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FR(Credit: by Ben Stansall/AFP/Getty)
Of all people, you might expect humanists to have protecting human life at the core of their ideological DNA. Instead, they are queuing up to plunge in the needle of death. This week, as Parliament prepares to debate the assisted dying bill, they are cheerleading a change in the law that will encourage the most vulnerable in our society to agree to kill themselves if they are persuaded to believe some greater good can result from their death.
The humanists talk blithely about “safeguards”, as if any legal system on earth can protect an elderly and highly suggestible person from the subtle forms of micro-manipulations with which someone can be persuaded that it is in everybody’s best interest for their death to be quick and painless. You can say “think of the children” with the tiniest inflection of the voice, make the subtlest of reference to money worries. We communicate with each other, often most powerfully, through almost imperceptible gestures of body language and facial expression. No legal safeguard on earth can detect such subliminal messaging.
And then to dress all this up as love for your mother — “We just don’t want you to suffer” — is the vilest of betrayals. Assisted dying legislation doesn’t just change the relationship between the dying and their doctors, and the dying and the state. It fundamentally alters the dynamics within families, and at the most emotionally complex period of someone’s life.
As the debate has unfolded over the past weeks, I have become less and less convinced of the noble declarations behind it. For some at least, the matter seems to be entirely ideological; namely, that the idea of choice has to be driven into every aspect of our lives. The attraction of this reasoning to our political decision makers is obvious: it exonerates them from their responsibility to keep people safe — their primary responsibility as law makers.
Consider capital punishment. Like assisted dying — or state-sponsored suicide — capital punishment is popular with the public. But whereas the opponents of capital punishment (as I am) point out that these terminations can be botched and cruel, few will make the same point with respect to assisted dying. Fundamentally, the state should not be in the death business. And making it easier and cheaper for the state to be allowed to kill people, rather than sort out the basic infrastructure of social and palliative care, and to keep people alive with dignity, is to push all the incentives in exactly the wrong direction.
The proposed legislation does not even mention the word suffering, though it is the desire to avoid suffering that is at the heart of the case for assisted dying. But suffering is so intrinsic to our existence that there is no legal or medical scalpel that is precise enough to excise it without also damaging the very things that give life its fundamental value. A radical project to rid the world of suffering, if carried to extremes, would also rid the world of love and hope, of courage and compassion. Of love, because love — love lost, love denied, love betrayed — is perhaps the greatest cause of emotional suffering; of hope, because hope walks a tightrope between success and failure, triumph and misery; of courage, because courage is so often a preparedness to suffer, risk suffering, for some greater good, and compassion, because definitionally means to suffer alongside. There is a vastly significant difference between wanting to alleviate the suffering of another through comfort and kindness and palliative care, and by seeking to alter the very terms of reference of what it means to be human. This assisted dying legislation is like introducing a zero hours contract with life.
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SubscribeI’ve read and listened to a lot of the debate, and I’m struck by how much people don’t frame the proposition as it is being put: assisted dying would not be available to people who are depressed or ‘tired of life’, it is only an option for those who are in the process of dying. You have to be in a condition that will likely kill you within the next 6 months; by the time you have completed the application process it would more likely be only weeks ’till your death.
Does Giles really think people would be pressuring Mum to take the jab because they can’t wait another 6 weeks to get the money?
That’s why, also, assisted dying doesn’t change ‘the definition of what it is to be human’. It’s a (Christian?) mercy to allow a person the death that they want. One of the reasons they may choose it is because they want their loved ones to remember them as they were during their lives, and not just the unpleasant last few weeks.
I wonder if Giles has found what I have, which is, that many people over the age of 70 don’t really care if they dropped dead tomorrow: they’re here because they’re here, so they will enjoy what they can, and be good to the people they care about. Maybe there are people who are terrified of dying and want to resist it to the last minute, but I find, most people aren’t frightened of being dead, but they would prefer ‘ a good death’ of their own choosing. That’s what the polls seem to be saying.
We understand all that.
But i’ll just copy what i posted on yesterday’s article on the same subject:
If palliative care was all its cracked up to be, there would be no need for debate, or this bill. The fact is, it can’t help those people with intractable pain or breathing difficulties which leads them to a protracted suffocation over days/weeks witnessed by their loved ones, unable to help due to fear of prosecution. Those who oppose this bill would change their minds if subject to this circumstance.
I hope they aren’t, as with anyone whose facile comments would deny the right to end ones own life with dignity. Argue if you wish – that’s the reality.
Edit: and don’t just downvote if you disagree – say why you’d be able to withstand those circumstances, either as a relative or someone in unremittable pain.
If palliative care was all its cracked up to be,
I don’t know about the quality of palliative care in most countries. I’d like to know but like everything else it’s like a closed shop unless you’re involved. Doctors and medical staff are regularly quoted as saying they wouldn’t let anyone suffer. I don’t know if it’s true or not, or if it’s even within their ability. I also feel the further we get into these issues the more elusive the truth of things. To me that means there has not really been a meaningful public debate. And there rarely is because sides are taken and rhetoric becomes a weapon. In the end I have to accept that I’m uninformed. But that only matters in discussions with friends and associates because in the end the decisions are made by those who have the power to make ideas law. Issues like this make me conscious of how hopeless the system is that we use to make decisions. I don’t think we’re capable of making the best decision, or the right one or the one that works. This is who we are; reasonably smart animals struggling to deal with issues beyond our capabilities. Whichever way we go on this people will get hurt. But probably the most insulting aspect is the posturing of many and what they reveal of themselves, The ad campaign in the underground is possibly the most insulting thing I’ve seen in my lifetime; it’s the branding of death, or murder if you like.