce a “culture of death”. grandchildren’s education or simply of society. Almost half of those who request assisted suicide in Canada are motivated at least par tly by the fear of being a burden. The elderly, the depressed, the unconfident, the poor and the alt r uistic will all be manipulable once it becomes possible to persuade someone, subtly or over tly, that they may be better off dead. The distinction between helping someone to die well and helping someone to commit suicide is critical For any Christian, there is a ver y clear principle here, which is that we have our lives f rom God and we cannot terminate life before its natural end. This does not, of course, preclude t reatments to relieve suffering which may have the effect of shor tening our lives. But it is not necessar y to have any kind of religious faith to take issue with this legislation. The chief objection to it is that it presents the f rail and vulnerable, the sick and dying, the lonely and mentally ill, with the ter r ible choice of ending their lives rather than with care and support to enable them to live and die well. We are not just autonomous, isolated individuals; we live in community and the choices available to any of us affect us all. Once we introduce the option of assisted suicide, we shall indeed have what the Scottish bishops call a culture of death. At present, people may be prosecuted for helping someone else commit suicide, though in practice the prosecuting authority does not do so in cases where individuals are motivated by compassion rather than by, say, greed. But the legislation now being considered will put death on the menu of options legally available to the suffering. It simply should not be there. Arthur Hugh Clough’s lit tle ditty, “Thou shalt not kill, but need’st not st r ive / Officiously to keep alive”, is What we should be offering instead is the uniform availability of good palliative care. In this issue, Baroness Finlay of Llandaff, a palliative-care specialist, argues that the service is patchily provided and should be better. This is the case even in Britain, which is a world leader in the field. The impetus to extend the legislation to those f rom those with a limited time to live to those with degenerative conditions is already evident. A group of Parkinson’s sufferers want to extend the law to them. If the legislation is limited to the provision of lethal medication for people to take themselves, it will cer tainly be challenged in the cour ts for discriminating against those who are unable to take medication unassisted. The thicker end of the wedge is easily visible already. We urge all those who care about the sanctity of human life, whether Catholics or not, to do ever ything possible to challenge this bill. MPs and MSPs need to be told how wrong these proposals are. They need to be written to, privately or publicly, and lobbied online. It is time for people of goodwill to rally in a common cause to defeat a measure that will make our society less, not more, humane. NOVEMBER 2024 ● CATHOLIC HERALD 1