The assisted dying bill

This week the UK House of Lords is debating the Assisted Dying Bill.  The bill seeks to permit people who are terminally ill and have less than 6 months to live and are mentally competent to be able to be helped by a doctor to commit suicide usually by drinking poison. 

Needless to say there is some heated debate in the media about this and some surprising people such as former Archbishop of Canterbury George Carey and Desmond Tutu have come out in favour of it while current Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby opposes it. 

Traditional Christian belief is that human life is a gift from God and possesses an intrinsic dignity and value.  People are created by God in his own image for the distinctive destiny of sharing in God's own life. Human dignity and value are not measured by mobility, intelligence, or any achievements in life. People who are old, sick, mentally challenged, even those with locked in syndrome or in a persistent vegetative state have the same value and worth as fully functioning people. Therefore euthanasia, assisted suicide and so on fly in the face of this because all life has value and no one has the right to consider a life worthless and therefore to be ended, even one’s own.

This Bill and its proponents do not propose assisted dying based on any of these arguments though but as a matter of choice. Nowadays choice is everything from which school your children go to, which doctor or hospital you use, to choosing an abortion. Choice is king and if I choose to do something then that is my business and mine alone. 

Morals, common values, right and wrong have all been slain on the altar of choice. If it feels good then do it. Instead of talking about choice with consequences or rights and responsibilities we just promote choice. 

The problem with the Assisted Dying Bill which sounds so reasonable with wonderful safeguards is that it opens the door to ending someone’s life before their natural time. The Abortion Bill in 1967 was never intended to be abortion on demand that we have nowadays with 200,000 babies a year being given no choice of life but that is what we now have.  

In the same way I believe assisted dying will in years to come lead to voluntary euthanasia and then …. The Netherlands is held up as the liberal ideal in Western society.  Previously though euthanasia and physician assisted suicide were still technically illegal there, doctors were not prosecuted if they followed certain guidelines. The problem was that these guidelines were being interpreted in ever broader ways. Then in 2002 euthanasia and assisted suicide were legalised in the Netherlands. 

The US Patients Rights Council website http://www.patientsrightscouncil.org/site/hollands-euthanasia-law/ comments Right-to-die advocates often argue that euthanasia and assisted suicide are “choice issues.” The Dutch experience clearly indicates that, where voluntary euthanasia and assisted suicide are accepted practice, a significant number of patients end up having no choice at all. 

The irony is that during World War II Holland was the only occupied country whose doctors refused to participate in the German euthanasia program. Dutch physicians openly defied an order to treat only those patients who had a good chance of full recovery. Commenting on this fact in his essay “The Humane Holocaust,” highly respected British journalist Malcolm Muggeridge wrote that it took only a few decades “to transform a war crime into an act of compassion.” 

The problem with accepted practice  such as assisted suicide is that it changes the dynamic of everyone’s thinking. You can imagine in years to come how the terminally ill will feel pressured whether deliberately or through guilt to end their life early. They may well imagine they are doing everybody a favour by no longer being a burden or a nuisance to their families. 

In the Daily Mail on 9th July, Professor Theo Boer, a Dutch ethics expert and someone who has carefully watched the effect of assisted suicide in the Netherlands warns Britain not to go down the same path as his native country. He says that the number of assisted suicides has doubled in 6 years. He believes that the very existence of a euthanasia law turns assisted suicide from a last resort into a normal procedure.  Euthanasia is now becoming so prevalent in the Netherlands, he said, that it is ‘on the way to becoming a default mode of dying for cancer patients’.  and he admits he was terribly wrong to have believed regulated euthanasia would work.‘I used to be a supporter of the Dutch law but now, with 12 years of experience, I take a very different view.’

With the increase of elderly people and better health care prolonging life, we have some serious issues to face.  The Liverpool Care Pathway was designed to give excellent care for those in the last days of their lives. For some it worked really well but it was used by some health care professionals to hasten death often without the knowledge or consent of patient or family. I remember being shocked a few years ago when an elderly patient I knew died in hospital of malnutrition and dehydration. Unfortunately that has now become accepted practice in some circumstances for hastening the death of elderly people. 

While I respect the view that people believe they have the right to end their life I cannot support it. We must find ways of helping terminally ill people face death with dignity, by promoting high levels of palliative care and enabling families to be supportive without being burdened and that those terrified of life find the hope and encouragement  to continue.  As Pope John Paul II said ‘True compassion leads to sharing another’s pain. It does not kill the person whose suffering we cannot bear.’ 

I believe instead of looking at euthanasia and assisted suicide or dying to deal with the  problems of increasing numbers of elderly  and terminally ill people, we should open the debate on when the sanctity of life became a matter of choice and seek instead to re-establish some common morals and values that seem to be sadly lacking in today’s society.